Lincoln Cottage in Capital to Be Named a Monument

The cottage where President Lincoln spent the summers during the Civil War and composed the final draft of the Emancipation Proclamation will be named a national monument today by President Clinton, White House officials say.

Clinton also is to announce a $750,000 matching grant for use in preserving Anderson Cottage, as the Lincoln retreat is known, and the surrounding 2.27 acres. The site will be renamed the President Lincoln and Soldiers’ Home National Monument.

Clinton is making the designation under the 1906 Antiquities Act, designed to protect sites and objects of antiquity on federal land by presidential proclamation. The other nine national monuments Clinton has named are large parcels of land, mostly in California, Arizona and Colorado.

The stucco house, built as a luxury summer home by a Washington banker about 1842, looks today much as it did when Lincoln--and, later, three other presidents--enjoyed the privacy of the large estate about three miles north of the White House. It was purchased in 1851 for use by Army veterans, and when the building no longer was needed as a dormitory, the house was offered to Lincoln for his use.

The cottage, which sits in the middle of the Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Home campus at 3700 N. Capitol St. NW, will be open to the public on a limited basis.

The grant comes from the White House Millennium Council’s preservation program, Save America’s Treasures, in partnership with the National Park Service and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Restoring the cottage to the way it looked in the 1860s will cost from $3 million to $4 million and is expected to take three years to complete, White House officials said.

Last month, the trust designated the cottage, which became a National Historic Landmark in 1973, as one of the country’s 11 most endangered historic properties. Each year, the historic trust creates a list of public and private properties that are threatened by neglect or demolition.

Each summer, Lincoln had his bedroom and living room furniture moved to the then-rural hilltop cottage, where his family could escape the hot, humid weather and the pressures of the wartime White House.