Navy Yard

This guide to the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C. follows Thomas Tingey, who spent fifteen years building the nation's first naval shipyard out of a marsh, and the night in August 1814 when British troops closed on the capital and he was ordered to burn what he had built rather than let it fall. You'll hear how he laid the powder trains himself and which one building he chose to spare. It ends with what his own neighbors did to that house before he could get back inside it, and the fifteen more years he spent running the yard afterward.