BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Smithsonian Institution Building (The Castle)

DC -- Smithsonian Institution Building (The Castle):

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. SICAS_970708_01.JPG: Smithsonian Castle; Joseph Henry statue For years, I thought the statue in front of the Smithsonian Castle was actually James Smithson. Nope! Turns out to be the first US head of the Smithsonian--Joseph Henry. Smithson's crypt is off the entrance behind the statue but not his statue. Sigh. James Smithson, who had never visited the United States, died in England in 1826. His will specified that his estate was to go to the offspring of his nephew (his only kin). If there were no offspring, then the money went to the United States "...to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men." The nephew died in 1835 without heirs so the US got the money. The US Congress wasn't real thrilled with this initially and debated how to implement the will. Joseph Henry was appointed by Congress to be the first Secretary of the Smithsonian and he got to finalize how the money would be used. James Renwick designed the Smithsonian Castle and it was completed in 1855, the first of the Smithsonian buildings. Henry moved into the Smithsonian Castle before it was even finished (he moved in in 1847) and lived there until his death in 1878. The US sent for Smithson's body, finding it in Scotland and bringing it back to be placed in the crypt in this Castle. Over the years, the Castle acquired a variety of goods to make it "America's Attic". Unfortunately, a fire in 1865 swept the building and wiped out most of the collection. The building was renovated and then opened to the public. Originally, the Henry statue faced the Castle itself. It wasn't until the 1960's that it was turned to face the Mall, in a realignment to make the Smithsonian more a part of the people.
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AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.) I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
Directly Related Pages: Other pages with content (DC -- Smithsonian Institution Building (The Castle)) directly related to this one: [Display ALL photos on one page]:
- 2023_04_27C1_SI_Castle: DC -- Smithsonian Institution Building (The Castle) (4 photos from 04/27/2023)
- 2022_DC_SI_Castle: DC -- Smithsonian Institution Building (The Castle) (27 photos from 2022)
- 2021_DC_SI_Castle: DC -- Smithsonian Institution Building (The Castle) (6 photos from 2021)
- 2020_DC_SI_Castle_4Ward: DC -- Smithsonian Institution Building (The Castle) -- Forward Into Light (10 photos from 2020)
- 2020_DC_SI_Castle: DC -- Smithsonian Institution Building (The Castle) (6 photos from 2020)
- 2019_DC_SI_Castle: DC -- Smithsonian Institution Building (The Castle) (17 photos from 2019)
- 2017_DC_SI_Castle: DC -- Smithsonian Institution Building (The Castle) (16 photos from 2017)
- 2016_DC_SI_Castle: DC -- Smithsonian Institution Building (The Castle) (24 photos from 2016)
- 2015_DC_SI_Castle: DC -- Smithsonian Institution Building (The Castle) (7 photos from 2015)
- 2014_DC_SI_Castle: DC -- Smithsonian Institution Building (The Castle) (9 photos from 2014)
- ...More (List all 24 pages)...
Sort of Related Pages: Still more pages here that have content somewhat related to this one :
- 2019_DC_SI_Castle_Commons: DC -- Smithsonian Institution Building (The Castle) -- The Commons (49 photos from 2019)
Same Subject: Click on this link to see coverage of items having the same subject: [(Smithsonian) The Castle] [Display ALL (Smithsonian) The Castle photos] [Museums (Other)]
1997 photos: Since 1984, I've lived in Silver Spring, Maryland. From 1981 to 2002, photos were taken using a Pentax ME Super camera. From 1989 to 2002, I was doing all pictures as prints (instead of slides which I had grown up on). In 1997, at the age of 40, my photo obsession began and I started taking thousands of photos per year. In September, 2002, I switched to digital cameras and the number of photos exploded. Image quality is going to be variable because these are scans of slides and/or prints. The images shown here were scanned in two phases. In the early years of the website, I rescanned a selection of pre-digital images, all at fairly low quality settings. During the COVID pandemic, I launched the Great Rescanning Effort, rescanning ALL of my pre-digital images from various media (prints, slides, negatives, etc) at higher resolution and quality settings. Mutilple versions of images -- some from the initial scannning phase, some from prints, some from slides/negatives -- were posted so there are frequently duplicate images on the same page. At some point, I hope to have time to do a final review and get rid of the duplicates but that'll have to wait until all of the pre-digital images are finally posted. Trips this year: North Carolina (Dad), Florida (Mom), using a time share in Arkansas to visit Civil War sites in Missouri, Georgia, Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee. The Civil War became my excuse to see places I'd never been to in my life and it was a great motivator for 20 years or so.
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