Why the Washington Monument is visibly two colours of marble
The obelisk honouring America's first president took from 1848 to 1884 to build, with a 23-year pause in the middle. Money ran out, a society fought over control, and the Civil War intervened, which is why three kinds of white marble face its walls. For five years it was the tallest structure on Earth.
Washington died in 1799 as the country's undisputed patriotic icon, yet partisanship stalled any tribute. He was linked to the Federalists, and the Jeffersonian Republicans who took Congress in 1801 cancelled earlier approvals. John Marshall's idea of a tomb inside the Capitol also died, partly because the family would not move the body from Mount Vernon. Only in 1833 did private citizens form the Washington National Monument Society, which by 1836 had gathered $28,000 and launched a design contest.
Robert Mills won in 1845 with a vast scheme: a colonnaded rotunda 250 feet across, crowded with statues of Revolutionary heroes and the signers of the Declaration, carrying a 500-foot obelisk topped off by Washington driving a six-horse chariot. Critics called the obelisk a plagiarism with nothing personal about it, and the estimated cost of more than a million dollars scared the society. In April 1848 it settled for a plain shaft. Even the site moved: ground at the spot planned in the 1791 L'Enfant Plan was too unstable, so the monument shifted 390 feet, leaving a small marker called the Jefferson Pier.
The cornerstone went down on 4 July 1848, and work halted in 1854. When Thomas Lincoln Casey resumed the job, he smoothed away the Egyptian door ornaments intended for the never-built temple. The stone shaft was finished in 1884, dedication followed on 21 February 1885, and the public entered in October 1888. Who laid the early stones is debated: historian John Steele Gordon doubts enslaved people did the skilled masonry but says the Maryland quarries undoubtedly used slave labour, while historian Jesse Holland thinks enslaved workers very likely joined the building crews.
Today the structure is a hollow shaft 500 feet tall under a 55-foot pyramidion capped with a small aluminium point, and surveys in 2013 and 2014 put its height at just over 554 feet 7 inches. Iron stairs spiral around a central lift, and fifty flags ring the base. The Eiffel Tower overtook it as the world's tallest structure in 1889. After the 2011 Virginia earthquake it shut for repairs until 2014, then closed again from 2016 to 2019.
Source: Washington Monument
