Recently I wrote about the tiny doors scattered about Ann Arbor, Michigan. But there are even more famous tiny doors in our nation, those located in the U.S. Capitol building. Here fairies don’t roam and live behind these doors. These were created after a Christmas fire.
In 1851, the Library of Congress was housed in the Capitol. A guard patrolling the grounds noticed a flickering light from under a locked door to the Library. By the time he broke the door down and fetched some water, two stories of the Library were on fire. This Christmas Eve fire burned into the morning with a loss of thirty-five thousand volumes. Two-thirds of what Thomas Jefferson had purchased.
At the time water was not readily available. John Jones, the officer on patrol that night, stated the fire could have been extinguished if he had not had to go downstairs to retrieve water.
Enter Captain Montgomery C. Meigs of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Washington Aqueduct was built and brings freshwater from the Potomac at Great Falls into the city and to pipes hidden behind the Capitol’s tiny doors. These doors conceal shallow closets where workers can fill pails of water if the need arises to extinguish a fire, or just to mop the floors.
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