Why the Washington Monument Is Two Different Colors

Look at the Washington Monument from almost any angle and you can see it: a faint but unmistakable horizontal band about one-third of the way up, where the stone shifts from a slightly warmer white to a cooler gray. It is not a trick of the light. It is a permanent scar left by one of the strangest chapters in American history.

A Monument That Barely Got Started

The Washington National Monument Society broke ground in 1848, laying the cornerstone in a ceremony attended by President James K. Polk.

The plan was to raise an Egyptian-style obelisk using white marble quarried from Texas, Maryland - a town in Baltimore County whose stone was prized for its bright, fine-grained surface.

By 1854, after six years of steady work, the shaft had reached roughly 152 feet.

The Know-Nothing Takeover

Then everything stopped.

Private donations dried up in late 1854.

In February 1855, the nativist Know-Nothing Party - an anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant political movement - staged a ballot-stuffing at the Monument Society's annual meeting and took control of the project.

Congress, appalled, withdrew its funding.

The Know-Nothings managed to add just three feet of inferior stone before abandoning the project in October 1858.

Those three feet were later torn out as substandard.

For more than twenty years, the monument stood as an unfinished stump on the National Mall.

A Different Stone

After the Civil War, Congress voted to fund completion and handed the project to the Army Corps of Engineers in 1876.

Construction actually resumed in 1879.

The Texas, Maryland quarry could no longer supply marble matching the original stone.

Engineers first tried marble from Lee, Massachusetts - but after a few courses were laid, the color mismatch was too obvious to ignore.

They settled on marble from the Beaver Dam quarry near Cockeysville, Maryland.

It was close in composition, but not identical, and the two stones aged differently in the open air.

Finished at Last - With a Permanent Seam

The capstone was set on December 6, 1884 - 36 years after the first cornerstone ceremony.

When the monument opened to the public in 1888, it stood at 555 feet and 5 inches and was the tallest man-made structure in the world, a record it held until the Eiffel Tower was completed in 1889.

The color band was visible from the start.

Engineers considered remedies and concluded the best option was simply to accept it.

Every year, millions of visitors look up and notice that something seems slightly off - and now you know exactly why.