The Imaging Research Center at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County has been working on a project to create a digital reconstruction of the District of Columbia as it existed at the time of the construction of the U.S. Capitol in 1814. The video at that link explains a bit about the challenges of having to derive topographical data from inexact sources such as contemporary paintings and incomplete maps. Though Pierre L’Enfant’s master plan for the city of Washington was finalized in 1791, very little of the city as we now know it had been built more than 20 years later, and most of the city was still farms and open land. Complicating matters further, the British burned what buildings there were in place that same year, including the White House and the Capitol, setting construction back even further and causing the destruction of many official documents that would have been of invaulable use to the IRC’s project. The Capitol would require four additional years to be reconstructed after the fires, and was not completely finished until 1868.
