The millions of visitors who pass through the doors of the National Air and Space Museum each year come to see the real thing, the actual air and space craft that shaped history – from the world’s first airplane to the back-up hardware for the latest robot spacecraft on its way to explore another world. Few if any of our visitors, however, realize that aerospace history was made on the site of the National Air and Space Museum one hundred and forty eight years ago.
On June 16, 1861, the Civil War had been underway for just two months. The first major battle of the war, which would take place near a quiet stream called Bull Run, 30 miles southwest of Washington, was still a little over a month away. At the time, the Columbia Armory stood where the National Air and Space Museum is now located, east of 7th street, at the extreme southeastern tip of the 52 acre plot then known as the Smithsonian Grounds.
The neighborhood was far from being the tourist friendly area of today. The odiferous City Canal carried Washington’s sewage and waste water along the northern edge of the Mall and into the Potomac. Visitors were warned to beware of thieves while out for an evening stroll along the trails that wound through the trees and shrubs covering the marshy Smithsonian Grounds. For over two decades Mary Ann Hall had operated one of Washington’s best known houses of prostitution just one block to the east. Until the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia in 1850, Robey’s notorious slave pen stood one block west of the Armory site, at the corner of 8th and B Street (now Independence Avenue).
Built in 1856, the Columbia Armory housed the District of Columbia’s store of small arms and other military equipment. The Washington Gas Light Company generating plant was immediately east of the Armory, along with a large domed gasometer, or storage tank for the coal gas produced by the plant. It was the combination of the available work space at the Armory and city gas next door that led Smithsonian Secretary Joseph Henry to instruct Thaddeus Sobieski Constantine Lowe to inflate his balloon on this site.
A New Hampshire man, Lowe (1832-1913), had emerged as one of the nation’s best-known aerial showmen since his first flight in 1857. He made headlines with a giant balloon exhibited in both New York and Philadelphia, with which he hoped to fly the Atlantic. When that plan fell through, and on the advice of Joseph Henry, his scientific advisor, Lowe made a long flight from Cincinnati to Unionville, SC aboard the balloon Enterprise, on April 19, 1861. Landing only a week after the firing on Fort Sumter, the aeronaut was taken into custody by newly minted Confederates, and was released only after locals recognized his face from accounts of his transatlantic plans published in the illustrated national newspapers of the day.