Oh! say can you see Francis Scott Key’s house? No you can’t. It seems the home of this brave man is dispersed o’er the land of the free.
The author of the Star Spangled Banner owned a house which stood on M Street NW in Washington D.C. In 1948, in order to make way for an on-ramp to the Key Bridge (how ironic), the National Park Service painstakingly took the house apart brick by brick, numbered the parts, and crated them for reassembly later. The house crates were stored under the bridge and then forgotten. Over time, the crates were misplaced, lost or stolen. No pieces of this landmark building remain.
Source: Flashbacks by Patrick M. Reynolds citing Washington in Focus by Philip Bigler and Capitol Losses by James M. Goode
