City of Dust and Magnificent Distances

Joseph Peabody Orme entered Georgetown College on September 3, 1855, his tuition and fees to be charged to his uncle and guardian, W. H. Ward. Like the majority of students of his day, he did not graduate, leaving the college in 1860 to take up the study of law in Illinois. Between his entrance and his departure for the west, however, he corresponded with a number of fellow students. His great-grandnephew, Joseph Orme Evans, recently donated eight letters received by his ancestor between August, 1856 and December, 1860, and they make fascinating reading.

An 1860 Philonomosian Society invitation, from the Georgetown University Archives.

Student politics--winning or losing membership in one of the prestigious student societies like the Philonomosian-figure largely, as do slighting references to the city of Washington. More than one writer quotes Dickens' dismissal of the place as a "city of magnificent distances."As the decade draws to a close, the writers turn more consistently to national politics. Most of them are nominal Democrats and supporters of Stephen A. Douglas, committed to national unity but hardly abolitionists; many are from the south. The last letter, from transplanted Washingtonian William Boyce, then in Louisiana, makes the reality of oncoming civil war only too clear:

The die is cast: and there seems to be no god-like man in the land who can stop the fearful tempest which is about to burst upon the country . . . we must meet it bravely.

Of the correspondents involved, only Orme came to grief in the war, dying from accidental friendly fire during a march through Arkansas in 1863 as a captain in the 92nd Illinois Volunteers.

Does anyone know who first called Washington the "City of Dust?" We don't.