How the Lincoln Memorial was built: the swamp, the fight over the site, Bacon's temple, French's statue in 28 blocks, and the 1922 dedication

Architecture · 4 September 2026

The Lincoln Memorial was built between February 1914 and May 1922 at the west end of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on land that had been the Potomac's mudflats until the Army Corps of Engineers filled them in the 1880s and 90s, which is why it stands on 122 concrete piers driven 65 feet through the fill to bedrock; it is a Greek Doric temple of white Colorado marble by the architect Henry Bacon, 190 feet long with 36 columns for the states of the Union at Lincoln's death, holding a seated statue of Lincoln 19 feet high by Daniel Chester French, carved by the Piccirilli brothers of the Bronx from 28 blocks of Georgia marble, with the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural on the walls. It cost 3 million dollars and was dedicated on 30 May 1922 before 50,000 people, with the Black guests seated in a roped-off section, in a city where Marian Anderson would sing on its steps in 1939 because a hall was closed to her and where Martin Luther King would speak in 1963. Below: the fifty years of plans, the site, the foundations, the temple, the statue, the words and the murals, the dedication and what came after, the numbers and the myths, with the obelisk at the other end of the reflecting pool in Washington Monument facts.

Fifty years of plans

Congress formed a Lincoln Monument Association two years after the assassination, in 1867, and the sculptor Clark Mills designed a 70-foot monument with 36 figures that was never funded; through the 1870s and 80s bills for a memorial failed, and the only memorial in the capital was the Freedmen's statue of 1876, paid for by freed slaves, of Lincoln standing over a kneeling Black man, which Frederick Douglass criticised at its dedication. In 1901 the Senate Park Commission's McMillan Plan, by Daniel Burnham, Charles McKim, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, redrew the Mall on L'Enfant's lines and extended it west over the new fill to the river, ending with a memorial to Lincoln facing the Washington Monument and the Capitol, "a great portico" reflected in a long pool; it took a decade of argument, and in 1911, with President Taft's support, Congress created the Lincoln Memorial Commission and voted 2 million dollars, the first federal money for a memorial to a president since Washington's. Lincoln Memorial.

The swamp and the fight over the site

The Speaker of the House, Joseph Cannon, said that he would never let a memorial to Lincoln be built "in that God-damned swamp", and proposed the site in front of Union Station; others proposed Arlington, the Soldiers' Home, and a memorial highway to Gettysburg; the commission, with Burnham and McKim's plan in hand and the landscape architect Olmsted arguing that the river site's isolation was its dignity, chose the Potomac Park site in 1912, "a place set apart", at the end of a two-mile axis from the Capitol. The land was Potomac Flats, a marsh and tidal mudflat below the Washington Monument that the Corps of Engineers had dredged from the river channel and dumped between 1882 and 1911 to make 700 acres of park, and the ground was soft to a great depth; when digging began in 1914 the engineers found the fill, then river mud, then gravel, and drove the foundations to bedrock at 65 feet with concrete piers, 122 of them, each 4 feet across in steel cylinders, topped by a concrete platform 257 feet square, all of which is under the terrace and invisible. Cannon's swamp holds the memorial up; there has been no settlement.

Bacon's temple

Henry Bacon, a New York architect trained in McKim's office and in Greece, was chosen by the commission in 1912 over John Russell Pope, who had proposed a pyramid, a ziggurat and a temple on a hill; Bacon's design was a Greek Doric temple, on the Parthenon's model, but with the entrance on the long side, facing the Mall and the Monument, and without a pediment, the roof being an attic storey instead, so that the building reads as a box of columns; it is 190 feet long, 119 wide and 99 high, on a stepped base with a terrace, of Colorado Yule marble from a quarry 10,000 feet up in the Rockies, whose 1,600-pound blocks came down by tram and rail, the largest single stone, the entablature's, weighing 18 tons. Around the outside are 36 columns, 44 feet high and 7.5 feet thick, tilted slightly inward as at the Parthenon so they look straight, one for each state at Lincoln's death in 1865, with the states' names in the frieze above; the 48 states of 1922 are on the attic wall above, with festoons, and Alaska and Hawaii on a plaque on the terrace. Inside, the hall is divided by two rows of Ionic columns 50 feet high into a central chamber with the statue and two side chambers with the speeches, under a ceiling of bronze girders and panels of Alabama marble soaked in paraffin so that light comes through them. The building was finished in 1917 and waited for the statue and the war's end.

French's statue

• The sculptor. Daniel Chester French, of the Minute Man at Concord and the standing Lincoln at Lincoln, Nebraska, chosen by Bacon, his friend and collaborator on a dozen monuments, in 1914; he studied the life mask and hand casts of Lincoln made by Leonard Volk in 1860 and the photographs, and the hands of the statue are Volk's casts.
• The design. Lincoln seated in a chair with fasces on its front, one hand clenched and one open, in the attitude French called "gentleness and strength"; a plaster model 3 feet high was made in 1915, then 7 feet.
• The size. The statue was planned at 10 feet; when French and Bacon set up a photograph of the model at that size in the finished hall in 1917 it looked lost, and they doubled it to 19 feet seated, 28 feet if standing, which meant the statue could no longer be one block.
• The carving. The Piccirilli brothers, six sons of a Tuscan carver working in the Bronx who carved most of the marble sculpture of American Beaux-Arts, cut it from 28 blocks of Georgia white marble from Tate, over four years, from French's full-size plaster, with pointing machines, and assembled it in the memorial in 1920 so that the joints do not show; it weighs 175 tons on a pedestal 10 feet high.
• The light. When it was installed the statue was lit by the sun through the open front, which lit Lincoln's knees and left his face in shadow and gave it, French said, "a startled look"; he fought for six years for electric floodlights in the ceiling, which were installed in 1926 and give the face its calm.

The words and the murals

On the south wall is the Gettysburg Address of 1863, on the north the Second Inaugural of 1865, "with malice toward none", carved by Ernest Bairstow in letters that the designer Evelyn Beatrice Longman laid out; the carver of the Second Inaugural cut an E for an F in "future", and the error was filled and shows as a shadow. Over the statue the inscription by Royal Cortissoz, the art critic: "In this temple, as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the Union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever." Above the speeches are two murals by Jules Guerin, 60 feet long, of Emancipation and Unity, allegories of angels and figures in oil on canvas with a wax and kerosene coating that has needed cleaning ever since. The word "slavery" does not appear in the memorial; the Gettysburg Address does not contain it, the Second Inaugural does, and the emphasis of the commission, in 1922, was on the Union.

The dedication and after

• 30 May 1922. Memorial Day; President Harding, Chief Justice Taft as chairman of the commission, and Robert Todd Lincoln, 78, the President's only surviving son, before 50,000 people; the Black guests, including the speaker Robert Moton of the Tuskegee Institute, were seated in a segregated section across a road, and the Black press walked out; Moton's speech was censored by the commission.
• 1923. The Reflecting Pool, 2,029 feet long, dug between the memorial and the Monument, in Bacon's and Olmsted's plan, holding the two in one view; rebuilt in 2012.
• 9 April 1939. Marian Anderson, refused Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution because she was Black, sang on the steps at the invitation of Eleanor Roosevelt and Harold Ickes to 75,000 people, beginning "My country, 'tis of thee".
• 28 August 1963. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" from the top step, to 250,000 at the March on Washington; the spot is marked in the step since 2003.
• 1959 and 2009. The memorial on the back of the penny from 1959 to 2008 and the five-dollar bill since 1929; Obama's inaugural concert on the steps in 2009.
• Visitors. About 8 million a year, open 24 hours, free, with the Park Service's rangers; the best light is at dawn from the east and at night.

The numbers

• Building. 190 by 119 feet, 99 feet high; 36 Doric columns, 44 feet high; the terrace 257 feet square; foundations of 122 piers to 65 feet.
• Materials. Colorado Yule marble outside, Indiana limestone inside, Tennessee pink marble floor, Alabama marble ceiling, Georgia marble statue; 38,000 tons in all.
• Statue. 19 feet high seated on a 10-foot pedestal, 28 blocks, 175 tons; four years to carve.
• Time. Cornerstone 12 February 1915 (Lincoln's birthday), building 1914–17, statue 1920, dedication 1922; 8 years, and 57 since the death.
• Cost. 2,957,000 dollars, about 50 million today; the statue 88,400.
• Words. The Gettysburg Address, 272 words; the Second Inaugural, 703.

Versions and theories

• It was built on a swamp. On dredged river fill over a former marsh, which is why it stands on piers to bedrock; Speaker Cannon's "swamp" was a real objection and the engineers answered it.
• Lincoln's hands spell "A" and "L" in sign language. A story since the 1970s, tied to French's statue of Thomas Gallaudet with a deaf girl signing "A"; French never said so, the Park Service says no, and the hands are Volk's casts, one clenched and one relaxed.
• Robert E. Lee's face is carved in the back of Lincoln's head. The hair on the back of the head is hair; the "face" is pareidolia, and the story that French put Lee looking toward Arlington across the river is a guide's invention.
• There is a room under the memorial. There is: the undercroft, a cavern of concrete piers and stalactites of lime that the Park Service opened for tours in the 1970s and closed for safety; it is being made a visitor space in the 2020s.
• The E carved as an F was a joke. A carver's slip, in "future" in the Second Inaugural, filled with cement.
• The 36 columns are for the 36 states of 1922. For the 36 states of 1865; the 48 of 1922 are named above; Alaska and Hawaii on the plaque.

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