Washington, D.C.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The United States capital exists on land that belongs to no state at all, and that was the point from the start. The Residence Act of 16 July 1790 authorized a federal district along the Potomac River precisely so the seat of government would not sit inside, or owe anything to, any single state; Maryland and Virginia each donated land to build it. The commissioners overseeing construction named the new city Washington, after the sitting president, on 9 September 1791, while the surrounding federal district took the name Columbia, a poetic name for the country then in wide use. The arrangement still holds: Washington, D.C. remains coextensive with the District of Columbia today, a status that gives its residents no voting representation in Congress and no state government of their own, a tradeoff built into the capital design from the beginning rather than an oversight discovered later.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

George Washington chose the site along the Potomac that would eventually carry his name, but he never occupied the city built there. Construction was still underway when his second term ended in 1797, and he died in 1799, a year before the federal government actually moved from Philadelphia to the new capital in 1800. John Adams became the first president to live in the building that would later be called the White House, moving in before it was even finished. Washington did, however, personally select the exact site along the Potomac under the authority the 1790 Residence Act gave him, so the city that bears his name is one he sited but never inhabited.