Washington, DC

Although the whole world knows Washington, DC as the capital of the United States, the city did not exist when we became a nation in 1789. The seat of the new government was located temporarily in New York City. A year later it was moved to Philadelphia. When it came to selecting the place for a permanent capital, both these cities were among those who vied to be chosen. Some of the competing cities offered land and money as incentives. A fierce rivalry developed between the northern and southern states over the location, a conflict that was finally resolved by a political compromise. In exchange for agreeing to locate the capital in the southern region, the northern states were relieved of the heavy debts they had incurred during the Revolution.

In 1790 Congress passed the Residence Act giving President George Washington the power to select a site for a new federal district, as the then-nameless capital was called. The Act also said that Congress would continue to meet in Philadelphia until 1800, when the capital city was supposed to be ready for the government to move in.

Washington's own estate, Mount Vernon, was located on the Potomac River below the bustling river towns of Alexandria, Virginia and Georgetown, Maryland. He was convinced that the land along the Potomac had enormous commercial potential as a shipping center if it were linked by canal to the Western frontier. For the site of the new capital Washington picked an area at the junction of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers about 14 miles upstream from Mount Vernon.

A survey of the land, a "ten-mile square" which had been ceded by Maryland, was undertaken by Andrew Ellicott with the help of Benjamin Banneker, a free black from Maryland who was a self- taught mathematician and astronomer. Forty boundary stones, laid at one-mile intervals, established the boundaries based on Banneker's celestial calculations. Most of the land consisted of floodplain, dense forest, and farmland. In order to speed development of the city, Washington convinced a number of local landholders to donate tracts of land for the new capital.