03/13/2025
The website for the Smithsonian Craft Show has been updated with a list of the artists in the show along with photos of their work. If you have an interest in the show, it’s worth a look.
www.SmithsonianCraftShow.org
In the last post, I promised to return with some history on the National Building Museum, the venue for the Smithsonian Craft Show. So here goes…
The Washington DC skyline is full of Greco-Roman architecture of marble monuments and government buildings. But there’s one building that stands out as different from them all. It’s a large, ornate, red brick structure located a few blocks northwest of the US Capitol. It was built from 1882 - 1887 to house a growing government bureau.
After the Civil War, the government’s pension system was expanded to include pensions for veterans. The staff required to meet this mission grew to over 1,500, requiring a new building to house the Pension Bureau. Retired Brigadier General Montgomery Meigs was selected to design and manage the construction of the Pension Building. Throughout the Civil War, Meigs had been the Quartermaster General, responsible for the logistics (supply and transportation) of the Union Army. He was widely known as an efficient, hard-driving, and scrupulously honest officer. In 1882, with a limited budget, he began to design and build the new Pension Building.
Budget constraints forced Meigs to forego Washington’s traditional Greco-Roman architecture for an Italian Renaissance style. The primary material was red brick, not marble. A notable part of the design was a 1,200-foot frieze around the building of sculptures depicting Civil War scenes. Meigs turned to Bohemian sculptor Caspar Buberl for this task.
The frieze is a beautiful horizontal stripe of sculpture that runs the circumference of the building. It displays a variety of Civil War scenes that depict infantry, artillery, cavalry, medical, and quartermaster war imagery. To keep frieze costs under control, Meigs directed Buberl to sculpt a single 69’ scene with the variety of military elements listed above. The same elements of this scene were then mixed and matched 18 times in different sequences to fill the 1,200-foot length of the frieze.
The building’s interior features a spacious courtyard supported by eight huge Corinthian columns. Each column measures 75’ tall, 8’ in diameter, is made of brick, and is painted to resemble marble. An inaugural ball was first held in the building in 1885 for Grover Cleveland. Inaugural balls have been held there ever since. It was also home to a long-running annual TV special called Christmas in Washington.
At the beginning, it gained the nickname “Meigs Old Red Barn”. A prominent Washington journalist called it a “hideous architectural monstrosity”. By the 1960s, the building was in desperate need of repair and was considered for demolition. In 1969, it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1980, the National Building Museum became a private non-profit institution by act of Congress. Today, among other things, it’s a great venue for a first-rate craft show.
If you’ve made it this far, there’s two more things…
More General Meigs Trivia:
The night President Lincoln was assassinated in Ford’s Theater, upon learning the news, Meigs immediately went to Petersen House (across the street, where Lincoln had been taken). He stood at the door through the night, deciding who could enter. The next morning, after Lincoln passed, he moved to the parlor to sit with the President’s body.
General Meigs played an early, crucial role in the creation of Arlington National Cemetery. In 1864, Meigs ordered that Union soldier burials take place at Arlington House, the home place of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Meigs hated Lee for siding with the Confederacy and took a personal interest in directing that burials be done on the mansion’s grounds and around the nearby flower garden. Post-war, a legal battle ensued with the Lee family suing to move the graves so they could reclaim their home. This only spurred Meigs to further expand the cemetery to thwart their efforts. It all culminated in a Supreme Court ruling that the government’s seizure of Arlington House was illegal, returning the estate to Lee’s oldest son. Realizing he now owned a cemetery with over 2,600 headstones, numerous memorials, and white picket fences, Lee’s son sold it back to the government for $150,000, and it went on to become Arlington National Cemetery.
Thanks to Wikipedia as the primary source for this story.
Smithsonian Craft Show
