Page:The Supreme Court in United States History vol 1.djvu/199

Rh its early years, was the present Law Library room underneath the present Court-room.^ Such, however, is not the case.* 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 stair- way hall, and a Senate ante-chamber ; and on the west side, four conmiittee 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

1 See this misstatement in "The Supreme Court Room*' in Case and Commeni (1890)» n, 97; in Woolworth's Speech before the Omaha Bar Ass'n» Feb. 4, 1901 ; in MarshaWs Life, Character and Judicial Service, III, 32 ; in The National CapHol (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.
 * Hiitory qf the Capitol (1900), by Glenn Brown, I, 24, 25, 28.