William J. Stone (1798–1865) engraved this plate of the White
House in 1822 for Peter Force’s National Calendar. Stone was
brought to America in 1805 and, after going to school in
Pennsylvania, settled in Washington in 1815 as an engraver and
lithographer. Although he engraved many fine maps of the Federal
City, he is perhaps most famous for his facsimile of the
Declaration of Independence done in 1823 during John Quincy
Adams’ secretaryship. See George C. Groce and David H. Wallace,
The New-York Historical Society’s Dictionary of American
Artists,1564–1860, New Haven and London, 1957. The President’s
House (or White House, as it began to be called as early as
1810) was designed by James Hoban as a white sandstone Georgian
edifice of two stories above a ground floor, topped by a steep
roof. George Washington picked the exact site of the building,
and work began on it in 1792. The first residents of the mansion
were John and Abigail Adams, who moved into the unfinished
structure in 1800. During Thomas Jefferso