Oh, for the days when the equivalent of the Pentagon fit into three rooms.

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 203. Oh, for the days when the equivalent of the Pentagon fit into three rooms.

In January 1813 the headquarters of the United States Department of the Navy consisted of three not very large rooms in a two-and-a-half-story brick building located about two hundred yards west of the White House, which it shared with the State and War departments. The four clerks were crowded into one room on the second floor, the secretary of the navy had another, downstairs the nine men of the navy accounts department filled the third, and everywhere hung an air of disorganized neglect. Secretary Hamilton’s successor arrived in Washington at three o’clock in the afternoon on January 23, and the friends he ran into that very first day, he wrote his wife that evening, mainly “commiserate me on the Herculean task I have to encounter.”