The cornerstone of the building that became the White House was laid in Washington on October 13, 1792, with George Washington attending. The city itself was being surveyed from a swamp, and the president's house was one of the first things planned for it. The design came from James Hoban, an Irish architect working in Charleston, who won the competition for it, and the stone was cut at the quarry at Aquia Creek in Virginia. Washington never lived in it.
The building was put up slowly and partly by forced labour. The records show enslaved men and free labourers working side by side, and the stone and the timber coming up the Potomac. It took eight years. The house was still unfinished when the federal government moved from Philadelphia in 1800. John Adams moved in that November, the first president to live there, and he was out of office a few months later.
It was burned. In August 1814, during the War of 1812, British troops marched into Washington and set fire to the building, and the interior was gutted, though the outer stone walls stood, and Hoban came back to rebuild it behind the same walls, which is why the house has the shape it had in 1800. It was painted white to cover the smoke stains, and the colour gave the building the name people already used.
The name was made official late. Theodore Roosevelt ordered the stationery to carry the words White House in 1901, and the building has been the president's residence, and its office, through every presidency since Adams. The cornerstone itself has never been found, and there are people who still look for it.