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

The Universe: 1879-1949

The men visiting the construction site of the National Museum had about them an unmistakable air of propriety. The Smithsonian, in little more than three decades, had become a recognized force in American life, reflected now in silk top hats, in the handkerchiefin the jacket pocket of Secretary Baird and in the cape worn by Lieutenant General William Tecumseh Sherman. The man who had broken the will of the Confederacy in Georgia during the last campaign of the Civil War had gone on to become a Smithsonian Regent and chairman of the Institution's Building Committee.

[drawing] General Sherman's fellow Regent, General M.C. Meigs, had supplied Sherman's forces down south, and had commanded a division of civilians within the War Department when Jubal Early, a Confederate general, threatened Washington. A brilliant engineer, Meigs had also directed the construction of the Washington Aqueduct, which brought water to Washington from the Potomac River at Great Falls, and the building of the Cabin John Bridge, for a time the longest masonry arch in the world. As a member of the U.S. Army's Topographical Engineers, he had distinguished himself by surveying much of the Mississippi River

[streetcar]That day on the Mall, Meigs, as consulting engineer, showed considerably more interest in the particulars of the rising museum than its architect, Adolf Cluss, who leaned raffishly against an unfinished doorway. Cluss had stated in his 1879 report that the building would require even more material than had originally been proposed: five million bricks, 3,000 barrels of cement, 4,000 cubic yards of sand, 470 tons of wrought iron, 31,000 square feet of glass, and 60,000 pieces of slate. Meigs kept track of this phenomenal load; Baird, true to character, was also intimately involved in the overseeing. Spending the $250,000 approved by Congress was so closely monitored, in fact, that a few thousand dollars would be left over when the building was completed in 1881 and the doors opened to an inquisitive public.

By then the collections, including the avalanche of accessions from foreign and domestic exhibitors at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition that had been assiduously sought by Spencer Fullerton Baird and his assistants, would be so great that even the new National Museum could not contain them.

[1886 handbook cover]Visit the Smithsonian After its First Fifty Years


Topics

[Bullet] The Americans
[Bullet] Icarus on the Mall
[Bullet] A Voice from the Cambrian
[Bullet] Celestial, Terrestrial

Explore the Smithsonian Buildings from the turn of the Century...

[Bullet]The National Museum of Natural History (1911)
[Bullet]The Freer Gallery of Art (1923)
[Bullet]The Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum (1902)

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