Over the last two weeks, we have looked at the history of bathtubs in the Capitol, and how they were eventually phased out and, as it turns out, forgotten. In 1936, the Washington Evening Star breathlessly proclaimed that the “Capitol Bath Mystery Revived By Romanesque Tub Discovery.”
The story thus titled was from the Associated Press and started out:
A brace of old, sunken marble bathtubs down in the caverns of the Capitol – sorely in need of a good scrubbing – have revived something of a major mystery. Laborers discovered the dust-caked tubs Monday and were unimpressed. Connoisseurs of tubs and such declared, however, that they bor a remarkable resemblance to ones used by Roman Senators in the days of Maecenas, 2,000 years ago. Whether Senators ever used the tubs in the Capitol, however, is part of the mystery. Newsmen breathlessly substantiated the discovery, and found the tubs, built into dank smelling foundations of the building – and decorated with brass spigots.
A few days later the Washington Post found someone who remembered the tubs being used some 50 years earlier (a feat apparently more difficult than finding someone who knew about the habits of Roman Senators in the days of Maecenas) This was Abraham Lincoln Goodall who was then 71 years old, and had worked in the folding office of the Senate from 1880 to 1885. “I was only a boy at the time, and I was mighty pleased when the president pro tem of the Senate, David Davis, gave me a pass to the baths. We had to have a card to get in.”
Since non-Senators were not allowed on the Senate side, and these particular baths had not been used for about ten years by then, he almost certainly bathed in one of the tubs on the House side, though it might well have been one of the original ones. He went on “That was before the bathtub had come into general use, and those sunken marble ones seemed pretty fine.”
The following year in the run-up to FDR’s second inauguration, a further memory of the tubs was unearthed when the Star went looking for those Washingtonians who had witnessed the most inaugurations. Charles Bruce, then 88, was the winner, having seen all inaugurations from Franklin Pierce to Herbert Hoover. He also knew of the tubs because his father had been in charge of the House bath room. “At the time,” he told the newspaper, “there were four white marble tubs in that bath room. Those tubs were elevated, so that one had to go up two or three steps to get into one. There was also one such tub in the Senate bath room at the same time.”
While it has become impossible to determine how accurate Bruce’s memory was, the idea that there were more tubs in the House than in the Senate seems likely. However, it also seems likely that the two tubs that were found on the Senate were the original fixtures there, that he simply forgot about one of them.
Some twenty years later, the tubs were rediscovered by Representative Fred Schwengel of Iowa, a self-described “rummager.” Two years later, the Star followed Schwengel on his “sandhog” tour of the Capitol and wrote it up.
Since then, there have numerous articles about the tubs: The New York Times in 1983 (“Old Glories of Capitol Bathing Tubs”); Atlas Obscura, (“Senate Bathtubs”); WETA in 2018 (“The Congressional Bathtubs”); Gizmodo in 2014 (“The Secret Solid Marble Bathtubs in the U.S. Senate’s Boiler Room.”) It looks like the tubs will remain objects of fascination for the foreseeable future.