The Jefferson Pier

 About forty years ago, while walking downhill from the Washington Monument, I noticed a small marker:

 

 

No other sense of "pier" coming to mind, I supposed that the Jefferson Pier must have been a landing on the Potomac. I knew that good deal of the land south and west of the monument was fill.

 

Since then, I had looked for it once or twice, not hard, always without finding it. On the Saturday before July 4, I was walking with visitors toward the monument and spotted the marker. While we were looking at it, a fellow with earphones in straightened up from his inspection and told us that this marked the first proposed site of the Washington Monument, as being due west of the Capitol and due south of the White House: his audio guide had told him as much. We thanked him, and I stood corrected.

The WPA guide, Washington: City and Capital does not include "Jefferson Pier" in its index. It does say that L'Enfant had it in mind to have an equestrian monument to Washington at the point where this marker now is, and that any movements to erect a monument to Washington were stalled by Washington's discouragement as long as he lived. Once Congress determined to build the monument, it was found that the footing was better a bit to the east, where the monument now stands.

Wikipedia has a clear account of the Jefferson Pier. According to that, the marker originally stood on the south side of Tiber Creek (long since buried), and was used as a mooring post for barges. But it was not on the Potomac. The pier is located as close as it can be to where it first was, but some feet higher, for the ground has been built up.