The Smithsonian: 150 Years of Adventure, Discovery, and Wonder

Bright Lights, Bold Adventure: 1846-1878

The Capitol stood out starkly to the east, incongruous above the tattered line of shops and houses extending along the northern edge of what would become the Mall. Washington was still a backwater, a city built where one should not have stood, with a low, watery periphery and narrow, often squalid streets. Envisioning grand architecture in this malodorous commons required imagination.

The plot being sought that September morning was to support an institution to be founded in Washington dedicated to a vague directive-"the increase & diffusion of knowledge"-and the search represented the end of long, rancorous debate in Congress. The President, James Knox Polk, a Democrat and a believer in Manifest Destiny, later wrote in his diary that he had passed "nearly an hour with them on foot in examining the grounds." The outing, however, concluded without any decision's being made.

Polk went back to the White House. As the 11th President, he had other things on his mind, among them a border dispute with Great Britain in Oregon and a war with Mexico, also over territory. The expeditions of John C. Fremont had opened up the land west of the Mississippi River to dreams of acquisition; Polk was in the process of adding more territory to the United States than any President since Thomas Jefferson, and territorial expansion had acquired an almost religious intensity.

America was still malleable in the fall of 1846, about to enter the Industrial Revolution but predominantly rural, underpopulated (there were fewer than million Americans), and vast. A radical new mode of transportation, the railway train, was compressing time and landscape, but there were only 9,000 miles of track in the United States, and immigrants were streaming west by more conventional means, the covered wagon.

Most Americans had no contact whatsoever with the federal government except through the postal service. Science, the passion of the distant, deceased Englishman who had so mysteriously endowed the institution destined to rise in the Capitol's front yard, was in its infancy, the study of matter and energy not yet even referred to as "physics."

That September morning's activity, the shadowy institution, like the words, "the increase & diffusion of knowledge," may have seemed abstract to Polk, unrelated to the young country's character and its prospects. But, beyond the imaginings of anyone, the nascent institution would prove invaluable in defining what was and what would become-truly and lastingly American.

Topics

A Gift
A Hole in the Floor
To the Territories
Centennial 1876

Explore the Smithsonian Buildings from the 19th Century...

The Smithsonian Institution Building, "The Castle" (1850)
The Arts and Industries Building, The National Museum (1880)
The Patent Building, Home of the National Museum of American Art and the National Portrait Gallery (1850)
The Renwick (1860)

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