Franklin School
German Roots in Washington

  • Franklin School (2000). Image credit: Goethe-Institut Washington/William Gilcher
    Franklin School (2000).
  • Franklin School detail (2000). Image Credit: Goethe-Institut Washington/William Gilcher
    Franklin School detail (2000).
  • Dusty detail from a school stairway. Ironwork details in the school reveal the care with which Cluss decorated his buildings. (2000) Image Credit: Goethe-Institut Washington/William Gilcher
    Dusty detail from a school stairway. Ironwork details in the school reveal the care with which Cluss decorated his buildings. (2000)
  • Inside Franklin School: View looking north on 13th Street NW. View northwest towards Alexander Graham Bell's former laboratory at 1325 L St, NW. On June 3, 1880, Bell sent a message from the school to a window in the laboratory building. (2000) Image credit: Goethe-Institut Washington/William Gilcher
    Inside Franklin School: View looking north on 13th Street NW. View northwest towards Alexander Graham Bell's former laboratory at 1325 L St, NW. On June 3, 1880, Bell sent a message from the school to a window in the laboratory building. (2000)
  • Franklin School facade detail. Image credit: Goethe-Institut Washington/William Gilcher
    Franklin School facade detail.
  • Lithograph of Franklin School. Image credit: Gardiner Collection, Sumner School Museum and Archives
    Lithograph of Franklin School.
  • Stereoscope view of Franklin School as a model school at Philadelphia Exhibition, 1876. Image credit: Library of Congress
    Stereoscope view of Franklin School as a model school at Philadelphia Exhibition, 1876.
  • Benjamin Franklin School, built 1869. Image credit: Photograph by Alexander Gardiner. Gardiner Collection, Sumner School Museum and Archives
    Benjamin Franklin School, built 1869.
  • Elementary school class at Franklin School, 1895. Image Credit: Photograph by Frances Benjamin Johnston. Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-76888.
    Elementary school class at Franklin School, 1895.
The Franklin School is located at 13th and K Streets, NW, across the street from Franklin Park. The exterior was renovated and restored in 1991; the interior remains untouched and is now under consideration for redevelopment. In 2004, the DC Preservation League named the Franklin School to its "Most Endangered Places for 2004" and noted that "the building is unheated, which has contributed to the deterioration of the interior finishes including plaster and wood trim. The lack of use and maintenance threatens the condition of currently well-preserved paintings on the third floor. The winter of 2002-2003 saw the building used as an emergency hypothermia shelter for the homeless." The homeless shelter closed in 2008.Completed in 1869, Franklin School was designed by Adolf Cluss, one of Washington's most influential, progressive, and productive architects. Cluss's ideas on how to build modern multi-room public schools with adequate ventilation and space for students and teachers reflect his advanced social thinking. Cluss had been part of socialist circles in southwestern Germany before leaving Europe for America during the failed 1848 uprising; he remained actively involved for a number of years with similar groups in Washington. He also took ideas that were already being used in other industrial, government, and business buildings and applied them for the benefit of students attending public schools. The Franklin School (for "white" students) and the Charles Sumner School (for "colored" students) (1872) became models for public schools around the country and in Europe, winning awards at exhibitions in Vienna (1873), Philadelphia (1876), and Paris (1878). Washington thus stood at the forefront of the public school movement of the post-Civil War period.

A plaque on the school recalls the building's connection with the history of technology. It reads: 

From the top floor of this building was sent on June 3, 1880 over a beam of light to 1325 L Street, the first wireless telephone message in the history of the world.

The apparatus used in sending the message was the photophone invented by Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone.

This plaque was placed here by Alexander Graham Bell Chapter, Telephone Pioneers of America, March 3, 1947, the centennial of Dr. Bell's birth.

A model of the Franklin School was shown and won awards at a number of international exhibitions in the 1870s. Here we see how the school model looked in the "Department of Education" section of the Government Building at the International Exhibition in Philadelphia, 1876. After the exhibitions in Europe, the model was returned to Washington, but has since disappeared.


 

Adolf Cluss, Architect

born Heilbronn, 1825
died Washington DC, 1905


Adolf Cluss dominated Washington's architectural scene from the mid-1860s to his retirement in 1890. As a city planner and engineer, he also helped to shape the very appearance of the city's streets and houses. Yet most Washingtonians today know little of this German immigrant's work, or of his youthful activities as a Marxist writer and organizer during and after Germany's Revolution of 1848.

Cluss broke into the field of architecture in Washington at the age of 39, when he and his partner, Josef Wildrich von Kammerhueber, won a competition for the plan for a new elementary school, the first of eight innovative schools they designed. Two of those buildings survive: the Franklin and Sumner schools. Soon Cluss, alone or with partners, won contracts for many of Washington's major public buildings of the post-Civil War years. Cluss designed three of the four buildings built on the south side of the Mall by 1890, including the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building (the original National Museum), the only one of the three that still survives. He designed at multiple churches, a hospital, market houses in Washington and Alexandria, and an opera house in Baltimore. His Eastern Market, Masonic Lodge, Calvary Baptist Church, a Fire Station, and one residence in Washington and the City Hall in Alexandria also survived.

Though public buildings seemed to interest him most, he also entered the booming housing market during the Washington's rapid growth after the Civil War. He designed elaborate row houses for the new wealthy class of the city, as well as Washington's first apartment building, almost all replaced in the 20th century by commercial buildings.

As the city's engineer and member of the Board of Public Works in the early 1870s, he superintended the extensive street paving and grading, and the design and building of the city's sewage system. Evidence also suggests that Cluss developed the plan that narrowed Washington's unusually wide streets, and encouraged property owners to plant gardens on the leftover street right-of-way in front of their houses. His plan decreased the city's responsibility for paving and street maintenance, and encouraged homeowners to beautify the city land in front of their houses. He also proposed the regulation allowing construction of houses with bays, porticos, and towers extending four feet beyond the front property lines. With their varied fronts and small yards and gardens, Cluss's proposals made Washington's row houses distinctively different from row houses in other east coast cities. Cluss also suggested the tree planting commission which in the following years planted thousands of trees along most of Washington's streets.

During his professional career, however, Cluss successfully concealed the role he played in his twenties as a friend of Karl Marx and a leader in the communist movement. In biographical accounts Cluss recorded that he was the son and grandson of architects in the German Kingdom of Württemberg, that he worked as a engineer in railroad construction in the Rhine Valley, that he emigrated to the United States in 1848, and moved to Washington, working in several government agencies as a draftsman.

A half-century after his death more facts emerged from European sources. Cluss met Karl Marx in Brussels and joined the Communist League. He became secretary of the Communist League in the city of Mainz, and represented workers as a propagandist and leader in the Revolution of 1848. After the failure of the revolution, Cluss emigrated to the United States. For nearly ten years he corresponded, often weekly, with Marx, Marx's wife, Jenny, Frederick Engels and other leaders of the communist movement in Europe. He wrote articles for German-American newspapers and traveled to participate in worker's meetings. Marx admired Cluss. In 1851, he said, "He is one of our best and most talented men, and the following year, he said of Cluss, "As an agent, the fellow's beyond compare."

By 1858, however, Cluss became disillusioned. There is no evidence of a falling-out with Marx. In fact, Jenny Marx's account of Cluss's visit to London in 1858, apparently to end his relationship with Marx, suggests an emotionally divided man. More likely, the always-practical Cluss concluded that communism had little future in the social and political environment he found in the United States. His employment as surveyor and draftsman for federal agencies, moreover, must have stimulated his professional interests and thoughts of his future possibilities in Washington. His marriage in 1859 also suggests that in a still strange land, he desired the security of a family life.

Becoming a respected and prosperous member of Washington's middle class, Cluss's clients included federal and city governments and wealthy capitalists. He became a friend of President Grant and other political and military leaders. What he thought of the United States' growing labor disputes and violence in the 1870s, or of the publication of Das Kapital, or the death of Marx in 1883 remains Adolf Cluss's secret. Though probably no longer a Marxist, Cluss's devotion to improving the man-made environment of the nation's capital, and building attractive but functional public buildings, suggests that he retained from his youthful idealism and experiences in Germany a vision of a good society.

Joseph L. Browne, Ph.D., Director, Adolf Cluss Project.