us capitol
Vinnie (Lavinia) Ream was born in a log cabin in Wisconsin on September 25, 1847, like many people of her day. In a time when many women grew up to become stay-at-home moms, because they were not normally accepted in most other professions, Vinnie chose to go to college instead. She attended Christian College in Missouri, which is now known as Columbia College. One of her lesser-known accomplishments was that she played the harp to entertain her family at home, but her greatest talent and the one for which she is most well-known was in sculpture. On July 28, 1866, when Ream was just an 18-year-old girl, she became the first woman in the United States to win a commission for a statue. She was commissioned to sculpt a statue of the recently deceased President Lincoln. The statue was destined to become her most famous work, and to this day, it resides in the Rotunda of the US Capitol.
Ream didn’t start out as a sculptor, but rather began her groundbreaking career as one of the first female US government employees, working at the post office. However, when she was just 16 years old, Abraham Lincoln posed for her for 5 months during the middle of the Civil War. Perfecting the statue would take her several years to complete, including travel to Europe. She opened a studio on Broadway, but quickly moved back to Washington, DC to open a new studio there. In Washington DC, she sculpted a statue of Admiral David Farragut 
in the Washington Navy Yard, and it resides appropriately at Farragut Square. Another great work of hers is the statue of Sequoyah, the Cherokee Chief that created the Cherokee alphabet. That was the first free standing statue of a Native American, and it is on display at the Statuary Hall in the US Capitol. As Ream became more and more famous, more and more opportunities opened up for her. George Custer posed for a bust, and Ream made a model of a statue of General Robert E Lee. She considered it an honor to be able to preserve so many historical figures in her sculptures.
Vinnie Ream died on November 20, 1914, and she is buried with honors beside her husband at Arlington National Cemetery. She was also honored with a US postage stamp and actually has a town named after her…Vinita, Oklahoma. She was also the subject of at least 3 well known portraits of herself.
On September 11th, I wrote about the significance if the September 11th date and the terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon, but there was another target that day. The attack on Washington DC was at first thought to be planned for the White House, but it was later determined that the attack was planned for the nation’s capitol building. I have wondered if that September 11th date could have a significance for the capitol too, so I did some research. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find a specific day that the groundbreaking at the capital took place.
I did find out that on September 18, 1793, George Washington laid the cornerstone to the United States Capitol building. Now, I’m not a contractor, but it makes sense to me that from groundbreaking to cornerstone, could logically take a week…putting the possible groundbreaking on…you guessed it, September 11, 1793. The building itself would take nearly a century to complete, as architects came and went, the British set fire to it, and it was called into use during the Civil War. Nevertheless, the original groundbreaking took place before September 18, 1793. Today, the Capitol building, with its famous cast-iron dome and important collection of American art, is part of the Capitol Complex, which includes six Congressional office buildings and three Library of Congress buildings, all developed in the 19th and 20th centuries.
As we all know, the brave heroes of Flight 93 foiled that attack on September 11, 2001, which is why the US Capitol building was not destroyed or damaged. Those people saved the capitol building and somehow managed t crash their plane into a field…hitting no one on the ground. They knew that the other planes that had been hijacked, were not landing to have their demands met…they were being flown into buildings, and that meant that they were likely headed for the same fate. They knew that all they could do was to sacrifice their own lives to make sure that this attack did not succeed, and that is what they did, crashing it into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. With a quick, “Let’s roll!!” they ran forward and fought with the terrorists, and while they weren’t able to get complete control of the plane, they made sure it didn’t reach it’s intended destination, and they saved the capital.
I can’t say, for sure, that September 11th was the date that they broke ground on the capital building, but in 
my mind, it makes sense that it was. And that makes it shocking to me. There were some days in Islamic history about September 11, but they were simply battles and such that took place, not the day that a city or place that was being attacked…also being the day that it was founded or had it’s groundbreaking. That makes it monumental, but in the third attack, they weren’t successful, and the plane crashed in a field. Maybe that was monumental too.
