Slate roofing seems to have made its initial appearance around 1800. In 1805 Joseph Riddle's dwelling house was "covered in copper" and John Janney's warehouse in slate, and at least one building in "composition." At this date an insurance plat shows a tinsmith and coppersmith's shop. The early roofs were covered in wood (i.e., wooden shingles).
DECLINE AND RESURGENCE
With the death of George Washington in 1799, which emphasized the close of the eighteenth century, the city whose prosperity seemed in some mystic fashion to have developed and grown with him began a decline.
In 1803 came yellow fever, leaving desolation and mourning in its wake. An English traveler wrote in 1807:
Alexandria was about eight years ago a very flourishing place, but the losses sustained from the capture of American vessels by the French in the West Indies, occasioned many failures. In the year 1803, the yellow fever, which broke out there for the first time, carried off a number of its inhabitants. These shocks have so deeply affected the mercantile interest, that the town has but two or three ships in the trade with Great Britain; and there is little prospect of its ever attaining to its former prosperity.[53]
Alexandria was further subjected to plagues. Cholera broke out in 1832, and people dropped dead in the streets while the population shuddered. Illness, death, and burial was the fearsome sequence of only a few hours. There was a Board of Health and a Quarantine Officer, but ignorance of sanitation laws and preventive medicine resulted in appalling epidemics brought in by visiting vessels.
Fire, too, ravaged the town. There were two major conflagrations in the early nineteenth century, one in 1810 and another in 1824, in each of which at least fifty buildings were consumed. The fire in the latter year all but demolished the west side of Fairfax Street between King and Prince Streets. George Washington is credited with having founded the first fire company and giving to the city what was then the finest of modern hand pumpers—a magnificent affair of red paint, brass trimmings, and leather buckets. A law of the town made it mandatory for each householder or proprietor of a dwelling or storehouse to furnish leather buckets of at least two-and-one-half-gallon capacity at "his or her expense"—in quantity equal to the stories of his house; no proprietor was expected, however, to provide more than three buckets. The buckets were numbered and lettered with the names of the owners, whose duty it was to send or carry them to any place where a fire broke out, or to "throw them into the street so that they may be taken there."[54]
The fire companies at the first alarm, in scarlet shirts, turned out on shortest notice, at a dead run on "shanks' mare." Woe betide the member who was late, for he was fined right heavily. Pumping by hand to put out a fire was a laborious affair and slackers were not tolerated. Even with the best of will and the most earnest of pumpers, the fires got out of hand and took a terrible toll of the early buildings. While insides were gutted, the walls often remained to contain again an interior of beauty and dignity.
Alexandria suffered more from the War of 1812 than from the Revolution. Before Washington fell to the British in 1814, Alexandria was forced to capitulate and had to pay a high indemnity for physical protection. This disaster, coupled with the failure of the canal which was to open up the vast Ohio country, all but wrecked the best financial hopes and plans of the city.