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DC 2006: Joint Annual Meeting of NAGARA, COSA, and SAA
Washington, D.C.
July 30-August 5, 2006
Hilton Washington
EXPLORING AMERICA’S CAPITAL CITY: PAST AND PRESENT
Packed with famous sights, free attractions,
and an endless calendar of special events,
Washington, DC, offers a variety of experiences
for history-minded conference-goers.
The DC 2006 conference hotel, the Hilton
Washington, enjoys a garden setting that
overlooks the city’s impressive skyline. Conveniently
located on upper Connecticut Avenue
and only a quarter of a mile from the Dupont
Circle Metro station, the hotel sits just minutes
from Georgetown, Adams-Morgan, Embassy
Row, the Washington business district, and all
local points of interest.
Dupont Circle is an in-town, urban neighborhood,
first settled 125 years ago, that contains
major residential areas and the businesses
that serve them, foreign embassies, renowned
museums and institutions, and architecturally
significant historic buildings. Dupont Circle is
at the geographic and social center of Washington,
D.C. Originally called Pacific Circle and
located at what was then the western boundary
of the city, it was renamed in 1884 for Admiral
Samuel F. DuPont of Civil War fame. The
Circle’s fountain, designed by Daniel Chester
French and erected in 1921, is a memorial to
the U.S. Navy. Visitors will find coffee shops,
hotels, and cafés within walking distance, as
well as the city’s best weekly farmers’ market.
The area features many museums, including
the Phillips Collection, America’s first modern
art museum, which showcases treasures by
Renoir, van Gogh, Picasso, Mondrian, and
O’Keefe. Visitors can also check out local artists
at nearby independent galleries.
At the National Archives, the Public Vaults
exhibition brings visitors beyond the Rotunda
and creates the feeling of entering the stacks
and vaults of the National Archives. Containing
more than 1,100 records and 22 state-of-theart
interactive stations, the exhibition shows
the raw materials from which history is made,
while also relaying compelling personal stories
of both our nation’s leaders and ordinary
Americans. Also on permanent display are the
Charters of Freedom—the Declaration of Independence,
Constitution, and Bill of Rights.
Across the street at the U.S. Navy Memorial,
visitors can learn more about the nation’s naval
heritage and honor those who served at
sea. Venture down the National Mall to visit
the World War II Memorial, flanked by the
Washington Monument to the east and the Lincoln
Memorial to the west. Hop on the Metro
to Arlington, just six blocks from the Rosslyn
Metro station, to visit the United States Marine
Memorial, or walk one block from the Gallery
Place/China Town Metro station to the International
Spy Museum, the first and only public
museum in the United States dedicated to
espionage. The Metro provides visitors with
a convenient mode of travel around the city
and its environs: More than a third of federal
government employees ride the Metro to work,
and millions of visitors use its 86 stations,
904 rail cars, and just over 106 miles of track
to navigate the capital.
Washington, DC has something for everyone— art galleries and museums,
a thriving restaurant scene, diverse styles of architecture,
a rich and compelling history, and verdant
spaces and blooming trees tucked amid city
streets. The idea to import Japanese cherry
trees in 1912 didn’t originate with first lady
Helen Herron Taft, but rather with Eliza Scidmore,
who once lived in Japan, served as the
sole woman on the National Geographic Society
board, and worked as a correspondent for
the New York Times. But it was the First Lady
who envisioned necklaces of blooming cherry
trees around roads and paths in “a muddy
patch of land beside the Potomac River”—the
Tidal Basin. In Washington, politicians, architects,
entrepreneurs, and a growing populace
joined together to create “a town built on, by,
and for politics.”1
The Story Behind the City
The federal government under President John
Adams officially “removed” from Philadelphia
to Washington City in June 1800. Despite its
title as the new capital of the United States of
America, the city was criticized by both visiting
legislators and full-time residents for its rural
isolation and its lack of built environment. For
a time, there was even disagreement about
what to call it—Pierre L’Enfant, designer of the
city, thought of it as the Capital City. George
Washington called it the Federal City. For Jefferson,
it was Federal Town, an embodiment of
the new government that should give “physical
form to his vision of what the Republic
should be.”
Whatever its name, the sparsely settled, raw
city gained a reputation for high rents, bad
food, and an abundance of dust. The gritty,
blowing dust, however annoying to travelers,
signaled a building boom. The planned avenues
consisted of stone markers, the roads
were only footpaths, and the Capitol was surrounded
by mud, wood shavings, and piles of
bricks.
Washington was one of the fastest-growing
urban settings in the United States during the
first three decades of the nineteenth century.
New buildings were constructed throughout
the era, and the population grew rapidly. The
number of federal employees grew as well,
from 291 in 1802 to 625 in 1829.The cultural atmosphere of the city lagged
behind
its physical growth, however, as Ebenezer
Mattoon, representative from New Hampshire,
wrote home in 1801. “If I wished to punish a
culprit,” he opined, “I would send him to do
penance in this place, oblige him to walk about
this city, city do I call it? This swamp—this
lonesome dreary swamp, secluded from every
delightful or pleasing thing—except the name
of the place, which to be sure I reverence.”
Despite its shortcomings
as a city, Washington was a thriving, vibrant, growing community,
set in a location on the Potomac River so
lovely that a visitor from England compared it
to Constantinople.2
A building boom followed after the burning of
the city in August 1814. Most of Washington’s
approximately 8,000 residents, already
plagued by the summer’s heat, humidity, and
mosquitoes, fled the city as 4,000 British
troops approached. After American defenders
were routed in a battle at nearby Bladensburg,
the vanguard of the British army reached
Capitol Hill and began its systematic destruction
of all public buildings in the city. After
the war, the capital’s population swelled to
12,000. Citizens and government officials
built more houses in the first twenty months of
postwar prosperity than in the preceding five
years, and by the end of 1817 real estate sales
had increased 500 percent over 1813. New
gravel paths connected congressional hotels
and boardinghouses; new shops and churches
opened for business. With rebuilt bridges,
new steamboats, and increased stagecoach
services, travel between Washington, its
neighbors, and points north and south grew
markedly easier.
Civic improvements stemmed from a boom
in the city’s business—government. With the
capital permanently located in Washington, the
federal government had emerged as the center
of power for the United States, a player in international
politics, and a focus for American
nationalism. A wide variety of visitors were
drawn to the district by the political power it
housed—foreign dignitaries, government officials,
ministers, journalists, entertainers of all
kinds, salesmen, and (of course) politicians
and would-be politicians.
The city became known for entertainment as
well as business. Washingtonians flocked to
plays, concerts (some by Washington native
John Philip Sousa), and the city’s ballparks—including
Swampoodle Grounds, Capitol Grounds,
and Boundary Field—when professional baseball
teams were formed in the city in the early
1870s. In 1892, the Washington Senators
joined the expanding National League and began
playing their home games at a site that
would host professional baseball games into
the early 1960s.
Beneath the City
The landscape of Washington today bears
little resemblance to the lay of the land when
L’Enfant first eveloped his plan for the capital
city. Since its founding, Washington has seen
extensive changes to its landscape: hills were
cut down, streams were diverted and buried,
canals were dug and then later filled in, and
the continual march of construction moved beyond
the original bounds of L’Enfant’s design
to the edges of the diamond-shaped District
of Columbia.
Archaeologists help to tell the story of the city
and those who lived there by unearthing wells,
cisterns, sewer pipes, house foundations, and
old streetcar lines. From beer bottles and soup
bowls to straight pins and buttons, artifacts
illuminate people’s lives. Excavations in the
Federal Triangle, for example, have revealed
the struggles of families—black and white, native
and foreign-born—to make a living in the
late nineteenth century. Households, brothels,
commercial businesses, and industries coexisted
here in “Hooker’s District” alongside
the canal (under Constitution Avenue), which
was little more than an open sewer. The city
supported 450 registered “bawdy houses” in
1862, which operated legally until prostitution
was outlawed in 1914.
A walking tour of archaeological sites in the
city is available online through the Center
for Heritage Resource Studies, University of
Maryland, College Park (www.heritage.umd.edu). Washington Underground:
Archaeology in Downtown Washington, DC, a Walking and
Metro Guide to the Past, was produced cooperatively
by the National Park Service, National
Center for Cultural Resources, Archeology and
Ethnography Program; the District of Columbia
Office of Planning, Historic Preservation Office;
the Center for Heritage Resource Studies,
University of Maryland, College Park; and the
Society for American Archaeology.
Finding your way through the streets of Washington— whether to its
famous monuments or lesser-known attractions—is just the beginning
of your adventure here. Make sure to check
out the links on the DC 2006 website (www.archivists.org) to plan your stay
in the city and to
take advantage of all it has to offer—the past
and the present, and government and its people,
converging on the banks of the Potomac.
– The 2006 Host Committee
John LeGloahec, Co-chair
Jennifer Davis McDaid, Co-chair
Greg Adams
Beth Alvarez
Sharmila Bhatia
Deirdre Bryden
Rita Cacas
Kitty Carter
J. Thomas Converse
Heather Crocetto
Clarence Davis
Jeffrey Flannery
Janice Goldblum
Jennie Guilbaud
Faye Haskins
Christina Hostetter
Tim Lewis
Nancy Melley
Lisha Penn
Arian Ravanbakhsh
Deborra Richardson
Megan Smith
Jennifer Snyder
Kate Theimer
Gayle Yiotis
The National Association of Government
Archives and Records Administrators,
the Council of State Archivists, and the
Society of American Archivists thank
the 2006 Host Committee members for
their hard work and great enthusiasm!
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