William Thornton Re-examined by Bob Arnebeck

Table of Contents     Chapter Nine: The Case of the Ingenious A 116. Law's 1800 house became the fulcrum of the New Varnum Hotel Some 42 years after Thornton and Tayloe died in 1828 and shortly before his own death in 1871, one of the three surviving children of Tayloe, who had thirteen, credited Thornton, his father's old friend and lately recalled as the "original" designer of the Capitol, for designing the Octagon. In an 1888 magazine article about the Octagon,  restoration architect Glenn Brown accepted the family legend. He also proposed the Octagon as the headquarters of the American Intitute of Architects, which was then in Manhattan. In  1896, he followed up the 1888 article with an article about Thornton's other designs, and especially cleared up doubts recently cast on Thornton's Capitol design. He  also credited him for designing and superintending construction of  two houses that the General Washington had built just north of the Capitol to hous...

The Doctor Examined, or Why William Thornton Did Not Design the Octagon House or the Capitol by Bob Arnebeck   Table of Contents     Chapter Six: Walls Fall Down 72. Robert Morris house in Philadelphia where the president lived and worked While Thornton left Hallet stewing  in his little stone house next to the Capitol, he could not avoid Hallet's pretensions once he got to Philadelphia. In mid-February, 1795, the New York Minerva, immediately followed by the Boston Orrey and Philadelphia's Gazette of the United States, printed a three part "Essay on the City of Washington." Since it was also printed in French, one scholar suggests that Hallet wrote it. However, Greenleaf had several French employees including a "Mr. Henry" who he paid to project ideas about the world capital soon to be built. Another Greenleaf brother-in-law, Noah Webster, was publisher of the Minerva. The essay primarily celebrated the economic and cultural importance of the city, and ...