Montgomery C. Meigs and the Building of the Nation’s CapitalAt the age of thirty six, in 1852, Lt. Montgomery Cunningham Meigs of the Army Corps of Engineers reported to Washington, D. C., for duty as a special assistant to the chief army engineer, Gen. Joseph G. Totten. It was a fateful assignment, both for the nations capital and for the bright, ambitious, and politically connected West Point graduate. Meigss forty year tenure in the nations capital was by any account spectacularly successful. He surveyed,