its early years, was the present Law Library room
underneath the present Court-room.[1] Such, however,
is not the case.[2] The North Wing, which was the only part of the Capitol then finished, consisted of a basement
floor containing, on the east side, the east entrance
hall and the Senate Chamber (the latter being a room
48 by 86 feet and 41 feet high, its gallery being on the
same level with the present first floor of the Capitol);
in the center of the basement floor was a grand stairway hall, and a Senate ante-chamber; and on the west
side, four committee rooms. On the first floor, on the
east side and over the east entrance hall, there was an
office designated for the Senate Clerk; and on the
west side, a House Clerk's office, and a large room
(35 by 86 feet) devoted in the early years to the House
of Representatives, and later to the Library of Congress.
Over the Senate ante-chamber was the House ante-chamber (the hallway of the present Supreme Court),
which to the west opened into the House and to the
east opened into the Senate Gallery. The room which
was assigned to the Court in 1801, and occupied by it
until 1808, was that known as the Senate Clerk's Office
(now occupied by the Marshal of the Court) located
on the main or first floor, over the basement east
entrance hall. In this small and undignified chamber,
only 24 feet wide, 30 feet long and 21 feet high, and
rounded at the south end, the Chief Justice of the
United States and his Associates sat for eight years.
Before the date of the first session of the Court in Washington, Chief Justice Ellsworth, who was still
- ↑ See this misstatement in "The Supreme Court Room" in Case and Comment (1890), II, 97; in Woolworth's Speech before the Omaha Bar Ass'n, Feb. 4, 1901; in Marshall's Life, Character and Judicial Service, III, 32; in The National Capitol (1897), by G. C. Hazelton, Jr., 186; in History of the Supreme Court (1891), by Hampton L. Carson, 241; and in Marshall, III, 121, note.
- ↑ History of the Capitol (1900), by Glenn Brown, I, 24, 25, 28.
