William Thornton Re-examined by Bob Arnebeck

    Chapter Fifteen: On the heights of Mount Chimborazo 198. Capitol 1832 In his feud with Latrobe, Thornton defended his character by citing his presidential appointments to positions of trust, and that should not be taken lightly. That he was a commissioner of public buildings lends credence to his claim in 1805, and still made today, that General Washington told him to restore his original design made in 1793. That he was Superintendent of the Patent Office lends credence to his claim that he invented the steamboat in 1789. That he held positions of trust led to his opinions on public issues being trusted. When he died, contemporaries did not mention the Capitol, where Bulfinch had designed and supervised completion of the dome, but they remembered the offices Thornton had held: "During the first Administration, he was introduced to President Washington, whose regard he conciliated, and by whom, having been appointed a Commissioner for laying out this Metropolis, and fixing his

Chapter Fourteen: Latrobe v. Thornton The novelty of seeing the two largest buildings in the nation, and both faced with stone, in a largely uninhabited rolling countryside evidently made it difficult to focus on residential houses. There were letters home that did mention the unfinished development on South Capitol Street inhabited by blacks and the crowded boarding houses near the Capitol. No recorded reaction to the Octagon remains. Of course, it wasn't quite finished and not open for entertaining during that period 1800 and 1801 when the city got its initial close scrutiny. Finally in 1804, a letter rated the Octagon in comparison with all other houses in the city. To save money, a senator proposed putting congress in the President's house and the president into a private house. Benjamin Latrobe opined that if the bill passed, only one house in the city would do for the president, Tayloe's.(1) He didn't allude to who designed it. In 1804, the feud between Latrobe an