The Wild Man At The Center Of The World

"His celebrity status as a wild westerner and creator of a fanciful fictive world outweighs the intrinsic aesthetic demerits of his writings," wrote Benjamin Lawson in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Ouch.

So, Miller was no Walt Whitman. Songs of the Sierras will never be "Song of Myself." But he wrote several plays that got produced; his columns appeared in many newspapers (including this one); and with his international fame, he championed Whitman at a time when the literati dismissed the poet as obscene.

Miller came to the District in 1883, a decade after Songs of the Sierras made his fame. He was at a low point in his life. He had just lost a fortune on a bad investment tip from millionaire Jay Gould, who advised the poet to buy Vandalia Railroad stock and sell Western Union. Western Union stock went through the roof; Vandalia went into receivership; and Miller lost $22,000 or more. (Meanwhile, Gould rejected his own advice and did the opposite, making a killing.) After that, in the words of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper, Miller had "no time for parlor posing or picturesque eccentricities." He needed to make money. Plus, his second marriage, to New York hotel heiress Abbie Leland, was falling apart. (Miller was terrible at marriage and was a deadbeat dad, as well.) Washington was a compromise for the couple. Miller said Manhattan was suffocating his Western spirit, and he wanted to go back across the country; Abbie refused to go any deeper into the wilderness than Washington. They spent several months in a tony place on California Street NW, but Miller's fame opened no doors here (he was a Democrat during a Republican administration), and he wasted his time lounging with bohemians such as Whitman. Abbie took their young daughter and went back to New York. Miller looked for a house where he could recapture his frontier muse.

Housing prices were sky high, and he couldn't afford any of the places the real estate agent showed him. It was also just before an uncertain presidential election, and the boom time that Mark Twain labeled the Gilded Age was fading.

"Despairing," Miller wrote in a column, "I climbed the crescent of hills to the northwest" and stopped under a cluster of oaks outside the city limits. After admiring the view and talking with a Civil War veteran who had lived in the neighborhood for a dozen years, Miller bought a few acres, hired some laborers and built a house that he said was an "exact duplicate of the cabin belonging to his Shasta country days in California," according to one biographer. It was about 12-by-20 feet, situated just north of where 16th Street NW's pavement ended in a dirt road, miles from any streetcar. Set back from the road where present-day Crescent Place meets 16th, Miller had the cabin built on what he called "a little edge of God's rest."

Washington ended at Boundary Street, now Florida Avenue NW, says Steve Coleman, executive director of Washington Parks & People, a nonprofit advocacy group for the city's parks. The neighborhood to the north was more suburban. After rains, yellow clay streamed down a steep escarpment and turned the road to mud. The space that is now the park held scattered buildings, including several tenements and the Wayland Seminary for black Baptists. (Columbian College, which during the Civil War had served as the hospital where Whitman volunteered, left the hill in the 1870s and eventually became George Washington University.) Meridian Hill was where city-dwellers came to escape the summer heat, enjoy concerts and feel the breeze.

SOMETIMES WE FORGET THAT WASHINGTON IS THE CENTER OF THE WORLD. Okay, we never forget, but we don't remember the exact coordinates. But the coordinates of the Washington meridian were mapped by Benjamin Banneker and Maj. Andrew Elliott in 1791, and marked with two-foot-tall stone obelisks that Thomas Jefferson placed on the Ellipse, at the White House and up 16th Street, the last one -- on the city's center line -- giving Meridian Hill its name.

Coleman likes to show visitors those coordinates while standing astride the yellow lane divider in the middle of four lanes of traffic.

"Looking down 16th Street, you feel the meridian," he says. As cars begin to bear down on us, I follow his gesture and see, yes, 16th Street pointing straight as a bowling lane south to the White House, the Washington Monument, the river beyond, all aligned.

Long before, Native Americans regarded Meridian Hill as a major intersection, where the east-west fall line of the Appalachian Piedmont met a clear sightline down the main branch of the Potomac River. "On a clear day," Coleman says, "they could have seen the ripples from schools of seven-foot sturgeon on the river."

I step clear of an SUV charging up 16th, but Coleman lingers to consider how the meridian later became a racial divider. It became "sort of the Maginot line of black and white Washington," he says. That division, rooted early in the 20th century, climaxed with the riots that erupted just blocks away, at 14th and U streets NW, after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Throughout the park, Coleman points out details that hint at its position of global significance -- obelisks on the wall, spherical iron fence ornaments. At a spot along the park's western edge, we look across the road to the cabin's original site. It is now the location of the White-Meyer House on the grounds of the Meridian International Center. Coleman pauses at a plaque at the edge of the park: "The Stone marking the Washington Meridian was formerly located 52 feet 9 inches west of this tablet." The spot Miller chose as his bit of the wilderness was right on the capital's center line.