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Somebody get the cake—it’s the 225th birthday of the name “Washington D.C.”

In a letter dated September 9, 1791, three commissioners in charge with constructing the new capital told Major Pierre L’Enfant that “we have agreed that the Federal District shall be called ‘The Territory of Columbia,’ and the Federal City, ‘The City of Washington.'” This was so L’Enfant, whose influence is still seen the city’s wide avenues and the National Mall, could title his map accordingly when he laid out his plans for the land.

But then, if that letter were followed to a “T,” wouldn’t we be living in Washington T.C.? Turns out, when the capital was incorporated almost a century later in 1871, “district” replaced “territory” officially, though it had been popularly used previously, says the Historical Society of Washington D.C.

The letter didn’t end there, though. Commissioners also told L’Enfant that “the streets shall be named alphabetically one way, and numerically the other: the former divided into North and South letters, the latter into East and West numbers, from the Capitol.” So happy anniversary to that, too.

The people who lived in the federal district at the time the letter was written had more representation in Congress than we do today (or at least the ones who were allowed to vote, anyway). Historian Kathleen Frydl writes that “until the Organic Act of 1801, residents who lived in the federal district cast a vote for congressional representative as part of either the Virginia or Maryland delegation, depending upon whether the section they resided in formerly belonged to one or the other state.”

As the quest for statehood continues at the November ballot box, success would mean a change in name. The city known as Washington D.C. would become a state called New Columbia (with the exception of a small carve-out of federal land for the U.S. Capitol, White House, Supreme Court, Union Station, the Kennedy Center, the Navy Yard, and the Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling).

This wouldn’t be the first major shift in the city’s borders. Congress “retroceded” about half of the district back to Virginia in 1846. One major reason for returning the federal land to Old Dominion? There was a growing movement in D.C. to ban slavery and Alexandria was a major nexus for the slave trade.

As Frydl notes with irony, “If only those living in other parts of DC so coveted the profit from the traffic in humans, their modern day counterparts would have congressional representation today.”

H/T Reddit