The title which for almost a hundred years the American people have given to the headquarters of their chief public servant is a fine example of historic accident. The White House was not originally intended to be a white house. It was built of a buff sandstone which proved to be so affected by exposure to the weather that as an afterthought it was covered with a thick coat of white paint. From its nearness to several red brick buildings, many persons fell into the way of distinguishing it by its color, and after its repainting to conceal the stains of the fire of 1814 this practice became general. Presidents have referred to it in their messages variously as the President’s House, the Executive Mansion, and the White House. Among the people it was also sometimes known, in the early days, as the Palace. The Roosevelt administration made the White House both the official and the social designation, and fastened the label so tight that there is little reason to expect a change by any successor. The White House was born under the eye of Martha Washington, was nursed into healthy babyhood by Abigail Adams, received its baptism of fire under Dolly Madison, was popularly christened under Eliza Kortright Monroe, and passed through numberless vicissitudes under a line of foster-mothers stretching from that time to the end of the century, every one carrying it a little further away from its original plan; then Edith Kermit Roosevelt administered a restorative elixir which started it upon a second youth. The evolution of the Capitol, described in an earlier chapter, finds a parallel in the architectural genesis of this building. Its drawings were made and its construction superintended by James Hoban, an Irishman; but a distinguished critic has described it as “designed on classic lines, modified by an English hand, at a time when French art furnished the world’s models in interior detail.” That accounts, of course, for its monumental and palatial features. But we must bear in mind that its sponsors intended it not only as an official residence for the executive head of the Government, but as a home for the foremost American citizen and his family, and that, in the esthetics of domestic architecture, local influences were most potent. All the Presidents except one, for the first thirty-six years of the republic’s existence, were Virginia gentlemen; so, although broadly following in treatment the Viceregal Lodge in Dublin, the President’s House took on much of the character of the “great house” on a Virginia plantation. This will explain why, in their work of restoration, when the architects were confronted by some gap in their plans which could not be filled by reference to the early records of the house itself, they drew upon the material common to the Virginia mansions of the same period.