WASHINGTON (AP) — Speaker Dennis Hastert and other House leaders planted a tree on the Capitol grounds Wednesday to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the first meeting of Congress in the Capitol Building.
The tree was a hybrid of a silver maple and a red maple, grown at a nursery just a mile from Hastert's home in Yorkville, Ill.
Hastert said the Capitol Building "rose out of an area that was once uninhabitable," to become "the center of the civilized world."
George Washington laid the cornerstone of the Capitol in 1793, and the building opened in November 1800, when the nation's capital moved from Philadelphia to Washington.
House pages threw Lincoln pennies dated 2000 into the hole before Hastert, joined by his wife, House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, House Democratic Whip David Bonior of Michigan and others, inserted the tree.