This article also appears in the March-April issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.
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.
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.
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.
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