17931776 Club
Washington lays the Capitol's cornerstone; eight Masons stand with him on Jenkins Hill
A silversmith's stone, an inscribed silver plate, and a parade mark the start of Congress's future home.
Three years after Congress chose a swampy stretch of the Potomac for the nation's permanent capital, there was still no building for it to meet in. On September 18, 1793, George Washington, dressed in masonic regalia alongside eight fellow Freemasons, laid the cornerstone of the United States Capitol on Jenkins Hill. Silversmith Caleb Bentley had made the stone; Washington placed an inscribed silver plate beneath it before a parade and public celebration. William Thornton's winning design, chosen for its "Grandeur, Simplicity, and Beauty," would rise from that spot over the decades that followed, reworked by later architects…
