l’enfant’s plan Original plan for the city of Washington, D.C., by Pierre Charles L’Enfant, 1794. The plan stops along the northern Boundary Street, just below the area that would come to be known as Meridian Hill as the city developed in the 19th and 20th centuries.
search of more enemy ships, he came across the Marquesas Islands
was taken prisoner and managed to escape, he arrived back in New
renaming it Madison Island and intending to bring its people into
Porter made it to Washington in 1814, just in time to play an
north of Polynesia and took possession of the island of Nuku Hiva,
York, where his countrymen received him with honor.
the “great American family.”4 Though this annexation was never seri-
instrumental role in driving the British out of the city. He was then
as essentially the U.S. Navy’s first imperialist.5 As early as 1815, he
administrative body composed of the most esteemed and accom-
ously pursued, this was an unprecedented act that established Porter
had proposed a naval mission to Japan to open its trade with the
West, a suggestion that influenced the organization of Commodore Matthew Perry’s famous expedition.
Despite his successes in the war, a relentless British attack on
the Essex at Valparaíso, Chile, forced Porter to surrender and flee, but the battle would be remembered as “one of the most desperate and
remarkable in naval history.”6 After one other defeat, in which Porter
appointed as a commissioner of the Navy Board in 1815, a new
plished naval officers. Having accumulated a significant amount of prize money during his adventures at sea and wanting to settle
down on a property “commensurate with his social position,”7 Por-
ter set his sights on the hill one mile due north of the White
House, the highest point in the District. “So rolling was the con-
tour of the meadows that their appeal to the eye of a sailor ashore
was irresistible,”8 and so in 1816, he purchased a 110-acre farm for
THE RISE OF MERIDIAN HILL
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