Qualla: The White House

The White House: Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Happyme22, CC BY-SA 3.0. James Hoban, an Irish architect trained at the Dublin Society of Arts, won a design competition in July 1792 with sketches loosely modeled on Leinster House in Dublin - now the seat of the Irish parliament. Construction began in October that year and dragged on for eight years. The walls were Aquia Creek sandstone from a quarry in Virginia, painted white to seal the porous stone. Enslaved African Americans quarried the sandstone and helped build the structure. Scottish stonemasons cut the high-relief roses and garlands above the north entrance. On November 1, 1800, John Adams became the first president to move in, even though the house was unfinished. He wrote his wife Abigail the next day, asking heaven to bestow blessings on the house and the wise men who would rule under its roof. Franklin Roosevelt later had that sentence carved into the State Dining Room mantel.

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Image: Happyme22 | CC BY-SA 3.0

The White House: Burned and Rebuilt

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ingfbruno, CC BY-SA 3.0. On August 24, 1814, during the War of 1812, British troops set the White House on fire in retaliation for American actions in Canada. Only the exterior walls survived, and most of those had to be torn down because the fire and weather had weakened them. Of the objects looted that...

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Image: Ingfbruno | CC BY-SA 3.0

The White House: Truman's Hollow House

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dan McCue, CC BY 4.0. By 1948, after the fourth-floor attic of the Coolidge years and the Truman Balcony of 1948 had piled extra weight onto a building still held up by 150-year-old timber beams, the White House was declared in imminent danger of collapse. President Harry Truman moved across the stree...

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Image: Dan McCue | CC BY 4.0

The White House: Jackie's Restoration

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Zach Rudisin, CC BY-SA 3.0. Jacqueline Kennedy thought the Truman-era interiors were beneath the building's history. In 1961 she enlisted Henry Francis du Pont of Winterthur and the Parisian decorator Stephane Boudin to redo the State Rooms with a coherent historical sensibility - Federal style for the Gree...

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Image: Zach Rudisin | CC BY-SA 3.0

The White House: The West Wing

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Donovan Lambert, CC BY-SA 3.0. Theodore Roosevelt moved all the executive offices out of the residence in 1902, building a temporary West Wing to give his large family room to breathe. William Howard Taft enlarged it seven years later and added the first Oval Office, which his architect Nathan C. Wyeth designe...

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Image: John Donovan Lambert | CC BY-SA 3.0

The White House: Always Under Construction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit George Hayward, Public domain. The White House has been under near-constant renovation since the first cornerstone was laid. Andrew Jackson's 1829 inauguration drew about 20,000 people inside; aides had to lure the crowd back outside with washtubs of orange juice and whiskey. Public open houses continued in so...

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Image: George Hayward | Public domain