The Old Patent Office Building
Robert Mills, William Parker Elliot, Thomas U. Walter and others · 1836 to 1868
Before you go inside, step back to the far pavement on F Street and look at the great Doric portico. Its eight fluted columns were modelled on the Parthenon in Athens, and the whole building was meant to read as a temple of American invention. The Patent Office was founded to hold the models that every inventor once had to submit with a patent application, and by the middle of the nineteenth century tens of thousands of little machines, engines and gadgets were displayed here in glass cases along the upper halls. Walt Whitman called it the noblest of Washington buildings.
Construction began in 1836 to designs associated with Robert Mills and William Parker Elliot, and the four wings took more than thirty years to close around the central courtyard. The south wing is sandstone from Virginia, while later wings used marble and granite, so the stone changes colour as you walk around the block. Inside, look for the vaulted galleries with their cast iron and masonry construction, and above all for the third-floor halls, once the model rooms, now the Lincoln Gallery and the Great Hall of the Portrait Gallery, with their coloured tile floors and stained glass.
The building has lived several lives. During the Civil War it served as a hospital and barracks, and Whitman and Clara Barton both tended the wounded among the patent cases. In March 1865 Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural ball filled the upper floor, only weeks before his assassination. A fire in 1877 destroyed part of the interior, and by the 1950s the building was slated for demolition to make way for a parking lot. President Eisenhower's intervention saved it, and in 1968 it reopened as the joint home of the Smithsonian's American art and portrait collections, a role it still plays today.
Did You Know? The building was saved from being torn down for a parking lot in the 1950s, and it is now listed as a National Historic Landmark.
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