library in history
A historical engraving depicting an early 19th-century library with tall bookshelves, classical columns, and elegant furniture. Several individuals are seen reading, writing, or conversing in the spacious room, which features decorative busts, framed artwork, and a large urn on a pedestal.
▪ This 1832 drawing by Alexander Jackson Davis and Stephen Gimber is the only known view of the Library’s first permanent, dedicated space in the U.S. Capitol. New York Public Library

Forged in Fire

Disaster played a key role in shaping the Library.
The Thomas Jefferson Building has awed visitors ever since it opened its doors in 1897. The grand building is more than a marvel of art and architecture, though; it’s also a monument to function and safety — fire safety in particular.

It was built that way. For good reason.

Not once, but twice, within the decades preceding the building’s design, the Library literally went down in flames.

On Aug. 24, 1814, during the War of 1812, British troops set fire to government buildings in Washington, D.C. The Library’s 3,000 or so reference books, then housed in an unfinished U.S. Capitol, provided ready fuel for the fire.

The following year, Congress purchased the 6,487-volume library of former U.S. President Thomas Jefferson to replace the lost collection. (See here.)

But just a decade later, those volumes, too, narrowly escaped complete destruction. On Dec. 22, 1825, Congressman Edward Everett detected a strange glow coming from windows in the Capitol on his way home from a late-night dinner.

A candle had been left burning in one of the Library’s galleries. The fire that erupted left the Library, “so lately one of the most beautiful rooms you ever saw … a sad spectacle,” Everett wrote.

An 1815 engraving from The Stationer’s Almanack depicting the burning of Washington, D.C., during the War of 1812. Soldiers, cannons, and British forces are seen in the foreground, while thick smoke and flames engulf the U.S. Capitol and surrounding buildings in the background.
▪ British troops attack Washington, D.C., in this scene published by The Stationer’s Almanack in London in 1815. Prints and Photographs Division
A historical painting of the U.S. Capitol building after the burning of Washington in 1814. The structure appears damaged, with charred walls and missing sections, surrounded by debris, with a few people in early 19th-century attire observing the ruins.
▪ In the ink and watercolor rendering above, artist George Munger showed the damage to the U.S. Capitol. Prints and Photographs Division
Yet, no books perished that could not be replaced.

On Christmas Eve 1851, the Library was not so lucky. A chimney fire burned through about 35,000 of the roughly 55,000 volumes the Library had accumulated by then — including two-thirds of the books from Jefferson’s collection.

“The precious accumulations of more than 30 years have been reduced, in one short, melancholy hour, to a mass of black cinders,” The Union newspaper in Washington, D.C., lamented.

These catastrophes were front of mind in 1873 when Librarian of Congress Ainsworth Rand Spofford publicized a design competition for a new Library of Congress building.

All parts of the new building, he advised prospective architects, must be “of fire-proof materials, no wood being employed in any portion of the structure.”

Thanks to painful lessons from the 19th century, the Jefferson Building has not suffered a significant fire since it opened.

—Wendi A. Maloney is a writer-editor in the Office of Communications.
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