04 Sep 2012

Lost Capitol Hill: Thomas Law's Ten Buildings

Finding a house in D.C. by its address is, today, a trivial operation. The numbers match-up with the streets, and thus make navigation child’s play.

It was not always this easy. For the first 50-or-so years, D.C. had no street numbers. Addresses were given as “n side Ls btw 7 & 8e,” leaving it up to the reader to determine which house, exactly, the dry goods store of J. Jenkins inhabited.

Even worse was when the location was simply given as the name of the building, as if anyone would know the exact location. Today, we look at one of these buildings, and also some of the earliest buildings built in the new city.

Looking at the 1822 city directory – the first published for Washington, D.C. – there are numerous entries such as, “Nicholls, Sarah school mistress, Ten Buildings, New Jersey av.” The Ten Buildings were, at the time, an important landmark in the new city, and anyone consulting the book would have immediately known what they were. Today? Not one of the ten buildings still remains, just a few references to it in old books.

The Ten Buildings were built by Thomas Law, who had arrived from England in 1794 with about $400,000, some of which being money he had made in India, some he borrowed. He came for the express purpose of turning this small fortune into a large one, and after having visited the District of Columbia a number of times during 1795, decided that this would be where he could make the most money. Within a year, he made a name for himself – by marrying Eliza Park Custis, George Washington’s step-granddaughter.

On October 1, 1798, Law received a building permit to build 10 new houses, which would eventually be in great demand two years later when the Federal government moved to D.C. The houses were built on the northwest corner of E and New Jersey Avenues, SE, and the row ran towards the Capitol.

New Jersey Avenue at this time was a very different place than it is today. Just three years earlier, Law described it as having recently been “full of stumps of trees,” but now it had been “opened to have access to the Eastern Branch, and merchants [have] made wharves and warehouses on the Eastern Branch, where only there is a harbor safe from the danger of ice which comes down by floods in the Potomac.” It had thus become one of the most important streets in D.C., connecting the waterfront to the Capitol.

The Ten Buildings were, as Law had hoped, indeed in great demand once Congress arrived. One of the houses was let to Samuel Harrison Smith who — recently married — arrived to D.C. just a few weeks before Congress.  Smith seized the opportunity to start the newspaper National Intelligencer, and for the next few years, the Intelligencer was printed on the main floor, while Smith and his wife, Margaret Bayard Smith, lived upstairs.

Detail of an 1802 map of Washington DC showing New Jersey Avenue from the Capitol (empty area at top) to the Anacostia (at bottom). The red arrow points to the houses that comprised Law’s Ten Buildings (Princeton University).

The area around the Ten Buildings continued to thrive, with its neighbors including “the bank, the book store, the two hotels and most of the members’ boarding houses,” according to George Alfred Townsend, in his paper “Thomas Law, Washington’s First Rich Man,” presented before the Columbia Historical Society in 1900.

Towards the end of the 19th Century, however, the buildings began to fall into disrepair, and the units were replaced with newer structures. In 1900, the building on the corner remained, along with a few others, but even the corner building was eventually replaced with a much larger building, which today houses the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Thus, no traces of these old houses remain; not even a picture to remind us of what they once looked like.

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One response to “Lost Capitol Hill: Thomas Law's Ten Buildings”

  1. […] houses on both sides of the 200 block of New Jersey Avenue Southeast, just steps from the Capitol, a block of ten houses further down the Avenue, and a sugar refinery and wharf at its end, where it meets the Anacostia. […]

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