Congress chartered the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation in 1893 with authority to build a national cathedral in Washington, and the cornerstone was laid on a hill above the city in 1907 with President Theodore Roosevelt in attendance. Work proceeded through two world wars and the Depression, funded entirely by private donation, and was not declared complete until 1990, when President George H. W. Bush watched the final decorative finial set into place on the west towers.
The building follows English Gothic precedent closely, with flying buttresses, ribbed vaults and an extensive program of stained glass and stone carving. Its formal name, the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, is used mainly in liturgical contexts; almost everyone, including the cathedral's own signage, calls it the National Cathedral.
That national role, rather than any specifically Episcopal one, is what the building is most often asked to perform. Its congressional charter describes it as a house of prayer for all people. State funerals for Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush were held under its vaults, alongside inaugural prayer services and national memorials drawing participants from far beyond the Episcopal Church.
The cathedral has also answered to ordinary structural hazards a building of its age and mass invites. A 2011 earthquake centered in Virginia cracked pinnacles and displaced stones from the central tower and flying buttresses, and the repair campaign stretched on for years, a reminder that a Gothic building finished only in living memory can still need the patient masonry its medieval predecessors required.