
Jefferson Pier, Jefferson Stone, or the Jefferson Pier Stone, () is a stone in
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly known as Washington or D.C., is the capital city and federal district of the United States. The city is on the Potomac River, across from Virginia, and shares land borders with ...
that marks the second
prime meridian of the United States even though it was never officially recognized, either by presidential proclamation or by a resolution or act of
Congress
A congress is a formal meeting of the representatives of different countries, constituent states, organizations, trade unions, political parties, or other groups. The term originated in Late Middle English to denote an encounter (meeting of ...
. It is located WNW of the center of the
Washington Monument
The Washington Monument is an obelisk on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., built to commemorate George Washington, a Founding Fathers of the United States, Founding Father of the United States, victorious commander-in-chief of the Continen ...
.
[Jefferson Pier, NGS Data Sheet]
/ref>
Location and inscription
The stone is on the National Mall
The National Mall is a Landscape architecture, landscaped park near the Downtown, Washington, D.C., downtown area of Washington, D.C., the capital city of the United States. It contains and borders a number of museums of the Smithsonian Institu ...
almost due south of the center of the White House
The White House is the official residence and workplace of the president of the United States. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest (Washington, D.C.), NW in Washington, D.C., it has served as the residence of every U.S. president ...
and the midline of 16th Street, NW, about due west of the center of the United States Capitol
The United States Capitol, often called the Capitol or the Capitol Building, is the Seat of government, seat of the United States Congress, the United States Congress, legislative branch of the Federal government of the United States, federal g ...
building, almost due north of the center of the Jefferson Memorial and WNW of the center of the Washington Monument
The Washington Monument is an obelisk on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., built to commemorate George Washington, a Founding Fathers of the United States, Founding Father of the United States, victorious commander-in-chief of the Continen ...
.[Jefferson Pier, NGS Data Sheet]
/ref>[Coordinates for:
* Center of the White House:
* Center of United States Capitol:
* Center of Jefferson Pier:
* Center of Jefferson Memorial: ]
The monument is a , tall granitic
A granitoid is a broad term referring to a diverse group of coarse-grained igneous rocks that are widely distributed across the globe, covering a significant portion of the Earth's exposed surface and constituting a large part of the continental ...
monolith
A monolith is a geological feature consisting of a single massive stone or rock, such as some mountains. Erosion usually exposes the geological formations, which are often made of very hard and solid igneous or metamorphic rock. Some monolit ...
with crossing longitudinal and latitudinal lines engraved on its upper surface and with a defaced inscription engraved on its west face that states:
POSITION OF JEFFERSON
PIER ERECTED DEC 18, 1804.
RECOVERED AND RE-ERECTED
DEC 2, 1889.
ifth line chiseled out/span>
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA[
]
The chiseled-out fifth line reportedly once incorrectly stated: "BEING THE CENTRE POINT OF THE".
Plan of Washington, D.C.
According to a notation on Pierre (Peter) Charles L'Enfant's 1791 "''Plan of the city intended for the permanent seat of the government of the United States ... ''" (see L'Enfant Plan
The L'Enfant Plan for the city of Washington, D.C. is the urban plan developed in 1791 by Major Pierre (Peter) Charles L'Enfant for George Washington, the first president of the United States. It is regarded as a landmark in urban design and h ...
), Andrew Ellicott measured a prime meridian
A prime meridian is an arbitrarily chosen meridian (geography), meridian (a line of longitude) in a geographic coordinate system at which longitude is defined to be 0°. On a spheroid, a prime meridian and its anti-meridian (the 180th meridian ...
(longitude ) through the future site of the U.S. Capitol. (Shortly after L'Enfant prepared this plan, its subject received the name "City of Washington".) Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson (, 1743July 4, 1826) was an American Founding Fathers of the United States, Founding Father and the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. He was the primary author of the United States Declaration of Indepe ...
, who at the time was serving as the United States Secretary of State
The United States secretary of state (SecState) is a member of the executive branch of the federal government of the United States and the head of the U.S. Department of State.
The secretary of state serves as the principal advisor to the ...
, supervised Ellicott's and L'Enfant's activities during the initial planning of the nation's capital city. Jefferson hoped that the United States would become scientifically as well as politically independent from Europe. He therefore desired that the new nation's capital city should contain a new "first meridian".
A prominent geometric feature of L'Enfant's plan was a large right triangle
A right triangle or right-angled triangle, sometimes called an orthogonal triangle or rectangular triangle, is a triangle in which two sides are perpendicular, forming a right angle ( turn or 90 degrees).
The side opposite to the right angle i ...
whose hypotenuse
In geometry, a hypotenuse is the side of a right triangle opposite to the right angle. It is the longest side of any such triangle; the two other shorter sides of such a triangle are called '' catheti'' or ''legs''. Every rectangle can be divided ...
was a wide avenue (now part of Pennsylvania Avenue
Pennsylvania Avenue is a primarily diagonal street in Washington, D.C. that connects the United States Capitol with the White House and then crosses northwest Washington, D.C. to Georgetown (Washington, D.C.), Georgetown. Traveling through So ...
, NW) connecting the "President's house" (now the White House) and the "Congress house" (now the U.S. Capitol building).[High resolution image of central portion of "The L'Enfant Plan for Washington" in Library of Congress, with transcribed excerpts of key to map](_blank)
an
enlarged image
''in'
official website of the U.S. National Park Service
Retrieved October 23, 2009. To complete the triangle, a line projecting due south from the center of the President's house intersected at a right angle
In geometry and trigonometry, a right angle is an angle of exactly 90 Degree (angle), degrees or radians corresponding to a quarter turn (geometry), turn. If a Line (mathematics)#Ray, ray is placed so that its endpoint is on a line and the ad ...
a line projecting due west from the center of the Congress house. A -wide garden-lined "grand avenue" would travel for about along the east–west line. L'Enfant chose the west end of the "grand avenue" (at the triangle's southwest corner) to be the location of a future equestrian statue of George Washington for which the Continental Congress
The Continental Congress was a series of legislature, legislative bodies, with some executive function, for the Thirteen Colonies of British America, Great Britain in North America, and the newly declared United States before, during, and after ...
had voted in 1783. (Although the planned "grand avenue" became the portion of the National Mall
The National Mall is a Landscape architecture, landscaped park near the Downtown, Washington, D.C., downtown area of Washington, D.C., the capital city of the United States. It contains and borders a number of museums of the Smithsonian Institu ...
that is now between the Capitol's grounds and the Washington Monument, neither the avenue nor Washington's equestrian statue were ever constructed.
Planning for Washington Monument
In 1804, Jefferson requested a survey of a meridian through the President's house while living in the house when serving as the President of the United States
The president of the United States (POTUS) is the head of state and head of government of the United States. The president directs the Federal government of the United States#Executive branch, executive branch of the Federal government of t ...
. It is not known why Jefferson requested a survey of a new meridian after he had previously directed a survey of a different one while serving as Secretary of State eleven years earlier.
In accordance with Jefferson's request, Isaac Briggs used a transit and equal altitude instrument to survey a new meridian line extending south from the center of the President's House that intersected a line extending due west from the planned center of the Capitol building.[Letter of "Nicholas King, Surveyor of the City to Thomas Jefferson, October 15, 1804":]
its first page
has the date and its purpose
its last page
mentions "pier", an
its back
has two annotations by later archivists, one of whom calls it "a record of the demarcation of the 1st Meridian of the US". URLs accessed on April 28, 2006. On October 15, 1804, Nicholas King, Surveyor of the City of Washington, erected at the intersection "a small pier, covered by a flat free stone, on which the lines are drawn." [ This established the Washington Meridian (sometimes termed the "16th Street Meridian"), now at a longitude 77°2'11.56" (NAD 83) west of the ]Royal Observatory, Greenwich
The Royal Observatory, Greenwich (ROG; known as the Old Royal Observatory from 1957 to 1998, when the working Royal Greenwich Observatory, RGO, temporarily moved south from Greenwich to Herstmonceux) is an observatory situated on a hill in Gre ...
.[ The pier and stone were located at the point that L'Enfant's plan had identified as being the future site of George Washington's equestrian statue. A ]pier
A pier is a raised structure that rises above a body of water and usually juts out from its shore, typically supported by piling, piles or column, pillars, and provides above-water access to offshore areas. Frequent pier uses include fishing, b ...
is a massive pillar capable of supporting a great weight. Most of the length of a surveying pier is buried vertically in the ground for stability. Free stone is fine grained stone soft enough to carve with a chisel, yet has no tendency to split in any preferential direction.
Another stone, the Capitol Stone, was erected where the north–south line from the President's house intersected a line extending west from the south end of the Capitol, and a third stone, the Meridian Stone, was erected on the north–south meridian two miles north on Peters Hill, now Meridian Hill. Neither of the two latter stones survives. Due to errors either when the Jefferson Pier was initially surveyed or when it was replaced, its center is now south of the Capitol's centerline.
The 1804 stone marker replaced one of two wooden posts driven into the ground in 1793 at its site. The marker was originally located on the south bank of Tiber Creek,[ near the creek's confluence with the ]Potomac River
The Potomac River () is in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic region of the United States and flows from the Potomac Highlands in West Virginia to Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. It is long,U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography D ...
. The area of the present National Mall west of the marker was under water until an engineering project that Peter Conover Hains directed from 1882 to 1891 created West Potomac Park
West Potomac Park is a U.S. national park in Washington, D.C., adjacent to the National Mall. It includes the parkland that extends south of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, from the Lincoln Memorial to the grounds of the Washington Monume ...
. East of the marker, Tiber Creek was transformed into the Washington City Canal
The Washington City Canal was a canal in Washington, D.C., that operated from 1815 until the mid-1850s. The canal connected the Anacostia River, termed the "Eastern Branch" at that time, to Tiber Creek, the Potomac River, and later the Chesapeak ...
.
During Washington Monument's construction
Barges used the marker as a mooring post during and after the first phase of Washington Monument's construction, which began in 1848.[ However, that usage was not the reason that the stone was named a "pier", because the surveyor who erected it had already used that term himself. The developers of the Washington Monument originally wanted the memorial to be located at the site of the Jefferson Pier. However, concerns about the bearing capacity of the soil prevented that from occurring. The marker served as benchmark when the Monument's construction began, but later disappeared from view.][
Without recognizing the significance of the stone, the ]United States Army Corps of Engineers
The United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) is the military engineering branch of the United States Army. A direct reporting unit (DRU), it has three primary mission areas: Engineer Regiment, military construction, and civil wo ...
removed the original marker during 1872–1874 as part of a cleanup and grading of the grounds around the stump of the Washington Monument, which had not yet been finished. As part of this project, the Corps of Engineers filled in gullies, planted trees and constructed ornamental ponds and a broad carriage road around the stump.[ The project left in place about 20 inches of the stone's foundation.
]
After Washington Memorial's completion
On December 2, 1889, John Stewart, a draftsman acting on the instructions of Colonel O. H. Ernst, Officer in Charge of Public Buildings and Grounds, erected a replacement marker above the recovered foundation of the original marker. According to 1898 and 1899 reports, an inscription on the west side of the replacement marker stated: "Position of the meridian post, erected September 20, 1793, and position of the Jefferson stone pier, erected December 18, 1804, and recovered and reerected, December 2, 1889." ( Silvio Bedini has written that these reports did not accurately describe the inscription.) The marker was lowered to within 8 inches of its top, so that the inscription was not visible above ground.[ In 1899, the ground on the west side of the pier was sloped so as to show the inscription on the Pier.
The meridian of the United States was changed to the center of the small dome of the Old Naval Observatory in 1850 (''see Old Naval Observatory meridian'') and finally replaced by the ]Greenwich Meridian
The Greenwich meridian is a prime meridian, a geographical reference line that passes through the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, in London, England. From 1884 to 1974, the Greenwich meridian was the international standard prime meridian, ...
as the legal prime meridian for both boundaries and navigation in 1912.
In 1920, Congress approved the placement of a new delineation stone on the Ellipse, the Zero Milestone
The Zero Milestone is a zero mile marker monument in Washington, D.C., erected in 1923 as the initial milestone from which all road distances in the United States would be measured.
Location
The monument stands just south of the White Ho ...
, which is an itinerary marker from which official mileages from Washington would be determined.[Coordinates of Zero Milestone (NGS says this should be correct with a couple of centimeters .)] The new marker, a gift of the Lee Highway Association, was for some reason placed one foot west of the original meridian line extending north–south from the center of the White House.
In 1943, the Jefferson Memorial was completed due south of the White House on the Washington Meridian. As a result, the Jefferson Pier now stands on a north–south line that passes near the centers of the "President's house" and the memorial dedicated to the president for whom the Pier is named.
Maintenance
An artifact sometimes confusing to and often overlooked by tourists, Jefferson Pier is maintained today by the National Park Service
The National Park Service (NPS) is an List of federal agencies in the United States, agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government, within the US Department of the Interior. The service manages all List ...
under its National Mall and Memorial Parks
National Mall and Memorial Parks (formerly known as National Capital Parks-Central) is an administrative unit of the National Park Service (NPS) encompassing many national memorials and other areas in Washington, D.C. Federally owned and administ ...
administrative unit. In 1890 a new monument, the Ellipse Meridian Stone, was placed by the Coast and Geodetic Survey in the center of the Ellipse
The Ellipse, sometimes referred to as President's Park South, is a park south of the White House fence and north of Constitution Avenue and the National Mall in Washington, D.C., United States. The Ellipse is also the name of the circumference ...
in President's Park about north of the Jefferson Pier in a more protected area.[Coordinates of Ellipse Meridian Stone (NGS says this should be correct within a centimeter as of 2002)] Theodolite
A theodolite () is a precision optical instrument for measuring angles between designated visible points in the horizontal and vertical planes. The traditional use has been for land surveying, but it is also used extensively for building and ...
measurements showed the new Ellipse Meridian Stone stood from the longitudinal line of the replacement Jefferson Stone, indicating one of the two markers was improperly located.
Coordinates
Notes
References
* Note: King's letter is transcribed in an appendix.
**
** Note: Contains much information from book.
**
External links
1855 Colton map of Washington
Jefferson Pier would have been on seawall at edge of water at the entrance to Washington City Canal
2014 National Park Service Map of National Mall
{{authority control
1804 establishments in Washington, D.C.
National Mall
Obelisks in the United States
Surveying of the United States
1804 sculptures
Monuments and memorials in Washington, D.C.
Granite sculptures in Washington, D.C.