In researching Eastern Market in the run-up to its 150th anniversary, I was struck by how little I knew about the guy who actually built the market. We all know about Adolph Cluss, the architect, and plenty has been written about Joseph Carroll, who was the driving force behind it, but the actual builder? Not so much.
Fortunately, some records do remain, including a single entry in the book Executive Documents printed by the House of Representatives: 1872-’73 in which, under a list of contracts put out by the D.C. Board of Public Works, there is the entry “Build a new market house in square 872” and the name Henry Wingate.
For a man entrusted with such a large project ––$50,517.50, which would be $1.2 million today–– there is surprisingly little information about him in the newspapers and other records of the day.
Henry Wingate was born in 1825 in Maryland. As a young man, he moved to the District of Columbia, and on August 25, 1853, he married Sarah Elizabeth Jones, who was also born in Maryland. Over the next years, they had several children, some of whom survived to adulthood.
The Wingates lived for most of their lives in Georgetown. His occupation was given for the most part as ‘Carpenter,’ although the projects he took on became larger and larger as time progressed, and by the end of his life, he was listed as a ‘contractor’ in the city directories. He also had a brief stretch as Measurer and Marker of Lumber for Georgetown in the late 1850s. It was at this time that he began building homes for important people in that city, as well as the Masonic Temple on the corner of what is today M Street NW and Wisconsin Avenue NW.
Advertisement for Wingate published
June 24, 1873 in the Washington Evening Star. At this time, Wingate was in the middle of building Eastern Market, and is living just a few blocks south of it. (LOC)
In spite of his strong Georgetown connection, he is listed as living in Alexandria during the 1870 census, possibly because of a project he was working on there. In 1871, he bid on, but failed to win, the contract to build a new market in Alexandria.
There seems to have been remarkably little fuss made about his appointment to this important task. No articles mention any bidding process, instead the first time he is mentioned in connection with the new market is a short piece in the April 26, 1872 Evening Star stating that the “new market building in East Washington is rapidly approaching completion.”
This certainty seems to have been premature, as the following year there were some complaints of how long it was taking, complaints that were dismissed by the market house commission under John W. Thompson. It seems those complaining had it right, as in October 1873, the market still had not opened, partly because workers hired by Wingate refused to work without having been paid, while Wingate complained that he had “not received the funds to pay them.” This difference of opinion seems to have been relatively quickly sorted out, and the market opened on November 12 of that year. Remarkably, none of the articles celebrating this event mentioned who had been in charge of the building process.
Wingate returned to Georgetown, and turned to larger projects further afield, including building levees in New Orleans. Sadly, while there, he contracted Yellow Fever. He returned home and on January 23, 1879, died of pneumonia. He was laid to rest in Oak Hill Cemetery.