L'Enfant and the Freemasons: H. Paul Caemmer's The Life of Pierre Charles L'Enfant

The papers of Hans Paul Caemmerer (1922-1954) are deposited in the National Archives and include considerable correspondence concerning this book about Pierre Charles L’Enfant (1754–1825). It was Caemmerer who dispelled the belief that L’Enfant was an engineer, and found that he studied in the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture under his own father, an accomplished oil painter. L’Enfant’s big opportunity was to fill a blank canvas, physically and ideologically, of what became the capital. L’Enfant and pace, Caemmerer’s life of him, have been much cited by those who have caught a fever in terms of Washington as being of occult design. The need or desire to connect L’Enfant’s original drawings for the city with Freemasonry relies on some still poorly researched history. Masonic meetings possibly took place in early Georgetown. Potomac Lodge in Georgetown has the enigmatic Bladensburg Bible that was published in Edinburgh in 1754. Stories recorded long afterwards claimed the book was used for pre Revolutionary Masonic rituals. Since Freemasonry teaches that one reason for belonging is to enable travel in foreign lands, Freemasons befriending each other in earliest Georgetown is a pleasant, but unsubstantiated conjecture.