Excerpt from A Private Letter to the Individual Members of Congress: On the Subject of the Public Buildings of the United States at Washington It is not necessary to be very intimately 'ac quainted with the means of erecting large public buildings, to have observed that many di iculties must here necessarily impede their progress, some of Which arise from the manner in which the appropriations have been made, the rest, from the present state of this city. The first and greatest of these has been the uncertainty of the ...
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Excerpt from A Private Letter to the Individual Members of Congress: On the Subject of the Public Buildings of the United States at Washington It is not necessary to be very intimately 'ac quainted with the means of erecting large public buildings, to have observed that many di iculties must here necessarily impede their progress, some of Which arise from the manner in which the appropriations have been made, the rest, from the present state of this city. The first and greatest of these has been the uncertainty of the continuance of the Work beyond the year, for which an appropria tion is actually made, - the e 'e???'ts of the former management of the public works, and the local Circumstances of the city and its neighborhood cause the remainder. The funds originally assigned for the erection of the public buiidmgs were to arise from the sale of the public property in the city. As it was gene rally supposed that these might be perfectly suffi cient for their compleat erection, building artisans in every branch of the business ocked to the place, andi am not informed that any difficulty was experienced under the management of the commissioners in procuring workmen in any number required. The extent in which both the pub lie and private quarries have been worked in the short period which has elapsed since the first com. Mencement of the buildings here, proves also, that there was no want of force applicable to that im. Portant department. Had the original fund been as commensurate to its object as was expected, the situations of all those engaged m the works would have been permanent, at least until all the public works were finished. Ou the time, during which a public building will continue to employ work men, some reasonable calculation can be made; and m such extensive works, as the Capitol, the President's House, and the Public O iees, - to which the sanguine views of the original promoters of this city expected many others to succeed, there appeared to be employment for so greata length of time, as to give encouragement to the settlement of many mechanics in the city who looked to them almost entirely for support. The stimulus was powerfully felt -it brought hither many of the best workmen on the continent, and enticed others from eligible situations in Europe. Many brought valuable property, and most of them valuable knowledge and experience with them; so that during the most promising term of the infancy of these works, lvashington might boast of arti sans umivalletl in the United States. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at ... This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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