Introduction

Table of Contents                                                                           

The Doctor Examined, or Why William Thornton Did Not Design the Octagon House or the Capitol

by Bob Arnebeck

Introduction

 

1. William Thornton in 1804

In January 1793, Dr. William Thornton, who was just off a boat from Tortola, British Virgin Islands, drew the elevation and floor plan that won the design contest for the United States Capitol. The judge was President George Washington and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson quickly fed his boss's enthusiasm. Not five months later, the latter told the former that they had been fooled by an amateur. What Thornton had designed could not be built. The thirty-three year old's sole professional credential was an M.D. from a Scottish medical school. Jefferson convened a committee of architects and builders to evaluate and change his design. But for the rest of their lives, the first and third presidents could not quite admit that awarding Thornton the prize was a mistake. 

Then in 1794, the president made things worse. Exasperated by at least three worthies shunning the appointment, he replaced a retiring member of the three man board overseeing construction of the Capitol with Thornton. A point to make in the president's defense was that he hardly knew the eccentric know-it-all who lived off profits from a Tortola slave plantation and came to America to lead freed slaves back to Africa and found a free republic.

None of its troubling beginnings is writ large in the Capitol today, which in this context is better called the New Capitol. Thornton made a design for the Old Capitol. How much of what was built actually followed his design is problematical. Work on it began in 1793 and it wasn't finished until 1829. It reigned on Capitol Hill long enough to be immortalized in an 1846 photograph. Five years later work began on the New Capitol which, by 1865, more or less swallowed the Old.

2. The Old Capitol in 1846

As a commissioner, Thornton plotted to thwart three trained architects, Stephen Hallet, George Hadfield and James Hoban. They tried to build what in 1795 George Washington described as a plan that "is no body's, but a compound of every body's....” The board of commissioners only oversaw construction of the Senate wing which was completed in 1800. 

In 1802, congress replaced the board with a superintendent. Rather than appoint Thornton, President Thomas Jefferson appointed the board's clerk to that office. A year later, the president hired Benjamin Latrobe, a trained architect, who designed and oversaw construction of the House wing. Meanwhile, Thornton landed on his feet. Secretary of State James Madison hired him as the clerk to register patents. From that office, Thornton gave himself patents and tried to prove that he had invented the steamboat. At the same time, he unmercifully attacked Latrobe for changing his Capitol design.

After the British army burned the two wings of the Old Capitol in 1814,  President Madison asked Latrobe to restore them. Thornton looked askance at what Latrobe wrought, and thought little of the dome designed and built by Charles Bulfinch who replaced Latrobe. For the rest of his life, Thornton begged the president and secretary of state for a diplomatic mission so he could liberate Latin America from Spain. Thornton died in 1828, just before the Old Capitol was finished. He left debts accruing in the all area's banks. The most liquid assets that he left his widow were thoroughbred race horses. His eleven American slaves were to be freed after the death of his wife if they were educated but "if any of them behaved so improperly as to require it," she could sell them, which she eventually did. His widow's agent sold his half share of 137 Tortola slaves fifteen months after his death.

Most contemporaries minimized Thornton's role in building the Old Capitol. But luck was on Thornton's side. He married Anna Maria Brodeau in 1790, when she was 16, and she died in 1865, 37 years after his death. Her passing kindled remembrances of her husband. In 1865, the New Capitol was finished and its magnificence renewed interest in the Old Capitol. One memory served Thornton well and because of it, he is now credited for designing the most notable private residence built in early Washington, the Octagon house just southwest of the White House at 18th Street and New York Avenue NW. 

Circa 1872

No contemporary in the generations of Washington, Jefferson and John Quincy Adams, who enjoyed being Thornton's neighbor for five years, credited Thornton for designing the house. Its original owner, Col. John Tayloe III, also died in 1828, four week before Thornton. He did not leave any letter or document crediting Thornton or anyone else for designing the house. Neither did William Lovering who as the supervising architect directed the contractors who actually built the house. But while the house was being built, Lovering did advertise that "specimens of buildings suitable for the obtuse or acute angles of the streets of the City of Washington, may be seen at his home." The Octagon faced an acute angle.

However, in 1870 Tayloe's third son, William Henry Tayloe, wrote several paragraphs for his son about life in the Octagon. Three short sentences traced its origins: “The Octagon was built by your grand father in the administration of President Washington who took much interest and frequently walked to examine the progress. He had much to do with its location. Dr. William Thornton drew the plan.”⁽¹⁾

His recollection errs in several respects. For example, work on the house began during the Adams administration and ended after Jefferson took office. While it was built, Washington lived at Mount Vernon. He died in late 1799 and never lived or worked within walking distance of the house. 

Tayloe's second son, Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, remembered Thornton more vividly. His published memoir is a posthumous collection of his occasional writings. He did not credit him with designing the Octagon. Of Thornton the architect, he wrote, "He was the architect of the first Capitol at Washington, and laid out some of the public grounds, and arranged the public buildings accordingly." Of Thornton the eccentric, he recalled his upbraiding the French ambassador for beating his wife, and his feud with Robert Fulton over who invented the steamboat. Thornton told young Tayloe that his pamphlet attacking Fulton led directly to his rival's death.

As for the Octagon, Benjamin Tayloe also had the dates wrong and also insisted that Washington "frequently watched the progress of the work, from his horse." But Benjamin cited a  source, a man who when a boy had worked on the house with his father who was a brick mason.(2)

William Henry Tayloe jotted down his recollections in 1870, shortly before his death, but they didn't get wide currency. "Historic Houses of Washington," an 1893 article in the widely read Scribner's Magazine, extolled the Octagon and Tayloe with his "five hundred slaves" and "his guests the most eminent men of his times" but made no mention of Thornton. The article also gave Thornton no credit for the Capitol. It described Latrobe, not Thornton, as "the mastermind of our unequaled Capitol." It also lauded two houses he designed, the Decatur House and the Van Ness Mansion. The former still stands on the northwest corner of Lafayette Park. The latter was southwest of the White House and not far from the Octagon. At the time, John P. Van Ness rivaled Tayloe as the richest man in the city.⁽³⁾

However, by 1893, Thornton had won a measure of fame in a magazine read only by architects. In the 1880s, Glenn Brown designed a house on Rhode Island Avenue “adapted to an unusual triangular lot facing Logan Circle.”⁽⁴⁾ The Alexandria, Virginia, native was also a restoration architect. He soon discovered the Octagon, also on a lot formed by a diagonal avenue, and it appeared to need a fix-up.

Brown fell in love with the house, and with its original owner Col. John Tayloe III. Brown's father had been a physician who had served in the Confederate army for four years. Brown's grandfather had been a senator from North Carolina. Brown was raised to admire men like Tayloe, a Virginia grandee who had inherited his father's wealth and Mount Airy estate outside of Richmond.⁽⁵⁾ In the January 7, 1888, American Architect and Building News, Brown wrote that Tayloe, "was unrivaled for the splendor of his household and equipages, and his establishment was renowned throughout the country for its entertainments, which were given in a most generous manner to all persons of distinction who visited Washington in those days...."

As for the "establishment" itself, Brown found that the interior was "elaborately finished, the door and shutters being of mahogany and all still in an excellent state of preservation." He described and drew the house's mantels, its roof trusses and floor plan.⁽⁶⁾ At the end of his short article, Brown said Thornton was the architect and "was a very interesting character and is deserving of a separate article."

In 1896, after getting access to some of Thornton's papers, Brown kept his promise and his article appeared in the July issue of the Architectural Record.⁽⁷⁾ In "Dr. William Thornton, Architect," Brown placed Thornton in the forefront of American design. Brown provided a concise biography and also rewrote the history of the Capitol, painting Thornton as its guiding genius who defended his original design from efforts by trained architects to change it. That challenged the opinion still held by the then Architect of the Capitol, Edward Clark, who had held that office since 1865. Based on drawings in the Library of Congress, Clark opined that "Hallet was the real architect, that what he called his 'fanciful plan' had been borrowed by Thornton...."(8)

Other architects inspected those drawings including Adolf Cluss, then the city's leading architect who designed the Smithsonian's Arts and Industries Building and the Franklin School among many other projects. At the annual meeting of the American Institute of Architects in 1876, he delivered a paper on the Capitol's architects.

4. Adolph Cluss strikes a pose

He noted that the government began paying Hallet to work on a Capitol design before Thornton's submitted his design. That alone made him the first architect of the building. Then “Dr. William Thornton, an English amateur of versatile manners, who had come from the West Indies, succeeded in having Hallet’s plans superseded by what he claimed as his own plans.....Thornton had, it appears, carried the day by a neatly washed elevation; and when his ground-plans were corrected according to sound principles of construction, they looked so remarkably like Hallet’s that this gentleman formally protested against the award....” In response, the commissioners in charge fired Hallet. Cluss continued:

Hallet’s name disappears from history after this time; but Thornton's claims were ridiculed before long. In the year 1804, Architect Latrobe denounced his plan in an official report to Congress, and animadverted upon the mode of carrying on the competition for plans of this great public building. He intimated that Thornton's work in the premises, being simply pictorial, could not claim dignity and consideration as an architectural composition. Hallet’s original designs were restored to the archives of the Capitol after the lapse of many years, in 1871; and his memory stands vindicated at this day.⁽⁹⁾

In 1896, to better quash Cluss's dismissal of Thornton's talents, Brown highlighted Thornton's design of the Octagon. That was an attribution unknown to Cluss. Brown brought up another achievement that Cluss overlooked. President Washington had made Thornton one of the three commissioners overseeing construction of the public buildings. As Brown put it: "when Thornton was appointed commissioner, Washington requested him to see that everything was rectified so the building would conform to the original plan." According to Brown, Thornton undid all the changes Hallet made to the design and building. As long as he was a commissioner, he prevented other changes.

 

5. Glenn Brown

By all accounts Brown was a good architect and an even better advocate for the value of good architecture. He rose to become executive secretary of the American Institute of Architects. However, Brown was not a good historian. Since no one had written a serious biographical sketch of Thornton, he can be forgiven for many factual errors about his life. But he jumped at any opportunity to extol Thornton.

For example, a friend showed him a letter written by James Madison in 1830 mentioning that "The only drawing of our house is that by Dr. Wm. Thornton, and is without the wings now making part of it." When Thornton visited Madison in 1802, he made a drawing of what he saw, not a design for the house. Brown credited Thornton for designing Madison's Montpelier mansion.

As the source for attributing the design of the Octagon to Thornton, Brown cited the book of writings by Benjamin Ogle Tayloe who didn't credit Thornton for the design.⁽¹⁰⁾ Brown doesn't mention seeing William Henry Tayloe's memorandum. Still, Brown must have learned of a family tradition crediting Thornton for the design. Benjamin Ogle Tayloe died in 1868, his brother William Henry in 1871, which was well before Brown got interested in the house. He could not quiz them on their differing recollections.

But Brown had no use for weighing evidence that might diminish Thornton's renown. Like other architects in the 1890s, Brown was trying to elevate the importance of design. Thus, he championed an amateur genius like Thornton who left it to trained architects to build his design. Brown was also using his discovery of Thornton to advance his own career. It helped him rise in the American Institute of Architects, and he hoped it would win him appointment to succeed Edward Clark as Architect of the Capitol. Clark suffered a debilitating illness in 1898. Meanwhile, celebrations of 100th anniversary of the city renewed interest in the Old Capitol. The old feuds were remembered. Brown believed everything Thornton wrote. Crediting Thornton for designing the Octagon would mean nothing unless Thornton's role in the creation of the Capitol was amplified. Brown wrote a two volume history of the building, with over 322 plates of illustrations, that congress published in 1900 and 1903 respectively.⁽¹¹⁾

It turned out to be relatively easy for architectural historians to refute Brown's glorification of Thornton. In the January 1919 Proceedings of the American Institute of Architects, Fiske Kimball and Wells Bennett reaffirmed the credit due to Hallet. At the same time, they noted that Brown's exaggerations of Thornton's influence, "with the weight of their official sanction, have naturally become universally accepted, and even to question them has been felt to be disputatious and malignant." Their effort to right the record proved in vain.(12)

In 1998, the Architect of the Capitol had Brown's history of the Capitol reprinted, relegating corrections curbing Brown's enthusiasm for Thornton to footnotes. As the author of the footnotes put it: Brown's "history reflects an unswerving bias toward Thornton in his interpretations of the numerous conflicts and controversies that surrounded the early design and building of the Capitol." Along with his footnotes, William Bushong added an essay, “Glenn Brown and the United States Capitol,” that explored Brown's background, career and ambitions. Bushong showed how Brown's work on Thornton helped him rise in the AIA:

Brown’s zealous promotion of Thornton as the “outstanding architect of his time” was related to his plan to have the AIA acquire and preserve Thornton’s Octagon as its headquarters, an action which has since linked the public’s recognition of the professional organization to this architectural landmark. If Thornton had been portrayed simply as an opportunistic gentleman architect with little practical knowledge of the field, Brown could hardly have convinced his colleagues to lease and later purchase the building. His promotion of Thornton’s genius as a designer and the first Architect of the Capitol was motivated in part by a determination to preserve and adapt the Octagon as the AIA head-quarters.... The Institute purchased the Octagon in 1902 at a time when the preservation of historic buildings, except for houses associated with major historic figures, was a novel  idea.⁽¹³⁾

Bushong then explained how Brown enlisted the leaders of the AIA to lobby for his appointment as Architect of the Capital. However, Speaker Joseph Cannon rather liked Clark's assistant, a wood carver by trade, and he got the job. The architects at least got President Theodore Roosevelt to change the job title to Superintendent of the Capitol. Until his death Brown thought he should be appointed Architect of the Capitol but finally his architect allies tired of souring their relationship with congress. With Brown entering his dotage, architects relented and the wood carver got the title.

That damning assessment did not diminish Thornton's reputation in the least. What made Brown's history of the Capitol plausible were two simple facts: Thornton won the design contest in 1793 and joined the board of commissioners in 1794. Ergo, he controlled the development of the building he designed. But Brown's claim that "when Thornton was appointed commissioner, Washington requested him to see that everything was rectified so the building would conform to the original plan," is based solely on Thornton's say so. In his letters, Washington made clear that he had no such intention.

To promote himself, Thornton shaded the truth and glorified his relationship with Washington. To promote himself, Brown shaded the truth and glorified Thornton. Both have warped not a few histories of the Capitol and the city. Why didn't Bushong's footnotes and trenchant essay put Thornton in his proper place?

That Bushong was the "Chief Historian" of the White House Historical Association, cross town rival of U. S. Capitol Historical Society, probably didn't help. He also didn't challenge Thornton's role in the design of the Octagon and his performance as a commissioner of the public buildings or as commissioner of the Patent Office.   

But what most likely diminished the Bushong's impact was that in the late 20^th century Thornton caught on. Most historians of the city's early history latched on to Thornton. With a genius entrained much can easily be explained without wading through the details in the papers of Washington, Jefferson and Madison and the records of the commissioners and the records of the speculators and developers who brought other architects to the city.

In 1976, the AIA published William Thornton: A Renaissance Man in the Federal City. In 1989, it published Building the Octagon which featured Thornton as the architect of the house. Both the AIA's American Architectural Foundation and the U. S. Capitol Historical Society launched and helped fund the project leading to publication of Thornton's papers in 1995. (14). The glorification of Thornton continues in the 21st century, In 2009, U.S. Capitol Historical Society published Incidental Architect: William Thornton and the Cultural Life of Early Washington D.C. which celebrates his civic and social virtues. In 2021, the Office of the Architect of the Capitol still hails Thornton: "For his indelible impact on our national landscape, Dr. Thornton is honored as 'the First Architect of the Capitol.'"⁽¹⁵⁾

Challenging the accepted narrative about the creation of iconic buildings is always in order, especially when it debunks the magical thinking of and about historical characters like William Thornton. Then who deserves credit for the design of the Old Capitol? Who designed the Octagon? Finally, why did his contemporaries not credit Thornton for having the genius for architecture that posterity insists he had? And, to begin, who was William Thornton?

 

Go to Chapter One

In these footnotes I try to direct the reader to the on-line sources, if not the pages in question then to a resource that has a search or find function making finding references to Thornton easy. For important footnotes to sources without an on-line presence, I hope to eventually provide links to another post in this blog with snapshots of the pages quoted.

1. Harris, C. M. editor, Papers of William Thornton, volume one, 1781-1802. University of Virginia Press,  1995. p. 584

2.Tayloe, Benjamin Ogle, In Memoriam, Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, compiled by Winslow Watson. Privately Printed, 1872. pp. 97-101, 149.

3. Hamlin, Teunis, "Historic Houses of Washington", Scribner's Magazine, October 1893, vol. 14, p. 475

4. Bushong, William B., "Glenn Brown and the United States Capitol" caption for figures 2 and 3, p. 3

5.  Glenn Brown, AIA: An Alexandria Architect's Monumental Vision, (2007 exhibition catalog pdf)

6. Brown, Glenn,  1888, "The Tayloe Mansion..." American Architect and Building News, vol. XXIII, p. 6.

7.  Brown, Glenn 1896, "Dr. William Thornton, Architect." Architectural Record, 1896 , Vol. VI, July-September (page 53ff) pdf.

8. Townsend, Washington Outside and Inside, 1873, p. 58 Google Books

9. Cluss, Adolph, "Architecture and Architects at the Capital of the United States from its Foundation until 1875", Address Before the American Institute of Architects, October 12, 1876. 

10. Op. Cit., 1896, p. 64

11. Brown, Glenn,  History of the United States Capitol, vol. 1, GPO, 1900, Google Books

12. Kimball, Fiske, and Bennett, Wells, "The Competition for the Federal Buildings, 1792-1793" Journal of the American Institute of Architect, January 1919, p.11.

13. Bushong, "Glenn Brown and the United States Capitol" pp. 9, 10; The AIA had leased the building in 1898 and "found the room on right was heaped six feet high with piles of rags and rubbish, the rest of the house was in dilapidated condition." Proceedings of 32nd AIA Convention, p. 31

14. Harris C. M., Thornton Papers p. xvii

15.  Performance and Accountability Report, Architect of the Capitol Fiscal Year 2021, p. 165; see also Webpage posted by Architect of the Capitol's office showing their estimation of Thornton