Presidents' Day at the White House
Just how does the president celebrate Presidents’ Day? Throughout the more than 200-year history of the White House, presidents themselves ha...
Days of Destruction: The President's House
How Long? 1 minute
After torching the Capitol about 100 British soldiers and sailors headed west down Pennsylvania Avenue with four officers, including Ross and Cockburn in ceremonial three-cornered naval chapeau bras, riding behind them. At the deserted White House, the hot and exhausted invaders found the table set for 40-50 dinner guests and they took to the food and drink with a will.
The president, first lady and Secretary of War Armstrong were the subjects of ribald mockery, and the British began assembling wooden tools, tables and sofa and bedding for a bonfire. Lieutenant George Pratt, a veteran of the Duke of Wellington's campaign against Napoleon in Spain, and "an expert in pyrotechnics," ordered 50 men to surround the Executive Mansion and hurl poles with fiery oil-soaked rags at the end like javelins through the broken windows. Before long the heaps of furniture, bedding, and curtains were on fire. The interior collapsed within the shell, a burning mass of wood flooring, lath, and everything else that was combustible.
The scorch marks of the fire are still visible today on the White House as two areas have been left unpainted.
Erik Kvalsik for the White House Historical Association
The frontispiece to the 1807 travel guide, A Stranger in America by Charles W. Janson, was a rare early view of the White House as it appeared before the 1814 fire.
The North Door surround, embellished by Scottish stonemasons with unquestionably the finest architectural stone carving produced in America at that time, survived the 1814 fire.
Mrs. Madison, with Latrobe's design skills, combined republican simplicity with high federal style to create a setting for political discourse in a cordial environment. The architect custom-designed furniture for the Oval Room in the Grecian mode then popular in England.
The principal drawing room of the Madison White House—today's oval Blue Room—between 1810 and 1814.
Gilbert Stuart's 1797 portrait of George Washington was taken down and reframed to better preserve it in 2004.
Dolley Madison through the later years of her life saved and cherished this red velvet ball gown. Curators who have studied the fabric of the gown believe it may have been material from the red velvet curtains that hung in the oval drawing room.
Greensboro Historical Museum
The President's House was left a gutted ruin; the walls still 'white except for great licks of soot that scarred the sockets that had been windows.' President's House by George Munger, ca. 1814-1815.
White House Historical Association (White House Collection)You Might Also Like
-
-
Presidents and College Football
Nearly 150 years after its beginnings college football season is in full swing. The sport has attracted countless players and even...
-
Presidents and the Hey Day of Horse Racing in the Federal City
President Richard M. Nixon was the first sitting president to attend the Kentucky Derby on May 3, 1969. In his party that...
-
The American Presidents and Shakespeare
On April 23, 1932, Shakespeare-lovers from around the country flocked to Washington, D.C., to attend the dedication of the handsome new...
-
Secret Service and the Presidents
Historian William Seale has described presidential protection as a learning process, with presidents and their families and the Secret Service...
-
Presidents and the Potomac
For the politicians, civil servants, and accompanying citizenry of the new federal government—freshly arrived in 1800 from comfortable, sophisticated Philadelphia—the...
-
Bio Caroline Harrison
The centennial of President Washington's inauguration heightened the nation's interest in its heroic past, and in 1890 Caroline Scott Harrison lent h...
-
Bio Andrew Johnson
With the assassination of Lincoln, the presidency fell upon an old-fashioned southern Democrat of pronounced states' rights views. Although an...
-
Bio Michelle Obama
“Each of us also comes here tonight," Michelle Obama told the Democratic National Convention in 2008, "by our own improbable journey” and...
-
Bio Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln warned the South in his Inaugural Address, "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine,...
-
Bio Mary Lincoln
As a girlhood companion remembered her, Mary Todd was vivacious and impulsive, but "she now and then could not restrain...
-
Bio Calvin Coolidge
1923, while visiting in Vermont, Calvin Coolidge received word that Warren G. Harding was dead and he was president. By the...