p. 14 | Growth in Our Country

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Apr 1, 1913

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 40, No. 13.

Growth in Our Country

A VERY interesting article in the March World’s Work on presidential inaugurations explodes some of the stories of the past and shows the great growth of this country. For instance, we have been told again and again how Mr. Jefferson, on the 4th of March, 1801, mounted his horse, rode to the capitol, dismounted, and unassisted hitched his horse to the fence. But William Bayard Hale tells us that this was not the case, that Jefferson was already vice-president when he was elected president, that he lived in Washington not very many yards from the capitol, and that he walked over to the capitol instead of riding. The story probably came from this: when Jefferson was succeeded by Madison, the daughter of Jefferson’s grandson tells us that her father was a lad of seventeen years and was his grandfather’s (Jefferson’s) sole companion as he rode, in those days of republican simplicity, up Pennsylvania Avenue on horseback from the president’s house to the capitol, where grandson and grandfather dismounted, hitched their horses to the palings, and the latter went into the congressional hall to see the government pass from his hands to those of his friend. The whole inauguration ceremony was simplicity itself in those days. An invited guest asked permission to wish Jefferson, the new president, joy. Jefferson replied, “I would advise you to follow my example on nuptial occasions, when I always tell the bridegroom I will wait until the end of the year before offering my congratulations.”

It is said that in the autumn, when Mrs. Adams came to the capital, she lost her way while in the wilds between Baltimore and the new capital city.

In the president’s palace, as it was called, there was not a bell in the house, and there were no grates in which to burn coal. Between the unfinished White House and the beginnings of the capitol stretched a wide road, “straight as a gun-barrel,” as one visitor described it, but full of holes and abandoned sandpits.

Pennsylvania Avenue was described as “a deep morass, covered with alder bushes,” and the capital city of 1801 consisted of woods, gravel banks, brick kilns, and rude houses, many of them mere laborers’ shanties. Eight years later, even Frederick Jackson, the British minister, wrote home that Washington was more like Hampstead Heath than any spot he had ever seen, being a place of heath woods and yawning gravel-pits, and that he had started a covey of partridges three hundred yards from the house of Congress. The country has grown amazingly since those days.