Smithsonian Castle

This guide to the Smithsonian Castle begins twenty-three miles up the Potomac at a quarry called Seneca, where enslaved men cut the red sandstone blocks that became these walls in 1848. It follows how a historian pieced their identities back together from a probate inventory, census records, and old runaway notices, after their names went unspoken for generations. The stone travelled by barge down the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal to a Scottish contractor who spent seven years raising the building around you.