Kicking Off America’s 250th at Mount Vernon

I cannot tell a lie. George, Martha, and their stately home are star attractions.

W ith the celebration of America’s 250th birthday now ramping up, and with the Fourth of July upon us, it’s time for a patriotic story and a chance to right an embarrassing wrong. I’d never been to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s Virginia home and a beacon light in historic preservation. I was in Washington a few weeks ago to visit National Review Institute’s office in Arlington, Va. Mount Vernon — the mansion, garden, distillery, tombs, museum, and splendid view — is a few miles away, so why not start our birthday year with Washington (1732–1799), the father of our country, our first president, and the man who won the Revolutionary War against the odds? And with Martha (1731–1802), very much the essential woman.

It’s a memorable experience. First, the house isn’t big, and it’s not Downton Abbey. It’s about 11,000 square feet, 21 rooms, some very small and very back-of-house, built as a four-room farmhouse in 1734 by Washington’s father, who owned about 3,000 acres of frontier, pristine woods, kitchen gardens, outbuildings, and land for crops. George was a two-year-old. Upstairs bedrooms were added, and Washington, who by 1761 owned Mount Vernon, expanded it, mostly in the 1770s, to be an elegant, instantly recognizable house, country-Palladian in style, with a spacious, colonnaded piazza facing not the entrance but the sweeping view of the Potomac River. Washington was the designer, and he wanted a distinctly English mansion recalling what he imagined country grandees in the mother country owned.

Mount Vernon was also very much a working farm, even as Washington developed into a Virginia aristocrat and built the property to thousands of acres. Outbuildings such as the smokehouse, laundry, and icehouse are steps from the mansion and open. The distillery and gristmill are about three miles from the main house. The slave quarters — between Washington and Martha, they owned about 300 slaves — aren’t far, either. Mount Vernon is a house but also a village. In its heyday, it had a brickyard, too.

The second thing to note is that Mount Vernon is a construction site. It’s in the middle of the biggest renovation program in its history — aside, and this is arguable, from the initial overhaul in its early days in the 1860s and ’70s as a public museum. Costing around $160 million, the current renovation started with the exterior. Two dozen layers of paint were removed in some places, to restore the old sand-paint finish that Washington intended to make the wood look like pricy stone. He was, at heart, a farmer and only intermittently flush with cash. The house is getting a new HVAC system, which means excavating a bunker for the mechanicals. The house’s foundation is getting some TLC, too. Rooms are “in restauro” to appear as they were in 1799; given a generation of research on wallpaper, moldings, and other finishes, this is a huge job.

The only room in the mansion that was open when I visited was the New Room, a two-story, tall, and as close-to-palatial space as it gets at Mount Vernon. It was one of Washington’s last projects, planned before the Revolution took him away from Mount Vernon for years and left him nearly beggared. It wasn’t outfitted until the 1780s. An impressive Venetian window, grand fireplace, and minty wall color make for peak colonial neoclassicist style, refined but unpretentious, even cheerful. Washington liked green, which he called “grateful to the eye.” The New Room, Washington’s make-a-statement place, served as a salon but doubled as a dining room. Don’t expect great art. The walls are covered with portraits, landscapes, and battle pictures, but Washington was an accessories guy, spending a bundle on London-made clothes and a Cadillac-standard coach.

Still, with so much construction, the place was packed. Tour buses stretched a quarter mile down the main road leading to the visitor center, where there’s a good introductory video and, a ten-minute walk away, to the house. The visitorship is a mix of all ages and, judging at least from the license plates in the parking lot, all parts of the country. This is gratifying to see. The video, house, and, of course, the museum are, together, in-depth treatments of Washington’s character and leadership. Fastidious, brave, a born joiner of groups, ambitious, athletic, disciplined, very correct, scrupulous, practical, and a natural risk-taker, Washington wasn’t much different in war, peace, and politics. He was certainly dutiful. His long-lived mother, a queen among battle axes, taxed his patience to the max. It’s clear he would have rather crossed the Delaware morning, noon, and night than tussle with her, but he was, in all things, proper.

The outbuildings, all open, and the museum explore Washington as an experimental and scientific farmer. He ditched tobacco as a crop in the 1760s for wheat, corn, cotton, flax, hemp, and booze, likely his most profitable product. Making, we think, 11,000 gallons yearly, Mount Vernon’s distillery might have been America’s biggest. Who knew he was also the herring king of the Potomac? Washington built a greenhouse in the center of his garden in which he grew lemons and oranges. Greenhouses — like wide, broad porches with big views — were very rare in Virginia.

The house and land were Washington’s livelihood but also his passion and his oasis. While visitors now don’t get the full impact of the house, the view of the river from the hill shows us that Mount Vernon had to be a much-loved place for him. He was a true revolutionary rather than a get-along, go-along type, but, revolutionary or not, his years away from Mount Vernon and as president cost him a bundle. Duty compelled him. When he became president, he intended to stay in the job for only a couple of years, but he never felt the time was right to leave office. He hated the ceremonies that came with the presidency and got no pleasure from its powers. In 1793, he complained to Jefferson about “the extreme wretchedness” of his life in office.

Washington’s chief pleasure, if only vicarious, came on Sunday afternoons, when he reviewed the detailed letters he’d received during the week from Mount Vernon’s overseer about doings on the farm. His replies tell us that he still ruled the roost as much as he could. During his presidency, when he visited Mount Vernon, which he often did, he was consumed with “events, dear boy, events,” as Harold Macmillan said. He and Martha weren’t particularly social but felt the demands of the office meant turning Mount Vernon into a party place.

At least during the war, he spent most of his days outdoors, as he did as a farmer. As president, he was stuck in an office all day. And hellish as war was, politics was both trivial and hateful to him. By nature a lover of order, Washington was also driven to distraction by the nation as improv act, amateur hour spent blindfolded in a minefield. When he became president in 1789, he was 57, not old but not young, either. No, Washington never had wooden teeth. He had dentures likely made from animal bone and wire mesh that might have assuaged his vanity, but they left him in terrible pain from irritated and swollen gums.

The museum is very good. It’s organized mostly by chronology starting with the land’s Native American past, mostly old tools excavated from around Mount Vernon, and Washington’s English ancestry. Washington’s presidential chair, the family’s silver, a 9-by-9 foot “Neoclassical Swag” quilt that Martha made, a harpsichord Washington bought for his step-granddaughter, Houdon’s marble bust of Washington, Mount Vernon’s original weathervane, and Washington’s dress sword are high points. Aside from the English silver, which is very nice, I liked the pieces from the first presidential china service, a white porcelain Sèvres pattern Washington bought from the retiring French minister whose New York house Washington rented during his first term as president. It’s neoclassical and spartan but difficult to make. The white glaze means the firing has to be perfect.

Many of the objects on view either in the museum or the house had to be relocated, purchased, or donated since so many of the contents had been inherited or sold. Lots of Mount Vernon artifacts and letters went to Arlington House, built by Martha’s grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, whose daughter married Robert E. Lee. The one-pound wrought-iron key to the Bastille presented to Washington by Lafayette in 1790 is a high point, too. For all the hoopla about the storming of the Bastille, Jacobins found only half a dozen prisoners there.

In the museum, Martha and George share the spotlight. Her father immigrated to America and became a well-to-do planter. Martha married a much older man who died when she was 26, leaving her with four children but, more to the point, 17,000 acres of land, 300 slaves, and a bundle of cash. She and George married in 1759. He hadn’t inherited Mount Vernon yet but lived there and ran it, and they were simpatico. Over the years, her money was a backstop, though much of it and her slaves were entailed to her first husband’s estate and meant for his heirs. They loved each other, Washington adopted her children and her grandchildren, and her role in Mount Vernon’s operations was considerable. She spent long stretches during the war living with Washington in camps.

Not sparkling, she was still smart and friendly, by no means the First Frump, and was a full-time presidential hostess. Fame and attention were her constant companions from 1775 until she died, and she didn’t especially like either. She was a patriot, but nothing in her upbringing prepared her to be a traitor, which is how Loyalists saw her. Both she and Washington knew during the war that Mount Vernon could easily become a target.

A great deal of Mount Vernon’s interpretation in the museum concerns the Washingtons’ slaves and George and Martha as slave owners. These are part of Mount Vernon’s story, but they verge on becoming “the” story. On the one hand, Washington was deeply uneasy about slavery, believing it would gradually disappear, sooner rather than later. At his orders, the slaves he owned were freed at his death, and Martha freed her slaves a year before she died.

On the other hand, Mount Vernon’s business model, based on slavery, might have been inefficient and antiquated, but slaves were, like land, huge bottom-line assets. He was of the school that prayed “God, make me good, but not yet.” He never separated slave families and he cared for his old slaves until they died, but he also vigorously hunted escaped slaves. When he was president and living in Philadelphia, he rotated his household help so that no one would be freed in accordance with the Pennsylvania law freeing slaves who lived in the commonwealth for more than six months. He was never cruel but always a perfectionist with his slaves as well as with his overseers, vendors, troops he commanded, and political flunkies. Martha freed her slaves before she died partly because she feared they’d rebel and kill her in her bed. Not a sign of the warm and fuzzies.

“Big Things Are on the Way” reads a banner graphic on a wall leading to Mount Vernon’s soon-to-be new Washington exhibition in its education center, next to the museum. I counted 35 object labels in the museum — before I stopped counting — referencing Washington as an “enslaver.” Curators being curators, they often evolve into academic dogs with a bone in their mouths, especially when the bone is in style, and chasing grievance over slavery is in style. It gets tired and redundant fast, and it’s a distraction. A museum section on slavery — an entire wall — begins with the headline “life is a burden to the slave person — indeed it is, left without education and the mind terrified all the time.” It’s a quote from 1898 — 99 years after Washington died — by Edmund Parker, a slave who had been owned by John Augustine Washington III, who had sold Mount Vernon 40 years before.

I’d note slavery when it’s relevant and meaningful rather than tangential. Otherwise, the labels are preachy and performative. Washington led the war effort from a position of adversity. He led by example. He never let defeat, disappointment, or discord crush him. That’s Mount Vernon’s message. The theme of the Founding Fathers and slavery is so tired and so often deployed by finger-wagging scolds who, I’m sure, would have traveled the same equivocating road toward their own convenience and comfort.

Mount Vernon is a monument to George Washington, but it’s also the foundation of America’s historic-preservation movement, nascent in the antebellum years. The country’s mantra was build, baby, build, and level anything and everything old and in the way. By the early 1850s, after three generations of Washington’s family owning the estate, Mount Vernon was a rickety pile. John Augustine Washington III, Washington’s great-grandnephew, wasn’t a bad steward but practiced a brand of uneven engagement typical among aristocrats. He owned other plantations, too, which divided his attention further. And, let’s face it, the land was never the best, and the work of the farm and house was undermined by streams of tourists.

When Louisa Bird Cunningham, one of those tourists and a South Carolina plantation owner, saw the house in 1853, the peeling paint, sagging roof, ship masts propping up the piazza roof, and waist-high weeds shocked and saddened her. Ann Pamela Cunningham, Louisa’s daughter, was inspired by her mother’s grim account of the place to take charge. Gathering first a group of affluent women from the South and, later, for inclusion’s sake, the North, she organized the Mount Vernon Ladies Association of the Union in 1856. Painful as it was, the group raised $200,000 to buy the house and 200 acres in 1858. Among the drags on its efforts were John Augustine himself, irked by having to sell to a women’s group; Northern abolitionists who felt that the project valorized slave owners; what was then the oddity of historic preservation; and the looming civil war. But the ladies’ association was tenacious and buoyed by a fledgling awareness that if the country was worth preserving, so was its history.

The group still owns and runs Mount Vernon, true to its mission to preserve and restore the mansion and educate visitors about Washington’s character and leadership. Each state is entitled to a regent, or trustee. Mount Vernon’s budget in 2023, recorded in its annual report for that year, was a bit over $70 million. Most of the money comes from philanthropy and admissions. Over many years, the ladies’ association has done renovations, established a presidential library, and secured view rights to the lovely vista of water and woods seen from the piazza. I don’t know whether the regents are still called Mrs. Virginia and Mrs. Connecticut and Mrs. Mississippi and so forth, but it’s a charming touch.

Washington and Martha returned to Mount Vernon after he stepped down from the presidency in 1797. Knowing he was too old to oversee five farms and thousands of acres, which was what Mount Vernon had grown to be, he’d planned to rent most of the land to other farmers, but that went nowhere. His successor as president, John Adams, seemed weak, war was in the air, and Thomas Jefferson, once Washington’s ally but now an enemy, seemed poised to win in 1800. Jonathan Trumbull Jr., Connecticut’s governor and an old Federalist crony, asked Washington to return to the presidency to keep Jefferson out. “No eye, no tongue, no thought may be turned toward me for this purpose,” Washington dryly replied. Not long after, he died, on December 14, 1799, in bed at Mount Vernon, following a bad cold and the loss of five pints of blood via three doctors who insisted on bleeding as a treatment. “All is over now,” Martha said, “I will follow him soon as I have no more trials to pass through.” She’d already buried her four children.

Washington was buried in the family crypt, brick and built into a hill not far from the house. The crypt was overgrown with brush and small trees, and his casket, glimpsed through the slats of a window, was impossible to distinguish from those of other Washingtons. Ever efficient as well as controlling, Washington had designed a new, commodious, vaguely Gothic Revival brick tomb for himself and Martha, each in a marble freestanding tomb behind a wrought-iron gate, with the American flag on the left and, on the right, the Commander-in-Chief standard, with 13 big stars on a blue field, that flew by Washington’s headquarters during the Revolutionary War. The various Washingtons left the moldering graves for their new forever digs in 1831.

The construction on the mansion is slated to end soon, leaving the house to shine in 2026. I have no quibbles about the house aside from its clunker interpretation of Washington’s slaveholding and the website, which needs sharpening and toughening. These two points aside, though, Mount Vernon is a highpoint in America’s heritage trail.