To George Washington from Gustavus Scott, 14 October 1796
From Gustavus Scott
[Washington] City: 14th Octr 1796
sir.
Mr Blagden waits on you for the purpose of examining your Stone Quarry. He is generaly h[e]re consider’d as the best Judge of free Stone in the City and all the Contractors for the public Works have submitted to his Opinions on the quality of the Stone deliverd. He is himself now a Contractor & has lately past Sentence against his own Stone.1
I am confident any Opinion he gives, you may safely rely on & that his Judgmt on the subject is equal to any Mans in the U.S. Mr Blagden has no Idea of any pecuniary Reward, and possibly wou’d rather be hurt by an Offer of that sort: if necessary he may be spared a few days without Inconvenience. Mr Morris is laboring hard to rid us of a part of our Bank debt, in which my Aid has & shall be readily given. Things are at present in a good Train & We have Reason to expect success; but what may be the event when 12 directors & a president are to determine I dar not say.2 I am with sentiments of perfect Respect & Esteem sir Yr mo. obt servt
Gusts Scott
ALS, DLC:GW.
1. In late October, GW directed his farm manager, William Pearce, to facilitate stonemason George Blagden’s examination of GW’s stone quarry (see GW to Pearce, 26 Oct.). For the freestone quarry at Mount Vernon, located along the Potomac River, see GW to Daniel Carroll, 16 Dec. 1793; see also GW to Pearce, 8 June 1794; and Lund Washington to GW, 14 Nov. 1775, in , 2:373–77. Blagden’s wish to examine GW’s quarry was likely prompted by the exhausted state of the quarries along Aquia Creek in Stafford County, Va., which were regularly utilized for construction purposes in the Federal City. The inferior quality and rising prices of stone transported from Aquia to Washington, D.C., probably also provoked the investigation of GW’s quarry. For instance, in 1795, Blagden had inspected about thirty tons of Aquia stone, which he determined to be of poor quality. By the spring of 1796, he located higher-quality stone, but it proved difficult to extract because it was covered with “earth” (, 311, 375; see also Commissioners for the District of Columbia to GW, 23 Dec. 1793, and n.10).
Originally from Attercliffe, Yorkshire County, England, George Blagden (Blagdin; d. 1826) arrived in the United States around 1794. Blagden served as superintendent of stonework and quarries at the U.S. Capitol until his death. He was also an alderman in Washington, D.C., a vestryman for Washington Parish, and a director of the Bank of Washington. In the late 1790s GW contracted with Blagden to construct his two connected houses in the Federal City (see GW to the District of Columbia Commissioners, 28 Sept. 1798, in 3:52–55). Blagden died in June 1826 when he was “crushed by the sudden falling in” of “a bank of earth where the workmen were digging out the foundation for the new building to be added to the Capitol” (Daily National Journal [Washington, D.C.], 5 June 1826).
2. After receiving authorization from Congress to secure loans, and in an effort to commence building operations in the Federal City, the D.C. commissioners had requested a loan from the Bank of Columbia earlier in the year. The bank agreed to lend the board a total of $40,000 at 6 percent interest, to be disbursed in four installments of $10,000 per month, beginning in August 1796 (see Commissioners for the District of Columbia to GW, 22 June 1796, and n.3; see also Commissioners for the District of Columbia to GW, 12 July 1796). For Federal City investors Robert Morris and John Nicholson’s scheme to assume the commissioners’ bank debt, see Commissioners for the District of Columbia to GW, 31 Oct., and n.3; see also Alexander White to GW, 25 May 1796.