Shortly after the completion of its construction, it was partially burned by the British during the War of 1812. Its reconstruction began in 1815 and did not end until 1830. During the 1850s, the building was greatly expanded by Thomas U. Walter. In 1863, the imposing "Statue of Freedom", was placed on the top of the current (new at the time) dome. The Washington Monument is an Obelisk erected in honor of George Washington, the first American president. It was Robert Mills who had designed it originally in 1838. There is a perceivable color difference towards the bottom of the monument, which is because its construction was put on hiatus for lack of money. At high, it was completed in 1884 and opened to the public in 1888. In the Deep South the colonial houses sometimes support a neoclassical pediment with columns, as at "Belle Meade Plantation" in Tennessee, with a symmetrical columned porch and narrow windows. The domestic architecture in the South adapted the classic model by supporting a mid-height balcony on the front without a pediment or entrance portico, such as at Oak Alley Plantation, in St. James Parish, Louisiana. These houses adapted to the regional climate and into the economy of a plantation with slave labor for construction. The Homestead Act of 1862 brought property ownership within reach for millions of citizens, displaced native peoples, and changed the character of settlement patterns across the Great Plains and Southwest. The law offered a modest farm free of charge to any adult male who cultivated the land for five years and built a residence on the property. This established a rural pattern of isolated farmsteads in the Midwest and West instead of the European and eastern U.S. states' villages and towns. Settlers built homes from local materials, such as rustic sod, semi-cut stone, mortared cobble, adobe bricks, and rough logs. They erected log cabins in forested areas and sod houses, such as the Sod House (Cleo Springs, Oklahoma), in treeless prairies. The present day sustainable architecture method of Straw-bale construction was pioneered in late-19th-century Nebraska with baling machines. The Spanish and later Mexican Alta California Ranchos and early American pioneers used the readily available clay to make adobe bricks, and distant forests' tree trunks for beams sparingly. Locally made roof tiles were produced by the Mission Indians. As milled wood became more available in the mid-19th century the Monterey Colonial architecture style first developed in Monterey and then spread.