The Federal Boundary Stones of Washington
Washington, District of Columbia, United States
The forty surviving 1791-92 stones marking the original District of Columbia diamond, surveyed under Andrew Ellicott with Benjamin Banneker, several now tended by neighborhood caretaker groups.
When the federal district was laid out in 1791-92, forty stones were set at one-mile intervals along its perimeter by Andrew Ellicott's crew, surveyed with the free Black astronomer Benjamin Banneker among them. They are the oldest federal monuments in the country, and most still stand in parks, front yards, and roadside triangles across Virginia and Maryland where the diamond's corners and lines fall.
Over decades, a network of local caretakers, historians, and neighbors, organized as the Boundary Stones project, has taken on cleaning, protection, and documentation, adopting individual stones. Several have become small neighborhood shrines of civic reverence, with seasonal cleanup visits and local lore attaching to the stones; a genuinely bottom-up stewardship of survey stones is a rare and real form of place-devotion.
Visiting
Stones are spread around the perimeter; the Boundary Stones site maps each with condition and access notes. Most stand on public ground or private land visible from the street.
Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DC_Boundary_Stone,_West_Corner_(Columbia_Historical_Society,_1907).png), CC BY-SA.
Associated traditions & practices
Visitor stories