William Thornton Re-examined by Bob Arnebeck

  Table of Contents    Rewriting this chapter   Chapter 11: Mrs. Thornton’s Diary Octagon and environs toward southwest in 1817 Doctor Thornton reached Mount Vernon with the Laws a day late, and he long voiced his regret that he had not arrived soon enough to perform a tracheotomy to restore breathing stopped by a throat infection. Sometime after 1802, he would write a fantasy claiming that he offered to bring the General back to life but "was not seconded." Of course, what he did know at the time was that the General’s death meant nothing to his slight reputation as a physician, but had a great deal to do with the fate of his Capitol design. To the delight of Thornton’s biographers, his wife seized the moment in a way that did much for Thornton’s fame as an architect. On January 1, 1800, she began keeping a diary with entries for every day of that year noting what she and her husband did as well as who they saw. She never explained why she kept her diary. Perhaps t...

Table of Contents      Rewriting this chapter   Chapter Nine: The Case for the Ingenious A 116. Law's 1800 house became the fulcrum of the New Varnum Hotel Today, Thornton is a celebrated architect and his fame is not based solely on his Capitol design. Posthumously, Thornton had a stroke of luck. Historians credit him for designing houses built by John Tayloe III, General Washington and Thomas Law. Tayloe’s and Law’s houses were architecturally important when they were built but Thornton never claimed that he designed those houses. No contemporary credited him for designing them. After Law's house was finished and Tayloe's brick walls were raised, William Lovering advertised that he would share "specimens of buildings" that would fit into lots facing an intersection with streets at an acute angle. But no one credited Lovering for designing the houses. Attributing their design to Thornton serves the agenda of posterity. As a 1925 New York Times' headline attes...