Last updated: August 3, 2023
Article
Build Your Own Adventure: Maryland Marble
NPS/Carol Highsmith
You Chose: Maryland Marble
As it turns out, you made a better choice than the people in charge. The Army Corps of Engineers initially decided to go with the quarry in Lee, Massachusetts. They wanted to save money. But after building several feet, the difference in color became too great to ignore. There were also problems with the quality of the less expensive stone. Delivery of the marble blocks from Massachusetts to Washington, D.C. was also a challenge. The decision was made to switch to the closer quarry in Baltimore, Maryland to finish the upper two-thirds. The stone wasn’t an exact match, but it was better than the brown streaked stone from Massachusetts. They should have listened to you!
The decision was made to scrap the idea of a large collonade around the obelisk. (They dropped the statue of George Washington in a toga driving a chariot as well.) These design choices meant that the Washington Monument would be an unadorned tower of sleek, bright marble shaped like an Egyptian obelisk towering above the nation's capital. With the new quarry in Maryland being so much closer to the building site, work proceeded steadily for the next several years. Using a steam-powered elevator that could lift six tons of stone up to a movable 20-foot-tall iron frame along with a boom and block and tackle systems for setting the stones, the masons inched their way up the monument, building twenty feet of stone and mortar, then moving the iron framework up twenty feet, repeating as they went upward. When the monument reached 470 feet above the ground, the builders began angling buttresses inward to support the 300-ton marble pyramidion at the top of the monument. More than 35 years after the laying of the cornerstone, the Washington Monument is finally nearing completion.