The White House

James Hoban won the 1792 design competition — Thomas Jefferson entered anonymously and lost. Enslaved laborers quarried the Aquia Creek sandstone and did much of the construction. John and Abigail Adams moved in unfinished in 1800; she hung laundry in the East Room. British troops burned it on August 24, 1814, and Dolley Madison had Gilbert Stuart''s portrait of Washington cut from its frame and carried out. By 1948 the interior was so structurally rotten that a piano leg went through a floor, and Truman had everything but the outer walls gutted and rebuilt around a steel frame over four years.