Washington Monument Completed, Dec. 6, 1884

On this day in 1884, a team of construction workers placed a 3,300-pound marble capstone on the Washington Monument and topped it off with a 9-inch pyramid of cast aluminum. With the Capitol dome, the monument continues to dominate the Washington skyline.

 

This engineering feat, which commemorates the nation’s first president, is more than 555 feet high, the world’s tallest freestanding masonry structure and the world’s tallest Egyptian-style obelisk. (There are taller monumental columns, but they are neither all stone nor true obelisks.) It contains some 36,000 stacked blocks of granite and marble.

 

Upon completion, it also became the world’s tallest structure, surpassing the Cologne Cathedral, which was begun in 1248 and completed in 1880. The Washington Monument held the title for four years, until the Eiffel Tower was completed in Paris. The District of Columbia’s building code decrees that it should remain the tallest structure in the nation’s capital.

 

Some 52 years before the obelisk was successfully topped out, the Washington National Monument Society selected Robert Mills as its designer. The privately funded society laid the monument’s cornerstone on July 4, 1848. But lack of funds and the Civil War delayed construction after only 156 feet had been completed.

 

After a hiatus in construction that lasted 20 years, a new marble source was used. Finally, in 1876, President Ulysses S. Grant authorized the federal government to finish construction. Two years later, the Army Corps of Engineers took over the project.

 

On Aug. 23, 2011, a 5.8-magnitude earthquake with its epicenter 84 miles southwest of the capital damaged the monument. The National Park Service has closed it to visitors until the damage is repaired. It remains, however, a focal point of the National Mall.

 

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