On October 13, 1792, workers in a muddy field along the Potomac River carefully lowered a polished sandstone block into the ground. President George Washington watched as a brass plate was set on top, marking the cornerstone of what would become the most famous house in America. The new United States needed a home for its president, and this would be it. Construction wouldn't be finished for another eight long years.
The design came from an Irish-born architect named James Hoban, who won a contest for the job and earned a prize of $500 and a city lot. He modeled the building on a fancy duke's mansion he knew from Dublin, but made it bigger and grander. The white walls were made of sandstone hauled from a quarry in Virginia. Enslaved workers, along with free Black laborers and immigrant craftsmen from Scotland and Ireland, did most of the building. They cut the stone, laid the bricks, raised the roof, and shaped the columns.
George Washington never got to live there - he died in 1799, a year before it was ready. The first family to move in was President John Adams and his wife Abigail, in November 1800. The walls were still damp. The East Room had no furniture, so Abigail used it to hang the laundry. The building was burned by British troops in 1814 and rebuilt with a fresh coat of white paint that gave it the nickname it still carries. Every president since John Adams has lived inside the walls that began with one cornerstone in a muddy field.
