Home HistoryDC History The troubled, trying history of the Library of Congress

The troubled, trying history of the Library of Congress

by Chris Butsch

In 1800, when President Adams moved the national capital from Philadelphia to DC, he also approved a $5,000 budget for books. The intention was rather pragmatic: give Congress a quiet place to research.

Unfortunately, British soldiers torched the young library during the War of 1812. To replace it, Congress purchased Thomas Jefferson’s personal library of 6,487 books for $23,950. In 1850, however, an accidental fire destroyed two-thirds of the growing collection.

Thankfully, Librarian of Congress Ainsworth Rand Spofford grew a steady collection from 1864-1897, and the Library of Congress now holds over 167 million items.

Chris Butsch

You may also like

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Accept Read More

The Washington DC 100
https://thewashingtondc100.com/history/2019/07/15/the-troubled-trying-history-of-the-library-of-congress/13639
thewashingtondc100.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-21
177526
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:QHIOUXIBVJW6BUANZKKDBLEMAQVC657G
<urn:uuid:a27b6be8-98ed-43ec-9afe-ab9356fe9720>
2021-05-08T22:27:10Z
104.21.30.164
text/html
sha1:HZ7BANBYS2MYWVTTXALXJR4232UAZHXJ
<urn:uuid:82b5baa2-52c5-42d6-94f7-d7b994930c59>
https://thewashingtondc100.com/history/2019/07/15/the-troubled-trying-history-of-the-library-of-congress/13639
response
<urn:uuid:4ce0c2d3-1fe2-49b2-9c67-83255f43e238>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-21
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for May 2021
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-234.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/