Witness to History: The Old Patent Office Building

The original 1791 plan for Washington called for a national church where a grateful nation could honor its heroes. Instead, a “Temple of Invention” arose in its place. Designed to house the U.S. Patent Office, this masterpiece of Greek Revival architecture became a showcase for national ingenuity and achievement.

Begun in 1836, the Patent Office Building is the third oldest federal building in Washington, D.C. During two centuries of momentous change, it has evolved in form and function to keep pace with the times. 

While serving the needs of the U.S. Patent Office from 1841 to 1932, the building also functioned as the first federally supported museum, as well as headquarters of the Department of the Interior, incorporating the Bureau of Indian Affairs and other agencies. From 1932 to 1953, it housed the Civil Service Commission.

Saved from demolition in the mid-twentieth century, the Patent Office Building is now home to the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Construction of the building began under the supervision of the architect Robert Mills (shown here with his wife, Eliza). Around the same time, Mills designed the Department of the Treasury, the General Post Office, and the Washington Monument. These magnificent Neoclassical structures helped transform rustic Washington, D.C., into an impressive capital city inspired by the venerable examples of ancient Greece and Rome.

The Patent Office Building promised an ideal combination of past and present, modeled on the classical Greek proportions of the Parthenon in Athens but updated with cutting-edge fireproof technology. 

The addition of three wings to Mills’s original building created a box-like frame around an open-air courtyard.  Thomas Ustick Walter, who replaced Mills from 1851 to 1865, oversaw construction of the north and west wings. He, too, claimed his system was fireproof. Events later in the century proved him to be tragically mistaken.

As the Patent Office Building expanded, so did the number of patent applications—from under 6,000 received in the 1840s, to nearly 80,000 in the 1870s, to over 200,000 in the 1880s. The number of staff members also increased, with additional clerks hired to manage the avalanche of paperwork. A new position—patent examiner—was created to research inventions and determine which were sufficiently useful and original to qualify for patents.

Controversy erupted at the Patent Office in 1853, when Commissioner Charles Mason hired women to work alongside men and to receive equal pay for equal work. This unprecedented arrangement scandalized Mason’s colleagues. His supervisor complained of the “obvious impropriety in the mixing of the sexes within the walls of a public office.” No objections were raised decades later when female clerks were hired in great number—but paid half as much as their male counterparts.

In 1854, Clara Barton, a former schoolteacher from New Jersey, became one of the first women employed at the Patent Office. Within a year, she was the only one still on the job. As the sole woman in an office of men, Barton endured harassment by some of her male coworkers, who blew smoke in her face and spit tobacco juice at her feet. “It wasn’t a pleasant experience,” she later wrote, “but I thought perhaps there was some question of principle involved and I lived it through.”

In 1887, the journalist Ida Tarbell carried out research at the Patent Office Building to disprove the idea that women lacked the capacity to be inventors. Her article was among the initiatives that prompted the Patent Office to publish a chronological list of 2,297 "Women Inventors to Whom Patents Have Been Granted."

Antebellum law made it illegal to patent the inventions of enslaved individuals. Free African Americans did occasionally patent inventions, sometimes under the name of a white person to evade racial discrimination. After the Civil War, the number of patent applications filed by Black inventors increased dramatically. Granville T. Woods—the so-called “Black Edison”— held over sixty patents for a wide range of inventions.

U.S. law required scale models of new inventions to be submitted with patent applications and made available for public inspection. The models were displayed in glass cases lining the building’s galleries, with staff members posted nearby to open them upon request. Following a visit in 1842, Charles Dickens praised the model display as a testament to “American enterprise and ingenuity.”

By the 1850s, the Patent Office Building had become Washington’s leading attraction. Tens of thousands of visitors explored the galleries each year, gradually making their way to the 266-foot-long “Model Hall” on the top floor. Said to be the largest room in the United States, it was known as the National Museum and featured a diverse collection of objects that went far beyond patent models. The New York Tribune described it in 1867 as “by far the first of its kind in the world, and of all museums it certainly is the most interesting and of the greatest benefit to the human race.”

Approximately two-thirds of the glass cases were filled with findings from an extraordinary round-the-world expedition led by Admiral Charles Wilkes in 1838­–42. The expedition yielded a trove of cultural artifacts as well as thousands of plants, rocks,  fossils, insects, fish, birds, and other specimens.

Many other collections soon found their way to the Model Hall. The somewhat random assortment of objects included “Historical Relics,” such as the original Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin’s printing press, and George Washington’s uniform. The display was simultaneously insular and expansionist, dedicated to national history while expressing global aspirations.

Above all, the Patent Office Building and its contents were a source of national pride. Foreign dignitaries were invariably escorted to the building and given tours. In May 1860, members of the first diplomatic delegation from Japan politely examined the stuffed birds and relics of the Revolutionary War but took greater interest in recent technological innovations on display.

The mood had been very different sixteen years earlier when pro-slavery mobs met at the Patent Office Building to launch an attack on the headquarters of Gamaliel Bailey’s abolitionist newspaper, the National Era, located just across the street.

Bailey would later help turn the tide of public opinion against slavery by introducing the world to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published for this first time in his newspaper from June 1851 to April 1852.

When the Civil War broke out in April 1861, the Patent Office Building transformed into a crucial center of Union Army operations. Teams of horse-drawn wagons gathered at the foot of the steps each day, ready to convey military supplies to  and from the building. 

The Patent Office Building also served as a Union military hospital and morgue from 1861 until 1863. Clara Barton and the poet Walt Whitman were among the volunteers who nursed wounded and dying soldiers. Whitman wrote of the tragic irony of seeing the shattered bodies of America’s youth in “that noblest of all Washington buildings,” the architectural embodiment of the nation’s optimism and ingenuity.

Witnessing young soldiers facing death with courage and equanimity would later inspire some of Whitman’s poetry.

In March 1865, Whitman was struck by another paradoxical reversal at the Patent Office Building, when the Model Hall, so recently the site of suffering and death, was transformed into the festive venue for Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural ball. 

After the Civil War, Whitman worked at the Patent Office Building as a clerk for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Native American delegates who came to negotiate treaties on behalf of the Cheyenne, Winnebago, Apache, and other Indigenous nations fascinated Whitman, and he took great interest in their distinctive dress and customs. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Indian Affairs was pursuing an aggressive assimilation campaign intended to stamp out those distinctions.

Another employee of the Bureau of Indian Affairs was Zitkála-Šá, also known as Gertrude Bonnin, a writer, musician, and educator. In 1916, Zitkála-Šá moved to Washington, D.C., to fulfil her role as the newly elected secretary of the Society of American Indians.

As a political activist, she protested the discriminatory agenda of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and promoted Native American political interests—most significantly, the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.

In 1932, the Patent Office vacated the building it had occupied for close to a century and the Civil Service Commission moved in. Wear and tear had taken their toll by the 1950s and the building was threatened with demolition to make way for a parking garage. Swayed by the nascent historic preservation movement, President Dwight D. Eisenhower intervened, and in 1958 the building was transferred to the Smithsonian Institution to be renovated for museum use. It reopened to the public in 1968 as the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. 

A massive renovation in 2000­–2006 restored many of the building’s historic architectural features while adding some modern improvements. One of the most important and controversial changes was a glass roof that transformed the open-air garden in the middle of the building to an inviting gathering spot that is accessible year-round, in all weather. The Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard is now a favorite venue for music and dance performances, festive celebrations, and impromptu workday lunches.

The former Model Hall on the third floor is still used as an exhibition space, with its side galleries devoted to the display of the National Portrait Gallery’s collection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century portraiture. 

The story of the Patent Office Building reflects the complexity and contradictions of the United States itself. By showcasing scientific exploration, technical innovation, and artistic creation, it has swelled national pride. But it has also been a site of class, gender, and racial conflict; of wartime suffering and death; and of governmental exploitation of peoples, lands, and resources. The rich and often paradoxical history of this ever-evolving building teaches us that our national past consists of error as well as achievement, and that future progress requires that we learn from both.