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Mosquito Pond - Town Center Park

Mosquito larvae, or wrigglers, thrive in small pools of warm water. Bobbing above and below the murky surface, they feast on algae, bacteria, and other microorganisms. In time, they grow into the perfect agents for the distribution of disease. They are the carriers of yellow fever or yellow jack, helminthiasis, dengue fever, malaria, Rift Valley fever, Ross River fever, St. Louis and Japanese encephalitis, and West Nile Virus. And the airborne pests spring to life during our languid summers. 

While walking through the hills and dales of the Federal District, Pierre L’Enfant took note of patches of standing water. Caught in the tidal interplay of two rivers, the City had lowlands, marshes, and mudflats. Urban legends aside, there were no swamps. Still, as he presented his final plans for the grand boulevards and monuments to democracy, old Pete L’Enfant surely must have swatted away the insects in that simmering August of 1791.     

Flash forward to the summer of 1814, a particularly brutal season for the City of Washington with its waves of heat and conquering Redcoats churning up the mosquito marshes. Residents could not recall a hotter August. Disease ran rampant, and an invasion force under the command of Major General Robert Ross and Rear Admiral George Cockburn was quickly approaching. The British were stitched up for revenge after the American sacking of Toronto earlier in the War of 1812. Public buildings all over the District were consumed by British torches. The White House, minus the famous Washington portrait spirited away by a valiant Dolley Madison, was burned down to its sandstone foundation. Fleeing Americans set fire to their own Navy Yards. The 44-gun frigate USS Columbia tipped over into the Anacostia in flames. Resident Mary Hunter described the blaze as possessing “an almost meridian brightness.” 

In a fit, Cockburn even went so far as to order the dismantling of the offices of the National Intelligencer and the destruction of all its “C” type. The broadsheet guided by the poisonous pen of Joseph Gales had cut a little too close to the Admiral when it tarred him as “The Ruffian.” This act of personal revenge further burnished the grim reputation of the man who had personally escorted Napoleon to desolate exile in St. Helena.   

In Southwest, Redcoats found an empty Arsenal at Greenleaf Point (later Fort McNair). The Arsenal was the third oldest military installation in America, placed at the point where the Anacostia met the Potomac by L’Enfant for the defense of the capital. In the 1790s, it sported a one-gun battery under the watchful eye of French officer Captain Villard, a compatriot of Lafayette. The enlarged Arsenal would now prove powerless against the wrath of the British Empire.

The Americans hoped to at least keep the ammunition out of enemy hands. US Colonel Decius Wadsworth frantically searched the city for wagons to spirit away the fort’s armaments. Evacuating soldiers threw weapons onto boats and mule carts and poured into a well the gunpowder they could not carry. The British stormed the fort, wrecked anything they could find, and disabled artillery pieces by firing them at each other.

The reverie was soon interrupted by a cataclysmic blast. During the search for weapons of mass destruction, a soldier reportedly dropped a match down the well. A British doctor later wrote, “the officers and about 30 of the men were killed and the rest most shockingly mangled.” The explosion shook the city to its core and left a 40 foot wide by 20 foot deep crater.

The British storm soon passed, mainly as a result of an actual hurricane and possibly a tornado that swept Washington the next day. The fort was eventually rebuilt and expanded after the war. Part of the land was used for the first federal penitentiary. It was here in the newly named Washington Arsenal that the Lincoln assassins were imprisoned. Four were later hanged in the summer of 1865. Conspirator Mary Surratt had the ignominious distinction of being the first woman executed under federal orders. 

That year and for the next few decades, Washington DC suffered from a series of epidemics, including cholera, typhoid, scarlet fever, and the mosquito-born malaria and yellow fever. In 1878, the city and nation suffered through one of the last great epidemics of yellow fever. Events were held throughout the District for the benefit of the victims. At the Congregational Church, a full chorus, organ, orchestra, and assembled audience sang Handel’s Hallelujah. At Ford’s Opera House, solemn concertgoers paid 50 cents to support the cause and hear the forty-two voice choir of the Washington Sangerbund under the leadership of Professor Carl Richter. Despite the terrible toll of yellow fever, no one knew how the disease was actually contracted. 

In the late 1890’s, a general hospital was added to the now christened Washington Barracks at Greenleaf Point. Amongst the medical staff was Major Walter Reed, MD. Returning from hard-scrabble postings in the West, where he treated several hundred Apaches and their leader Geronimo, and Cuba, where he ministered to US soldiers sick with yellow fever (over 5,000 died from the disease compared to 968 combat deaths), Major Reed was happy to be stationed at the Barracks. The fort with its surrounding marshlands and abundant insect life was the perfect place for his research on tropical diseases. Reed traipsed through the overgrown vegetation on the newly built Hains Point and the thick, polluted backwash of the James Creek Canal.

Building on the theories of Cuban doctor Carlos Finlay, Reed’s work would eventually confirm the link between mosquitoes and yellow fever and aid the disease-ridden diggers that were struggling to complete the Panama Canal. In the summer of 1900, some of the members of Reed’s team went so far as to infect themselves with yellow fever to prove the insect pathology. Reed would die two years later after complications from an appendectomy.

Reed’s fort would continue to grow. As we approach the 195th anniversary of the burning of Washington DC, the military installation, with its National Defense University, has become a major training ground for senior officers. The fort was renamed in 1948 to pay homage to Lt. General Lesley J. McNair, Commanding General of Army Ground Forces in World War II. During a post-D-Day offensive dubbed Operation Cobra, General McNair was killed in his foxhole by an errant bomb from the Eighth Air Force. Sadly, his son Colonel Douglas McNair was killed in Guam two weeks later by a sniper.