U.S. Department of the Treasury

About this property

The Treasury Building in Washington, D.C., is a National Historic Landmark building which is the headquarters of the United States Department of the Treasury. An image of the Treasury Building is featured on the back of the United States ten-dollar bill. In the spring of the year 1800, the capital of the United States was preparing to move from the well-established city of Philadelphia to a parcel of tidewater land along the Potomac River. President John Adams issued an Executive Order on May 15 instructing the federal government to move to Washington and to be open for business by June 15, 1800. Arriving in Washington, relocated government employees found only one building completed and ready to be occupied: the Treasury Department building. Of the 131 federal workers who moved to Washington, over half of them (69) were housed in the new Treasury Building, a two-story Federal/Georgian styled red brick building with a basement and attic that had 16 rooms on the first floor and 15 rooms on the second floor. The building was 147 feet (45 m) long and 57 feet (17 m) wide, flanking the south-east end of the President's House (later renamed the White House), one of four similar structures for the then four executive departments flanking the east (State and Treasury) and west sides (War and Navy) of the executive mansion facing Pennsylvania Avenue. Within six months of occupying the building, a fire broke out on January 20, 1801, nearly destroying the entire structure. The fire started in one of the first floor rooms and burned through to the floor above but was extinguished before any serious structural damage occurred. The building was repaired, yet by 1805 the records of the department were beginning to overwhelm the original building and a new "fireproof" brick and masonry vault extension was planned for the west side of the Treasury Building facing the next-door presidential residence. The extension of the Treasury Building was designed by architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe and completed in 1806. The first secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, never got to see it finished. The fire-proof vault addition designed by Latrobe turned out to be a hearty structure – it was the only part of the building that survived the 1814 burning of Washington by British forces during the War of 1812. Treasury offices were temporarily relocated to seven buildings along Pennsylvania Avenue between 19th and 20th Streets while the Treasury Building, other executive departments and President's House (White House) were reconstructed. The reconstruction took until 1817 under President James Monroe to complete.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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