Category Archives: Washington, D.C.

The Quartermaster

06 Wednesday Jul 2011

Posted by in Washington, D.C.

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There was a good piece in last Friday’s Washington Post about Union Quartermaster Montgomery Meigs.  The provisioning of the Union Army is an often overlooked component of the Civil War, probably because the story of how Billy Yank’s socks reached him during the Siege of Petersburg does not make for dramatic story telling.  Still, undramatic is not the same as unimportant.

Meigs is of course most famous for creating Arlington National Cemetery in the flower garden of Robert E. Lee’s home.

Meigs, however, was responsible for much more than that.

Even if the war had not come Meigs would have been justly famous for engineering the Washington Aqueduct, among other things.  This system of bridges and channels partially opened two years before the conflict started and was fully operational by 1864.  Given that Washington D.C. went from tidal backwater to armed fortress during the war, this is no small thing.  Ironically the war itself may be the reason we think so little of Meigs’s aqueduct today.  The mundane story of our drinking water, however important it obviously is, cannot compete with headlines from Chancellorsville and Gettysburg.

The aqueduct is still in use today, bringing millions of gallons of water to the region.

(Lithograph of the Washington Aqueduct, circa 1865; U.S. Army Corps of Engineers)

During this same period he was working on U.S. Capitol dome.

(Author: Harris & Ewing; Source: Collier’s New Encyclopedia, v. 1)

(Library of Congress)

The structure was famously incomplete during President Lincoln’s 1861 inaugural.

I began thinking more about Meigs’s role in the development of the nation’s capital during a visit to the National Building Museum this past Memorial Day weekend.  The museum is in what used to be the old Pension Building.  The mammoth edifice is testimony to the power Union veterans held for decades after the war.


This frieze runs the perimeter of the building.

Meigs made sure to include this memorial to one of his strongest supporters.

If you want to see the man’s legacy, look around you.


“work harder for final victory”

15 Tuesday Mar 2011

Posted by in Museums, Washington, D.C.

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Hey everybody,

The Hayfoot and I went to Washington this past weekend.  We took in part two of the National Archives’ Discovering the Civil War exhibit.  I find primary documents evocative.  They make history more immediate and tangible.  Seeing the kids in the museum gallery I wondered how many will have their imaginations sparked by the sesquicentennial the way so many youngsters did during the 100th anniversary.  If you want to see it you had better hurry; the show ends on April 17th.  We love playing tourist in D.C.   We also went to Arlington National Cemetery.  The Lee Mansion was somewhat disappointing because the house is undergoing extensive renovation and there was not much to see.  Still, the work is necessary and it gives us reason to return in the future.

I have always known of course that the Lee residence is just across the Potomac and close to the capitol, but until standing in the front yard with its panoramic view of the District of Columbia I was not aware of how close.

Walking down the hill we came across Robert Todd Lincoln, who rests within sight of his father’s memorial.

One yankee dollar for the restoration of the Lee estate.

We also watched the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns.  I came across this Universal Newsreel with a brief snippet of the Tomb from Memorial Day 1945, less than a month after V-E Day but with the war against Japan still raging.  The National Cemetery in Brooklyn Ed Herlihy refers to in the second segment is Cypress Hills, one of the first fourteen such burial places created by President Lincoln in July 1862.  I sense a Civil War subway trip coming this spring.

Memorial Day 1945 marked the end of an era; it was the first time no Civil War veteran participated in any of New York City’s numerous Memorial Day parades.  Eighty years after Appomattox only 240 members of the Grand Army of the Republic remained.  Eleven were New Yorkers and their average age was 98, too old and infirm to participate.  In the newsreel’s part three Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia—a former translator at Ellis Island—presides over the parade in Manhattan, which ended at the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument at 89th Street and Riverside Drive.  Many mistake this for Grant’s Tomb, which also lies on Riverside Drive but thirty-three blocks north.  The inside of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument is usually closed to the public.  One exception is each October when the public can tour the interior during Open House New York.  I missed it last year but already have it down on the calendar for fall 2011.

We have been to D.C. several times in the past few years and my only regret each visit is that we cannot stay longer.  Another trip is already in the works.

Thanks for checking in.