William Thornton Re-examined by Bob Arnebeck

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. Thornton never claimed that he designed those houses. No contemporary credited him for designing them. But no one else was credited for designing them. After Law's house was finished and Tayloe's walls were raise, William Lovering advertised that he would share "specimens of buildings" that would fit into lots facing an intersection with streets at an acute angle. However, attributing their design to Thornton serves the agenda of posterity. As a 1925 New York Times' headline attested, legendary houses have a way have getting attached to legendary architects: “Octag...

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 ...