On 18 September 1793 the President of the United States put on a Masonic apron, stepped down into a foundation trench, and laid the cornerstone of the Capitol with corn, wine, and oil. He then went and ate roast ox with everybody. The stone has never been found again.
The Morning
At ten in the morning, George Washington crossed the Potomac into the new Federal City. He was met by the Alexandria Volunteer Artillery and by brethren of Masonic lodges from Virginia, Maryland, Georgetown, and the Federal City itself, and the whole company processed roughly a mile and a half to the building site on Jenkins Hill.
It was the first large public ceremony ever staged in the city that would become Washington, D.C., and there was as yet almost nothing there — a surveyed grid, some cleared ground, and a hole in the hill.
The ceremony was Masonic from beginning to end. Washington presided, assisted by Joseph Clark, Grand Master of Maryland. A Georgetown silversmith, Caleb Bentley — a Quaker, and not a Mason — had made an engraved silver plate for the occasion, recording that the stone was laid in the first year of Washington's second term, by the Grand Lodge of Maryland and the lodges under its jurisdiction together with Lodge No. 22 of Alexandria, Virginia, and dating it in the Masonic manner: in the year of Masonry 5793.
Washington took the plate, descended into the trench, laid it on the ground, and the cornerstone was lowered onto it. Three Worshipful Masters attended him carrying the elements of consecration. Washington struck the stone three times with a gavel, and the corn, wine, and oil were poured — corn for nourishment, wine for refreshment, oil for joy.
Then a five-hundred-pound ox was roasted and the crowd was fed.
The Tools
Both instruments survive, and both are still working tools in the ceremonial sense.
The trowel is kept at the George Washington Masonic National Memorial in Alexandria. It has been brought out repeatedly across two centuries for the cornerstone ceremonies of major buildings in the capital — among them the Washington Monument, the Jefferson Memorial, and the Washington National Cathedral.
The gavel Washington gave to Valentine Reintzel, Worshipful Master of Maryland Lodge No. 9 — today Potomac Lodge No. 5 of Georgetown. Reintzel's family returned it to the lodge after his death in 1817. Since 1922 it has lived in a bank vault, brought out only for occasions the lodge judges worthy of it.
A working gavel and a working trowel, both in continuous ceremonial use since the year Washington used them. That is a rarer kind of continuity than a monument.
Why a Cornerstone Ceremony at All?
This was not eccentricity. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Masonic cornerstone laying was simply the normal public rite for the founding of a significant building — capitols, courthouses, schools, hospitals, churches, bridges. When a community wanted to mark a beginning with dignity, it asked the Grand Lodge.
The symbolism is operative before it is speculative. The cornerstone is the stone from which the rest of the building takes its lines. If it is not square, true, and level, everything raised on it inherits the error. The Craft tests it with the square, the level, and the plumb, and then consecrates it with corn, wine, and oil — a wish that the building be a place of nourishment, refreshment, and joy for those who use it.
Applied to a legislature, that is a rather pointed piece of instruction, and one suspects the men present in 1793 knew it.
The practice continued west with the country. The Grand Lodge of Colorado has laid cornerstones for public buildings across the state since 1861, and the cornerstones of Pueblo's own Masonic buildings were set the same way. The great double-headed eagle and cornerstone from the Scottish Rite Temple at 15th and Elizabeth now stand at Graham Masonic Park, where Silver State's brethren gather each June for the St. Johns Day picnic — the same ceremony, the same tools, a century and a half and eighteen hundred miles from Jenkins Hill.
The Stone That Went Missing
Here is the part that delights everyone who hears it.
Nobody knows where the cornerstone is.
The Capitol of 1793 was a fraction of the building that stands today. It was burned by British troops in 1814, rebuilt, then extended enormously in the 1850s with the new House and Senate wings, and altered many times since. Somewhere under all of that is Washington's stone, and the record of exactly which corner it occupied was not kept with the care hindsight would have wanted.
Serious searches were mounted for the centennial in 1893, again in 1958, and again for the bicentennial in 1991–93, using probes and the best survey work available. In 1993 the Architect of the Capitol reported locating a large buried stone beneath one section of the foundation that was plainly ceremonial in character — but the identification has never been made conclusive. The silver plate was most likely dislodged and destroyed during the 1850 construction of the Senate chamber.
So the Capitol rests on a stone that was laid with full ceremony, in front of a crowd, by the first President of the United States, and which the United States promptly lost track of.
There is a lesson in it that is entirely Masonic. The cornerstone's work does not depend on anyone being able to point at it. It was laid square and true, and everything raised since has stood on it, whether or not the builders above could see it. A Mason is asked to be that kind of stone — and told plainly that he should not expect a plaque.