I'm pretty sure that almost all Americans know about the Washington Monument located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Construction began on that great obelisk in 1848 and was completely finished in 1888. Besides the District of Columbia monument, there is another tower dedicated to our first president in Baltimore, Maryland. That structure was completed in 1829. The earliest completed Washington monument, built in 1827, is located near Boonsville, Maryland.
This gray, stone tower is only 40 feet tall. It sits on a prominence known as South Mountain. Boonsboro residents gathered on July 4, 1827 and built the first 15 feet of the tower in one day. Later that year, residents returned to raise the height to 30 feet. The stones were dry-laid, assembled without mortar. As a result of this construction technique that uses only friction to hold a structure together, the monument could not stand up to weathering and vandalism. It was a ruin by the 1860s. The monument was rebuilt using mortar in 1882, but it crumbled again when structural problems were ignored. The Civilian Conservation Corps rebuilt the monument properly in 1936, taking it to its present height of 40 feet.
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| Why not call this pavilion Mount Vernon? The park is managed by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, and someone there has a sense of humor. |
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| This is the first of eight signs that list significant dates in the life of George Washington. Stopping to read each sign affords older visitors like me a chance to rest during the uphill climb. |
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| The monument looks like a big, gray jug. |
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| The spiraling, stone stairway had me imagining lighthouses and castles. |
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| Check out the line cut through the trees. That's the Maryland/Pennsylvania State Line. |
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| Fort Necessity, aka the rest rooms. As I said, somebody has a sense of humor. |
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