The first published plan of Washington, D.C. and a landmark in American urban planning, offered here in an exceptionally broad, untrimmed example.

Due to the vicissitudes of war and sectional politics, the site of the American capital remained unsettled for years after independence, and before 1790 Congress met variously at Philadelphia, Lancaster and York, Pennsylvania; Annapolis and Baltimore, Maryland; Princeton and Trenton, New Jersey; and New York City.  The location of the permanent capital was not confirmed until the Residence Act of 1790, which provided for a district not more than 10 miles square along the Potomac River “at some place between the mouths of the Eastern Branch and the Connogocheague.”  Passage of the Act was made possible by the “Compromise of 1790,” in which southern states agreed to back Hamilton’s plan for federal assumption of state debts in return for the latter’s support for locating the capital along the Potomac.

In January 1791 President Washington announced that the capital district would be a diamond-shaped tract, 10 miles per side, roughly centered on the confluence of the Potomac and Eastern Branch Rivers. Andrew Ellicott was engaged to survey its boundaries, while Pierre L’Enfant was hired to develop a plan for the capital city itself. L’Enfant was a French artist and engineer who had served as a volunteer during the Revolution. He was brilliant but difficult, and his increasingly contentious relations with Washington, Jefferson and the commissioners led Washington to fire him early in 1792. Ellicott then reconstructed and revised L’Enfant’s design, regularizing portions of the street plan and eliminating several proposed avenues and open spaces.

This boldly engraved plan preserves L’Enfant’s vision of a grand capital on the European model, with broad avenues, large public squares and dramatic sightlines, all designed to make the most of the site’s topography and riverside setting. The Capitol and President’s House anchor the plan, linked by broad avenues and surrounded by an orthogonal street grid crossed by diagonals and punctuated by circles and squares. Georgetown appears at upper left, while the Potomac River, Eastern Branch, Tiber Creek and the proposed canal system provide the geographical framework. At lower left, a compass rose is accompanied by the latitude of the Capitol and a longitude of “0: 0,” treating the projected seat of government as the nation’s geographical point of origin.

The plan was intended to convey the grandeur and permanence of the national government—which at the time was barely three years old—and to project those qualities onto a site that remained largely undeveloped. Much of what it depicted existed only on paper, but Ellicott’s revised version of L’Enfant’s design became the working plan from which the capital developed.

The first published plan of Washington, D.C.
Ellicott arranged for James Thackara and John Vallance of Philadelphia to engrave and publish his plan, in part to facilitate the sale of land in the new city. Work on their large “official” engraving proceeded slowly, however, prompting Jefferson to arrange for Samuel Hill of Boston to prepare a competing version. Proofs of the two large plans began to appear in June and July 1792, with completed impressions following later in the year.

Before either of the large official plans was published, Thackara & Vallance engraved this version on a reduced scale. It appeared in the March 1792 issue of the Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine, preceding Hill’s reduced plan by some two months and thereby becoming the first published plan of the new capital.

Most surviving examples were trimmed and folded for insertion in the magazine. The present impression, by contrast, survives on an exceptionally broad, untrimmed sheet with its deckle edges intact and was evidently never bound.

In all, a superb example of the first published plan of Washington, issued while the national capital still existed largely on paper.

References
David Jolly, Maps of America in Periodicals before 1800, #440. “Checklist: Plans of Washington, D.C. from 1792 to 1800,” in Map Forum no. 12, #1. Miller, Washington in Maps: 1606-2000, pp. 44-47 (illus.) David Rumsey Map Collection, #15799. Stephenson, “From L’Enfant to the Senate Park Commission: Mapping the Nation’s Capital from 1791 to 1902,” p. 6 (in Philip Lee Phillips Map Society, The Occasional Papers, series no. 6 (Winter 2014)). Wheat and Brun, Checklist of Maps Printed in America before 1800, #527.