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Spring 2004

The Mysterious Mr. Jenkins of Jenkins Hill: The Early History of the Capitol Site

JOHN MICHAEL VLACH


The ground on which the United States Capitol stands was known from the earliest moments of European settlement as the New Troy tract. Granted in 1663 by the second Lord Baltimore to George Thompson, it was one of three substantial parcels that Thompson would own within the boundaries of the future District of Columbia. His holdings encompassed some 1,800 acres, or slightly more than one-fourth of all the land that would be allotted for the site of the capital city. While the 500 acres that constituted New Troy would change hands six times, it was never known by any other name prior to 1791 (see fig. 1). When Daniel Carroll of Duddington finally conveyed this property to the federal government, the site for the Capitol was still indicated on the official deed as New Troy.1 The name’s pretentious classical allusion was consistent with the names early settlers assigned to their farms. Thompson’s neighbor, Francis Pope, called his 400-acre farm Rome and the stream that flowed along its eastern edge the Tiber. It was, he must have thought, a much better and more imaginative name than its earlier and more prosaic designation of Goose Creek. Classical allusions such as these, reflecting the lofty goals of the early republic, would prove to be very appealing throughout the nation well into the nineteenth century.2

Figure 1. “Map showing Tracts of Land in Prince George's County, Maryland Conveyed for the Federal City & Ownership of the Land on June 28 & 29, 1792 when the first Trust Deeds were signed,” Don Hawkins and Priscilla W. McNeil (February 1991). Note that the small triangle marking the site of the Capitol is within the boundaries of the New Troy tract belonging to Daniel Carroll of Duddington. Furthermore, the tract of land slightly to the east of the Capitol site marked “D. Carroll” was actually owned by Thomas Jenkins at the time of L'Enfant’s survey work. Carroll acquired the property on June 1, 1791. (Courtesy Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress)

Figure 2. “Capitol Site Selection--1791,” 1973-74, by Allyn Cox, mural, Hall of Capitols, House Wing, U.S. Capitol. The painting shows Washington conversing with L’Enfant as they inspect various locations within the federal district. (Courtesy of the Architect of the Capitol)

Today, most guidebooks to Washington, D.C., describe Capitol Hill as a neighborhood comprising about four square miles with the Capitol standing at its western edge. In their attempts to be clear about the Capitol’s location, the authors of these guides often will add that the site of the building is actually called Jenkins Hill. This claim is also encountered on websites posted by various members of Congress, the Library of Congress, the Architect of the Capitol, and the National Park Service. Not one of these authorities specifies who Jenkins was or why his name is so prominently associated with such an important place. The habit of continual usage and the eminence of those who repeat the claim have combined to make the label credible. A few writers suggest that a Thomas Jenkins once leased a portion of Daniel Carroll’s estate near the future Capitol site in order to pasture his cows, and as a consequence of this transaction, Jenkins’s name became associated with the site.3 Given that Christian Hines, the nineteenth-century memoirist commonly cited as the authority for the existence of the lease, places two men named Jenkins in the northwestern section of the city between Rhode Island and New York Avenues, the case for the simultaneous presence of one of these men on the site of the Capitol seems rather feeble. Moreover, John Trumbull, artist of four paintings in the Capitol Rotunda, reported in 1791 that he found the site to be a “thick woods,” making it an unlikely place for pasturing livestock.4 After almost a century of speculation on the identity of the Jenkins of Jenkins Hill, the judgment of local historian Margaret Brent Downing in 1918 still holds: “the exact reason that the name of Jenkins is continually associated with this hallowed spot remains to be explained.”5

It is Peter Charles L’Enfant who first used the name Jenkins Hill (fig. 2). Offered the commission to design a seat of government for the fledgling American republic in the spring of 1790, he began to search out the best locations for a meeting place for Congress, a presidential residence, and several other public offices in January 1791. Stymied at first by poor weather, on March 11, 1791, he wrote to President George Washington that he had at last been able to inspect the “gradual rising ground from Carrollsburg toward the ferry road”—the land we recognize today as the southern half of Capitol Hill. Nine days later he wrote again to report that he had mapped out more of the territory between the Anacostia River and Tiber Creek “so much as included Jenkin’s [sic.] Hill and all the water course from round Carroll point up to the Ferry landing.”6 By June 22, 1791, L’Enfant’s vision of a future capital city had matured considerably with respect both to building locations and the potent vista that they might collectively present. Of the site for the future Capitol, he bragged to Washington: “I could not discover one in all respects so advantageous . . . for erecting the Federal Hse. [as] the western end of Jenkin’s Heights [which] stands really as a pedestal waiting for a superstructure.”7

After L’Enfant fixed the name Jenkin’s Hill on the Capitol site, both Washington and Thomas Jefferson followed his lead. Because L’Enfant offered alternate renderings of the name—sometimes as “hill” and other times as “heights”—it would seem that he was not entirely sure just what the prominent ridge at the western end of Capitol Hill should be called. Furthermore, he was apparently unaware that the site, which had belonged to a branch of the prominent Carroll family since 1758, was already known as New Troy.8 In the midst of the public enthusiasm for the emerging capital city, only a brief mention that appeared in the Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser on July 5, 1791, recalled the deeper history of the Capitol site: “It appears that the buildings of the Legislature are to be placed on Jenkin’s Hill on the land of Daniel Carroll, esq. of Duddington.”9 This was the last time the name of the property owner who conveyed his land to the federal government would be publicly linked with the Capitol site. While Carroll would gain a reputation as both a successful businessman and a committed supporter of the Federal City, his connection to the Capitol has been almost completely forgotten (fig. 3).10 Today, there is little public awareness that the ground chosen as the site for one of the nation’s most celebrated symbols of liberty was, in the final analysis, actually Carroll’s legacy to the nation.

Figure 3. Duddington Manor, home of Daniel Carroll of Duddington. Construction of the house within the city block bounded by First and Second, E and F streets, SE, began in 1791 and was completed in 1797. The house was demolished in 1886. (Fine Arts Commission photograph courtesy of the National Archives)

Figure 4. Map showing the location of Thomas Jenkins’s 54-acre tract on Capitol Hill and the probable path of the old “Ferry Road” across Capitol Hill. (Based on Map No. 2: Street Grades by William T. O. Bruff in Annual Report to the Commissioners of the District of Columbia, 1880; boundaries of Jenkins’s property determined by Priscilla McNeil [see fig. 1]; location of “Ferry Road” by John Michael Vlach)

Beyond recognizing a certain irony in the fact that the land that once belonged to Daniel Carroll is now assigned to a mysterious man named Jenkins, we must also discover just how it was that L’Enfant came to choose this particular name. While L’Enfant supplies no explanation, for eight months—from October 17, 1790, to June 1, 1791—a Thomas Jenkins did own fifty-four acres on Capitol Hill. His parcel was located about seven blocks to the east of the Capitol site (see fig. 1), roughly a mile from the site that is now regularly called Jenkins Hill. Since this was most likely the same Thomas Jenkins who also owned an apple orchard in the northwestern quadrant of Washington, his brief acquisition of an additional small plot in the more sparsely settled part of the District of Columbia suggests that his plan was to cut down trees either for building timber or for firewood.11 In the federal census of 1800, the household of Thomas Jenkins was recorded as consisting of a white male and four enslaved men, a workforce sufficient to turn a quick profit on a fifty-four acre plot. The presence of such a work crew is important to the naming of Capitol Hill because the path of the ferry mentioned by L’Enfant in his letters to Washington ran right through Jenkins’s parcel (fig. 4). Given that there was no other way, at that time, to travel across the hill, L’Enfant almost certainly encountered Jenkins or one or more of his slaves. While such a meeting can only be conjectured, it does suggest why, of all the possible labels he might have assigned to a relatively untamed wooded plateau, L’Enfant would fasten on the name Jenkins.

The name Jenkins Hill moved quickly from L’Enfant to Washington and then to a host of government officials. Since 1791 no alternative label has ever been seriously considered. The legitimacy of Jenkins Hill as the name for the site of the Capitol would also be confirmed by a map created in 1952 at the behest of the Commission on Fine Arts. Drawn by Arthur B. Cutter, then a member of the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers, the map attempted to capture a sense of the style and feeling of late eighteenth-century cartography. Entitled “View of the City of Washington in 1792,” the extensive acreages of the original proprietors stand out prominently (fig. 5). While Cutter offers no indications of the city’s varied topography, at the center of his map he marks the site of the Capitol with a circle of short pen strokes meant perhaps to suggest a raised elevation. Confined within the circle is the name Jenkin’s Hill. Cutter’s map, which combines tinges of antiquity with declarative authority, confirms an unquestioned truth about the location of the Capitol—it stands on prominent high ground long known as Jenkins Hill (fig. 6). When the force of common usage is supported by visual imagery—when what is heard can also be seen—then there can be no doubt in the public mind that what one has heard must certainly be true. Given that the site of the Capitol has been called Jenkins Hill for more than two centuries, it is unlikely that its name can ever be changed to reflect the actual story of the place. We can only recall that in the richness of time there will always be “truths” that merit our careful review.

Figure 5. “View of the City of Washington in 1792,” (1952) by Arthur B. Cutter. (Fine Arts Commission, Record Group 66, Historic Map no. 13, courtesy of the National Archives)

John Michael Vlach is professor of American Studies and Anthropology and director of the Folklife Program at The George Washington University.


Endnotes:

1. Daniel Carroll of Duddington (1764-1849) is not be confused with his older cousin Daniel Carroll of Rock Creek (1730-1796), who was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives in the First Federal Congress and served as a commissioner for the District of Columbia. Bessie Wilmarth Gahn, Original Patentees of Land at Washington Prior to 1700 (1936; reprint ed., Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1969), pp. 26-29, 73-75; Margaret Brent Downing, “Earliest Proprietors of Capitol Hill,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society 21 (1918):1-23; Priscilla McNeil, “Rock Creek Hundred: Land Conveyed for the Federal City,” Washington History 30 (1991):36, 44-45.

2. See Wilbur Zelinsky, “Classical Town Names in the United States: The Historical Geography of an American Idea,” Geographical Review 57 (1967):463-95.

3. For one example, see Paul Herron, The Story of Capitol Hill (New York: Coward & McCann, 1963), p. 19.

4. For the earliest description of Thomas Jenkins’s farm see Christian Hines, Early Recollections of Washington City (1866; reprint ed., Washington, D.C.: Junior League, 1981), pp. 34-35. For Trumbull’s description of the Capitol site, see Allen C. Clark, “Sutter’s Tavern,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society 42-43 (1942):98.

5. “Earliest Proprietors of Capitol Hill,” p. 20.

6. Elizabeth S. Kite, L'Enfant and Washington, 1791-1792 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1929), pp.36-37. Charles O. Paulin, “History of the site of the Congressional and Folger Libraries,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society 37-38 (1937):178, n. 4, notes that Capitol Hill was not called Jenkins Hill until after 1790. Federal Hill was the alternate name offered by Captain Ignatius Fenwick in a letter to George Washington in 1792; see “George Washington Papers and the Library of Congress, 1741-1799,” series 4: General Correspondence, Feb. 29, 1792.

7. Kite, L'Enfant and Washington, p. 55.

8. Rent Rolls for Prince George’s County, Maryland, indicate that on August 16, 1758, a transfer of 1,800 acres was made from Ann Young to Charles Carroll, Jr. [of Duddington]. This large estate included the New Troy tract that today encompasses the site of the Capitol. See Maryland State Archives, Land Office Rent Rolls, vol. 38 PG, p. 75.

9. See Allen C. Clark, “Origins of the Federal City," Records of the Columbia Historical Society 35-36 (1935):62.

10. See Allen C. Clark, "Daniel Carroll of Duddington,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society 39 (1938):1-48.

11. See Clark, “Origins of the Federal City,” p. 94. On June 1, 1791, Daniel Carroll purchased Jenkins's fifty-four acres; for copies of the deed consult the Daniel Carroll Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.