Franklin Square developed around valuable springs that led the federal government to purchase the site in 1832 to pipe fresh water to the White House, an arrangement that continued until 1898 after the city had begun drawing water from above Great Falls on the Potomac River. In July 1861, soldiers of the 12th New York Regiment occupied the square, then a lightly settled area on the city's northern edge, in flimsy barracks typical of the temporary quarters erected as Union troops poured into the capital. President Lincoln often passed by on his way to or from Anderson Cottage on the grounds of the Soldiers' Home, and he was sometimes seen in an open carriage on K Street talking with Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, who lived on the square's north side, while Union troops at times played baseball nearby. After the war, rapid population growth helped make Franklin Square a fashionable district for the city's elite, where Cecilia Sherman described moving to a new house as "going into the country" and future president James A. Garfield lived while serving in the House of Representatives. Franklin School, completed in 1869 and the only remaining vestige of that community, was designed by Adolf Cluss in a combination of Gothic, Romanesque Revival, and Second Empire styles, won recognition for its design and the city's educational programs at Vienna in 1873, Philadelphia in 1876, and Paris in 1878, and in 1880 became the site from which Alexander Graham Bell made the first wireless voice transmission to his nearby laboratory on L Street.
