Washington and Nellie Custis at Mount Vernon S America gift idea 1839 — a Senate-era portrait

1839 — a Senate-era portrait of the Virginian Whig who broke with Van Buren over the Independent Treasury

The Statue of Liberty 1878 — a documentary engraving from the years when Bartholdi's colossus existed only in fragments

where merchants and carriages choked the avenue and Maiden Lane's jewelers and dry-goods men staked their claim to a city already convinced of its own ascendance

The Tailors Instrument Melander Shears Patent is a small monument to the morning ritual — the kind of drawing that hung in apprentice manuals when barbering was a guild and a calling

photographed in the careful civic hush of a city learning how to mourn its dead in stone

Washington and Nellie Custis at Mount Vernon S America gift idea 1839 — a Senate-era portraitWashington and Nellie Custis at Mount Vernon a domestic engraving of the General in retirement, his step granddaughter at his side, the great house of the Potomac standing in for the quieter chapter of a man whose name had already calcified into legend. About the Source Bella Frye sources artifacts from the great American historical archive the Library of Congress, the National Archives, regional historical societies, and the lithographic publishers