We have brief accounts of the appearance of Washington written by travelers who visited the United States during the period from 1790 to 1800. There is an interesting description by Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, who wrote an account of his “Voyage dans les États-Unis d’Amerique fait en 1795-97.” The accounts of several inhabitants in Washington of the period is well summed up by Albert J. Beveridge in his Life of John Marshall (vol. III, pp. 1-4): A strange sight met the eye of the traveler who, aboard one of the little river sailboats of the time, reached the stretches of the sleepy Potomac separating Alexandria and Georgetown. A wide swamp extended inland from a modest hill on the east to a still lower elevation of land about a mile to the west. Between the river and morass a long flat tract bore clumps of great trees, mostly tulip poplars, giving, when seen from a distance, the appearance of a fine park. Upon the hill stood a partly constructed white stone building, mammoth in plan. The slight elevation north of the wide slough was the site of an apparently finished edifice of the same material, noble in its dimensions and with beautiful, simple lines, but “surrounded with a rough rail fence 5 or 6 feet high unfit for a decent barnyard.” From the river nothing could be seen beyond the groves near the banks of the stream except the two great buildings and the splendid trees which thickened into a seemingly dense forest upon the higher ground to the northward. On landing and making one’s way through the underbrush to the foot of the eastern hill, and up the gullies that seamed its sides thick with trees and tangled wild grapevines, one finally reached the immense unfinished structure that attracted attention from the river. Upon its walls laborers were languidly at work. Clustered around it were fifteen or sixteen wooden houses. Seven or eight of these were boarding-houses, each having as many as ten or a dozen rooms all told. The others were little affairs of rough lumber, some of them hardly better than shanties. One was a tailor shop; in another a shoemaker plied his trade; a third contained a printer with his hand press and types, while a washerwoman occupied another; and in the others were a grocery shop, a pamphlets-and-stationery shop, a little dry-goods shop, and an oyster shop. No other human habitation of any kind appeared for three-quarters of a mile. [Illustration: THE SIX BUILDINGS _Courtesy of National Photo Co._]