Adams Moves into White House: The Presidency Finds a Home

President John Adams moved into the unfinished Executive Mansion on November 1, 1800, sleeping in the drafty, half-plastered building that would later be renamed the White House. His wife Abigail arrived two weeks later and famously hung laundry in the East Room because there was nowhere else to dry it. The building had been under construction since 1792, designed by Irish-born architect James Hoban, who won the commission in an open competition that George Washington had judged. The construction relied heavily on enslaved laborers and immigrant workers, primarily Scottish and Irish stonemasons who carved the distinctive Aquia Creek sandstone facade. When Adams arrived, only six of the thirty rooms were finished. There was no running water. The main staircase was not yet built. The surrounding grounds were a construction site of lumber, tools, and workers' shanties. Adams wrote to Abigail that night: "I pray Heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this House, and on all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof." The blessing was inscribed in the State Dining Room by Franklin Roosevelt over a century later. Adams occupied the mansion for only four months before losing the 1800 election to Thomas Jefferson and departing Washington before dawn on Inauguration Day, too bitter to attend the transfer of power. Every subsequent president has lived in the building, which was gutted by the British burning in 1814, rebuilt, expanded, and completely renovated during the Truman administration in the late 1940s when engineers discovered the interior structure was on the verge of collapse.