Evolving Vision

Through the dark of night, an enslaved worker named Jim Parks saw the Union Army advancing across the Potomac River, moving "like bees-a-coming" as 14,000 troops captured Arlington House on May 24, 1861. The Union Army occupied this key vantage point to prevent Confederate artillery from shelling the Capital. Forty-three years earlier, the same view had inspired G.W.P. Custis to build Arlington House high on the hilltop, within the original boundary of the District of Columbia and overlooking architect Pierre Charles L'Enfant's grand vision for the nation's capital, as a monument to Washington's legacy. Custis hosted prominent guests from the White House, including presidents and foreign leaders, built his mansion in plain view of the lawmakers below, and made agriculture patriotic with annual sheep judging festivals. Most enslaved laborers lived in plantation dwellings like those at Mount Vernon. A lithograph shows a view of Arlington Plantation in 1838. Washington appointed L'Enfant, later entombed there, to lay out the streets of the capital city in the 1792 plan whose wide avenues, public spaces, and national memorials remain evident today.

Arlington, Virginia · United States