Ancient Web: A Cement Society Mapped Washington’s Forgotten Building Material

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Washington, D.C., has no shortage of monumental buildings. A smaller old website asks an unexpectedly specific question about them: what kind of cement holds the historic structures together?

Visit the historic natural cement guide to Washington.

The page belongs to the Society for the Preservation of Historic Cements and was prepared around the second American Natural Cement Conference, which planned to visit Washington sites on March 30, 2006. Rather than a general architecture guide, it offers a checklist of places associated with natural cement, a hydraulic binding material important before modern Portland cement became dominant.

A walking list made of building history

The entries include the old Patent Office, the Pension Bureau, the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building, the Capitol, and nineteenth-century additions to the White House. Some items have photographs and links to further references; others, like the Boundary Sewer, are listed with little or no explanation.

The Cabin John Bridge receives a particularly useful note. The guide identifies it as an 1857 bridge that was still carrying both traffic and the Washington water supply when the page was written. Other structures, such as the old Long Bridge over the Potomac, had already been replaced.

The companion Joseph Totten page provides the historical foundation. It describes Totten's research on lime, mortar, and natural cement while supervising Fort Adams in Rhode Island, and links a reproduction of his 1838 publication Brief Observations on Common Mortars, Hydraulic Mortars and Concretes.

Totten later influenced the Washington aqueduct, while engineer Montgomery Meigs worked on major cement structures in the capital. Together, the pages show how a building material connects fortification experiments, infrastructure, and public architecture.

A conference handout that became an archive

This is not a polished museum exhibition. It contains uneven spacing, old links, and some unfinished entries. Its specificity is the attraction: an enthusiast or building conservator can approach an imposing monument as a physical problem of materials, workmanship, and repair.

The old conference date is also important. The page is preserved evidence of what the society was documenting in 2006, not a current walking-tour itinerary or a guarantee that each external link still works.

Explore the Washington natural cement list and the Totten reference material.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.