Episode 3 of 3
Presidential Signing
- When
- July 16, 1790
- Where
- Signing of the Residence Act
President Washington signed the Residence Act into law on July 16, 1790, establishing a permanent seat along the Potomac River and designating Philadelphia as the temporary capital.
President George Washington signed the Residence Act on July 16, 1790. The act established a permanent seat along the Potomac River and designated Philadelphia as the temporary capital. It empowered Washington to appoint commissioners to oversee the project and set a deadline of December 1800 for the capital to be ready.
Sources
- Residence Act Wikipedia, revision of 2026-08-27
Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.