History
The concept of the Tidal Basin originated in the 1880s to serve both as a visual centerpiece and as a means for flushing the Washington Channel, a harbor separated from the Potomac River by fill lands where East Potomac Park is situated. Peter Conover Hains, an engineering officer in the U.S. Army, oversaw the design and construction. The basin was initially named Twining Lake, in honor of Major William Johnson Twining (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers), Washington DC's first Engineer Commissioner. According to testimony given to a Congressional subcommittee in 1917, it was Major Twining's idea to create a tidal reservoir and use that water to help "flush" the Washington Channel, and the design was carried out by Colonel Hains. A 1917 Army Corps of Engineers map of Washington already shows the basin with the name "Twining Lake". The Tidal Basin which exists today was not laid out until after World War II. It was built by the construction firm of Alexander and Repass in 1949 and unusual at that time because Alexander was of African descent and Repass was of European descent.
Read more about this topic: Tidal Basin
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of a soldier’s wound beguiles the pain of it.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)
“If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)