9781422287606

13 “Without Parallel in the World”

cityscape . Watterston called for “the highest edifice in the world, and the most stupendous and magnificent monument ever erected to man.” In 1836, the Washington National Monument Society announced that Robert Mills, an architect from South Carolina, had won the competition. Mills’s work was well known around Washington. He had been trained by Benjamin Latrobe and was eventually named the federal government’s official architect. Mills’s design was everything the society had wanted. He proposed a monument with a circular building, called a pantheon , 100 feet high and 250 feet in diameter . His VITAL FIGURE: George Watterston During the War of 1812, many government buildings in Washington, D.C., were burned by British troops. After the war, Congress named George Watterston its new librarian. Watterston was told to replenish the catalog of books in the congressional library. Before serving as librarian of Congress,

Watterston had been a journalist and novelist in Washington. He was born in 1783 on a ship in the New York harbor. Under Watterston, Congress obtained the 6,000- volume personal library of former President Thomas

Jefferson. He also adopted Jefferson’s classification system, designating books by subject matter, for use in the Library of Congress. That classi- fication system remains in use today. After Watterston lost his job in 1829, he devoted his remaining years to organizing the Washington National Monument Society and raising money for the project. He lived long enough to see the cornerstone laid in 1848, but died in 1854, long before the monument was completed.