IT HAPPENED August 24, 1814, two hundred and ten years ago. The US Capitol in Washington was attacked by British soldiers, and they burned the place down. The Capitol was still under construction by then, far from being completed, and the great dome would take more than half an additional century to complete. But it was a hallowed place, the house of the people, and so it was only natural that the Capitol would be rebuilt.
The architect selected was the same man who had also designed the portico, the tall pillars, of the White House. His name was Ben Latrobe, and he was the grandson of Stien de Wees. Ben was a restless guy, someone who needed to be able to move around. He usually stayed somewhere for a year, or two years, but then it was high time again to do and see something new.
HE TRAVELED large swaths of Europe, and in young America, too, he ran from place to place, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Norfolk, and in Richmond he stayed in place long enough to design a modern prison, with the cells built in a circle in order to make it easier to keep an eye on all the prisoners simultaneously.
Latrobe had inherited that restlessness. His ancestors in Holland also moved all the time. Leeuwarden, Leiden, Beverwijk. Grandpa Gerrit de Wees and grandma Sijtje had been the ones who had made the big crossing, and they were from Friesland, but Grandpa was not a Fries, for his parents hailed from Leiden and Alphen, and a generation earlier they had come from Amsterdam and Beverwijk. So as far as wanderlust is genetic, architect Benjamin had it handed down.
THE BIG Capitol building in the heart of Washington looks just as Ben Latrobe intended. On one side the House of Representatives, on the other the Senate, connected by a walkway that traverses below the tall dome. A wooden passageway ran there at the time, and the British had burned it to the ground. The members of parliament attended a church service there every Sunday. Grandma De Wees’ grandson had a solution for that too: he built that little church across from the White House, St. John Episcopal Church.
Benjamin Latrobe, descendant of the Dutch De Wees, Lieuwers, Jansen, Gijsberts, Goverts and Van Vlein families, had learned from the British raid. The intruders had marched from the street directly into the building. High steps were to prevent that in the future, and that worked. Until a heated mob of aggrieved mooks suddenly ran up on January 6, 2021. To that, Bennie would surely know an answer today as well.
