Page:Historic towns of the southern states (1900).djvu/166

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being that if his design were published speculators would seize upon the "vistas and architectural squares and raise huddles of shanties which would permanently disfigure the city."

When Madison became President, he sought to honor L'Enfant by offering him the professorship of engineering at West Point, but again the artistic foreigner declined to accept anything at the hands of the people who, he felt, had failed to appreciate the supreme effort of his genius. His final years he spent as a pensioner at the manor houses of the Digges family in Maryland. He died in the home of Dudley Digges in 1824, and was buried in the garden of the Chellum Castle Manor near Bladensburg, where to-day his grave is marked only by a cedar tree. Inasmuch as the great projects of L'Enfant are receiving to this day the attention of the Government, it would not be inappropriate, in the centennial year of Washington's existence, to give his remains fitting and affectionate sepulture in the city he designed.

The Commissioners, at a meeting held in Georgetown, September 8, 1791, decided to call the Federal district, "Territory of Columbia," and the Federal city, the "City of Washington." At this same meeting the method of