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
Minnesota’s Twin Cities has a similar story about one of their first historic cabins. I wish I had written down the name of the book and/or cabin that I read about. The historical society very carefully dismantled the building and numbered each log for reassembly at its new location. The logs were transported with no instructions to the workers at the destination. It was a cold winter and the workers saw wood for a warm fire. You guessed it. The supervisor arrived to find the building had warmed the workers!
bonnie - that’s a sad story. i wonder if anybody lost their job because of that error.
hopefully some part of the NJ Bell Lab facility will be saved and remebered for all future generations to enjoy. i recently visited the NY Museum of Natural History for the first time since i was a child. my wife and i spent the entire day there and still did not have the opportunity to see everything they had to offer. it was just great. i remember seeing all the kids there on their school trip. even if one of those kids becomes interested in history, science or technology, i’d say the museum was successful. let’s hope something positive happens with the bell labs site….
-rdb°