Matthew Gault Emery

Who was Matthew Gault Emery?

Matthew Gault Emery was Mayor of Washington, D.C. from 1870 to 1871, when the office was abolished. Emery was the last mayor of Washington, D.C. until the office was re-established 104 years later.

Born in Pembroke, New Hampshire, Emery moved to Baltimore, Maryland at the age of 19 and began apprenticing as an architect and builder. Three years later, he moved to Washington in hopes of gaining U.S. government contracts to construct Federal buildings. Over the next decade, Emery would cut and lay stones for, among others, the U.S. Treasury; the Navy Department; the U.S. Patent Office; repair work for the White House; and, most prestigiously, the cornerstone of the Washington Monument, which Emery cut, prepared, and laid in 1848.

Emery served as a Washington Alderman from 1855 to 1857. Joining the newly formed Republican Party, he then acted as a marshal at the 1860 inauguration of Abraham Lincoln.

Elected again as an Alderman in 1869, friends and colleagues encouraged Emery to run the following year against the incumbent mayor Sayles J. Bowen, whose financial negligence had crippled the city with debt and with whom Emery had publicly feuded. Although both Bowen and Emery were Republicans, Bowen had been disowned by the city's chapter of the party, which actually ran Emery on the "Reform" ticket — a ticket that Democrats endorsed rather than risk Bowen's reelection by splitting the vote again with their own candidate. Emery won the election by over 3000 votes.