For instance, there stood on the present site of the Public Library in Mount Vernon Square a ramshackle old market building, the owners of which had contrived so to intrench themselves behind legal technicalities that they could not be ousted by any ordinary process. One evening, after the courts were closed, a platoon of brawny laborers was marched up to the building, armed with battering-rams, axes, and sledge-hammers, and, before proprietors or tenants could hunt up a judge to interfere, the party had reduced the market to kindling wood and prepared the ground for conversion into a public park. Again, when the time came to improve the lower end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a railroad crossing stood in the way. It had been laid during the war, with no legal warrant but as a temporary military necessity, and the company had repeatedly refused to remove it. So at one o’clock one Sunday morning, when injunctions were out of the question, Shepherd brought down a gang of trusty men and proceeded to tear up the rails, which could never thereafter be replaced.
The boldness of this performance so stirred the admiration of John W. Garrett, one of the most powerful railway magnates of the day, that he offered Shepherd a vice-presidency of the Baltimore and Ohio Company. But Shepherd was not to be lured away. He was promoted by Grant from the vice-presidency of the Board of Public Works to the Governorship of the District, a move which, though flattering, made him all the more shining a mark for attack; and a group of large landowners, shuddering at the prospect of further increases in taxation, induced Congress to reorganize the local government, wiping out entirely the Territorial system and popular suffrage, and putting the administration of affairs into the hands of three Commissioners to be appointed for limited terms by the President. This plan has remained substantially unchanged for more than forty years, to the satisfaction of the citizens who have most at stake in the welfare of the city.
Having entered office rich at the age of thirty, Shepherd quitted it at thirty-three so poor that he had to begin life anew in the Mexican mining country. He left as his monument a record expenditure of twenty-six million dollars, about half that amount remaining as a bonded debt; many miles of newly opened or extended streets; a splendid achievement in shade-tree installation and parking improvement; modern water, sanitation, and lighting plants; and, above all, an awakened popular spirit as to civic advancement. Albeit his ways of working out his plans often were so crude as to shock the sense of quieter people and not to be commended as a continuing force for