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THAT building on the ground that is to be occupied by the United States Supreme Court, in Washington, familiarly referred to as “the Old Brick Capitol,” occupied as national headquarters by the Woman's Party, facing the Capitol grounds and with Congressional Library on its left, long pointed out to tourists, about which hundreds of romantic stories have been written, now turns out never to have beeen the Capitol at all.
It was not even the “Old Capitol Prison as has been claimed, in which Belle Boyd the Confederate spy, was so long imprisoned, and in the back yard of which Maj. Henry Wirz, keeper of the Confederate prison at Andersonville, Ga. was hanged by the neck.
The present building, it is revealed by one of the Federal government's most interesting crime detectors, participated in none of these historical events. It is not the same building that stood here when they were taking place. It has basked for a generation in a glory to which it was not entitled. It is in fact a mere youth among old Washingtpn buildings, being but about 60 years old.
The belief that this was the more ancient building has been so general that nobody in recent years had questioned it. Its recent owners, the Woman's Party, evidently believed in its ancient and historic associations. Those associations were a matter of great pride with them and for a lopg time the building carried a marker which indicated the distinctions of its past. In fixing a value on it when the Government sought to take it over as a site for the proposed great judicial structure they, in fact, held that its historic associations gave to it a peculiar value and asked that they be recompensed accordingly.
It was just this which led to the discovery of the absence of a valid claim to antiquity. The amounts to be paid for various of these plots were determined by condemnation proceedings carried out under the authority of the District Supreme Court. The method was through the appointment of a commission to value these plots. The commission that valued this property was composed of Sewell A. Reeves, Charles A. Fiske and William A. Hettingér. all well-known citizens of Washington. It wanted to know if a “historic value” should bé attached to it. It asked the Treasury Department, which was in charge of the execution of the project, if a historic value should be allowed to the owners. The Treasury Department attempted to ascertain the facts.
H. H. Morgan, of Architect's office, had charge of the investigation. To be sure this was the old building, everybody told him. Its history was familiar to everybody. It had been hastily erected after the British inconsiderately burned the Capitol in 1814, that it might serve as the temporary Capitol. Congress had met there for three or four years. It had become a fashionable boarding house back in the eighteen thirties. When John C. Calhoun had lived there and died there. When the Civil War came the building was commandeered by the Government, its windows were barred with steel, and it became a political prison.
One of the most romantic figures of the war was Belle Boyd, girl spy, young and dashing, who began her adventurous caper shooting: a Federal sergeant, who sought to tear down a Confederate flag she had hoisted. As a bearer of clandestine dispatches she was finally arrested and lodged back of the window marked with an arrow in the picture. She gave a sort of concert every evening during her incarceration by singing Confederate songs from this window. She escaped being hanged, however, and her importance may be gauged by the fact that she was exchanged for a captive Union general and lived to marry a Union Naval officer and to be buried in Wisconsin by the Grand Army of the Republic.
But Mr. Morgan was an archtect and the present building, he thought, had many earmarks that were peculiar to periods more modern than 1815. Could it be proven that this was the same building that was put up so hastily after the visit of the British? Only assertions of confidence in its antiquity were at hand. For that matter there was nobody who gave any proof to the contrary.
What were the facts?
In checking the physical history of Washington many a student has in recent years gone back to the famous Brady collection ot photographs of the Civil War period, which, some years ago, was bought by the Government and has found a place in the War Department. Mr. Morgan looked through these pictures and sure enough, he found a number of pictures of the old Capitol Prison. In one of these, Union sold iers, with the funny little cape of the period, were marching by. were marching by. In another, by a bit of a stretch of the imagination, Belle Boyd could be seen standing by her barred window. At this point the Treasury Department introduced into the situation one ot its most unusual and interesting officials. Bert C. Farrar rates as the “examiner of questioned documents” for the Treasury, In this post he is primarily the Government's handwriting expert. Every warrant that is issued by the Government, amounting to thousands a day, comes back through the treasurer's office for final payment. There is a huge and expert staff which handles these warrants. Out of the mass of them there are some twenty a day that may appear to have been tampered with or on which the signature is questioned. Mr. Farrar passes on these.
Government may be engaged in a suit over millions with a corporation that claims huge refunds on its income tax. The crux of the case may be the determination of the genuineness of a typewritten sheet from a loose leaf ledger. A watermark in the paper may that it was manufactured in 1926 while the ledger sheet is dated 1922. Mr. Farrar's reputation in such matters has grown to such an extent that he may receive a call to the State of Washington, as he recently did, to determine the genuineness of a signature on a hotel register upon which the innocence or guilt of a person accused of crime rested. Or he may go to Louisiana, as he recently did, to give evidence that determines the disposition of an estate.
This alleged historic building was not exactly a questioned document but the determination of its genuineness meant some hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Treasury, the funds of which it was his business to guard. So the architect's office asked the Treasury specialist whether or not it was the game building that had housed the Congress and incarcerated Confederate spies.
Mr. Farrar examined the pictures of the building that were taken during the Civil War. To be sure they did not look much alike. The present building was a story taller than the old one, but that might have been added. The windows and the chimneys were not in the same places but they might haye been changed. In the old building there were Roman arches over the doors while in the new those orifices were rectangular. Yet in the face of all these facts it was argued that the walls of the present building might have been those of the old building and so, fundamentally, this was the same building. Whether or not these were the original walls became the vital question for determination. Mr. Farrar proceeded to find out.
It seems that there are patterns in walls, just as there may be in calico or the laying of tile on a bathroom floor. Were the wall patterns of these two buildings the same?
Mr. Farrar took the best of the Brady pictures to the Bureau of Standards. Would that agency be so good as to make enlargements of the details of the picture that showed the brick patterns to best advantage. It would and did. To be sure, the photographs of this Civil War period were not good. Even in the enlargements the brick pattern was not plain.
There are two distinct methods of laying the brick in a wall that came into this problem. There is the so-called “Flemish bond” and the “common bond.&rdquo In the Flemish bond, which is an ancient type, the brick is laid in such a way that the long side of a brick shows, and next to it brick is laid crosswise of the wall so its end shows. Thus they alternate in all the rows of the outside will, showing first a long and then a short brick. In the common bond, which is modern, all the bricks present their long sides for four or five rows then there appears a whole row in which all the bricks are laid crosswise and only their ends show.
Mr. Farrar took his enlarged photographs to his “penman's table.” that aid to the counterfeiter or forger which has a glass top and a strong light underneath. The forger puts a paper containing a signature he wants to reproduce over this light, the document that is to be forged over this signature, and traces the latter. Mr. Farrar placed a sheet of paper over the enlarged photograph on the penman's table. He went over it meticulously as is the way of his kind and put a dash wherever he could make out the long side of a brick. Then, that he might not be affected by the positions of these brick whose positions had already determined, he took a new sheet and on it recorded with a dot the positions or all the short bricks he could pick out. These two bits of information were then assembled and it was found that the walls ot the original buildings were Flemish bond in pattern. The walls of the present building were common bond, showing the long sides of five layers of brick and then a layer of butts. Thus it became impossible that even the walls or the present building could be those of the “old brick Capitol,” which was the “old Capitol Prison.”
I went with Mr. Morgan for an examination of the building on the eve of tbe beginning of the work of demolition. We went into its basement. There, in certain portions of it, were to be found foundation walls of rough stone that came irregularly to the ground level. They had the apearance of being the foundation walls of the old building. Immediately on top of them a new type of construction began. It was of brick, laid in common bond, of the type of construction of the present building. Treasury Department authorities are convinced that these foundation walls, below the ground level, are all that is left of the original and historic building.
There are word-of-mouth assertions that the old building was torn down in the late sixties and that the present structure was built then. No record has been found to substantiate that theory and no individual has been found who remembers the destruction of the one building and the erection of the others, although there are doubtless many people still living who were familiar with what was going on in that area following the Civil War.
I have talked with one such gentleman who remembers much of the old building but not of the reconstruction. He is George McLean Wood, editor for technical publications, with offices in the Bond. Building, son of Col. William P, Wood, who was in
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charge of the old Capitol Prison during the Civil War. The present Mr. Wood was a boy of 11 when he went to live in the old residence in A street right next to the lot on which the old prison stood, which was the residence of the superintendent, and which still stands. He had the run of the prison and remembers very clearly many of the prisoners, including Belle Boyd, who were incarcerated there. After the war, however, his family moved to south Washington, and so, if the old prison was torn down and a new building put up there, he 'does not remember it.
After hearingall this evidence, pro and con, ,the commission appointed by the court decided that the building had no historical value. It did not place itselt on record to this effect, but its conclusions found expression in the fact that the price allowed for the property contained no sum which extended recognition to such a claim. The payment which the Treasury made for the property was based on real estate and not historical value. Its officials state positively that this is not the original building.
Yet despite all of this, a visit was recently made to the building, the stucco with which its exterior is covered was chipped off 4 feet above the ground at its southwest corner, and ancient brick, laid in the Flemish pattern, was revealed. It seemed that this was undoubtedly a part of the original wall.
Just how much ot this wall will be shown to have survived will not be known until the building is finally demolished.