Go to Fredericksburg to Discover Washington the Man

A visit to Ferry Farm for the archeology of his boyhood home, Kenmore for fabulous plasterwork, and was his mother a battle axe? 

F or America’s Semiquincentennial, many museums are launching new exhibitions, and what better place to visit first than Fredericksburg, the site of George Washington’s boyhood home, Ferry Farm? The house of Washington’s mother, Mary Ball Washington, and also the house of his sister, Elizabeth Lewis, are there, too — the latter is famous for its ceiling plasterwork, the grandest in Georgian America. We’ve got to look at Fredericksburg to understand how George became the founding father nonpareil.

Completed in 1775, Lewis’s house, called Kenmore, is in the center of Fredericksburg, which in colonial times was a port hub at the end of the Atlantic Seaboard fall line, the head of navigation from inland America to the sea, linked by the Rappahannock River. By the start of the American Revolution, a rich, plantation-based elite was well established.

Elizabeth Lewis, called Betty, and her husband, Fielding Lewis, built it. Betty (1733–1797) was a year younger than George and grew up at Ferry Farm, not a stately plantation with thousands of acres but a working farm, though a big one, on the frontier. After their father, Augustine, died in 1743, their formidable mother ran farm and family. Fielding (1725–1781), from a planter and merchant family, was her second cousin, but I’m related to myself, coming from old New England stock, so who am I to complain? Up to the point of kinks and idiocy, sharing genes can be a comfort. Fewer surprises.

At Kenmore, the couple built a showplace on their own 1,300-acre plantation. Having some 317,000 bricks and two-foot-thick Flemish bond walls (in which the bricks are set in a pattern with alternating short and long faces), the house was built to last. With so much brick, a flat, crisply landscaped approach, and strong, symmetrical lines, it inspires respect. My tour guide, a local with deep knowledge and a good teacher, took us through the house.

There’s a small visitor center. Much of the interpretation concerns the house’s ten-year-long renovation starting around 2000, and there’s material on the 80 or so slaves who worked there; the hundreds of Scots-Irish indentured laborers who helped build the house get an honorable mention. Nobody ever cries about the indentured workers today, but in those days, most immigrants came to America in forced servitude.

An elegant hall with a winding staircase and tall ceilings introduces us to the interior. There’s plasterwork design on the staircase’s open stringers — the space on the side of each step — but let’s not shoot all the fireworks at once, the Lewises might have thought. Aside from pricy, luxurious Prussian-green wall color and this hint of plaster decoration, the hall is reserved.

In the next room — called the chamber — things turn splendid. The chamber, the dining room, and the drawing room all have mantles with plaster swans surrounded by ornament. Plaster wall medallions over the fireplaces depict scenes from Aesop’s Fables, and plaster flower garlands scroll below a copious plaster bouquet that fills a vase. One plaster ceiling centers Apollo as the sun god surrounded by rays, swags, medallions, and leaf clusters. Another is a festival of medallions, palmetto leaves, swags, garlands, and clusters. There’s a ceiling with a four-seasons theme as well. In the dining room, framed but empty rectangles in parts of the walls make the room seem taller and the plasterwork on the ceiling more celestial. They’re exquisite.

Today we decorate floors with carpets, and walls with art, and windows with draperies, but ceilings are left naked and boring. Why not go up and do it big? And plaster, starting as malleable, is easier to work than stone. It’s a blank slate, too, so imagination can run wild.

No one’s sure who is responsible for creating most of the plasterwork or who designed it. It’s linked to European decoration, English, French or Italian, to Chippendale and places such as Syon House, in London, and other Robert Adam buildings, to Versailles, and to the prints of Piranesi. Colonial elites didn’t live in caves. Inspirations and current tastes, whether in books or prints, came here not long after they premiered in Europe. Batty Langley’s and Abraham Swan’s earlier design books were known here, too. Langley’s Treasury of Designs (1750) is a likely source for one of Kenmore’s ceilings. By the early 1770s, George Washington was designing, expanding, and decorating Mount Vernon in high English taste, so he was an influence as well. In 1775, Washington wrote a letter to Fielding Lewis referring to his “plaisterer,” and there are references to a local “Stucco man” who might have been a slave or an indentured worker.

That so few of the ceilings can be traced to a European template tells us that some local design ingenuity must have been at work. The ceilings’ own 250th anniversary was last year, and they still look fabulous. They’ve had periodic restorations, but plaster’s exterior is more durable than I thought. Structural movement as buildings settle, moisture, freeze-and-thaw cycles, and faulty mixture of plaster ingredients are concerns, but Kenmore’s plaster is in good shape. The renovation that started in 2001 involved cleaning, restoring, and whitewashing plasterwork.

The plasterwork never went away but much else did. The house changed hands, things were sold, heirs took stuff to their own homes, and people redecorated. Early in the last renovation, Kenmore’s board and professional staff — both wonderful, by the way — decided to bring things back to 1775. The original carpeting was divined through tiny fibers left in corners and reproduced by Wilton, the venerable British carpet maker. The electric emerald-green flocked wallpaper now in the drawing room is stunning. “Flocked” means it looks like fabric, and Kenmore’s might have had a bit of lamb’s wool in it. The design is based on paint analysis and ghost marks found on the plaster walls. A good curator has to be a good detective sometimes. Adelphi Paper Hangings Company near Albany reproduced it. The pattern’s called Everard Damask, and it’s got pizzazz.

The green flocked wallpaper might give a heart attack to those of white-bread taste today. Many people think that Georgian means white, but the colonials and the English across the Pond loved color — not necessarily gilding, but sage, ochre, terra-cotta, ultramarine, celadon, pink, carmine, and, at Kenmore, baby blue and Prussian green. Goodness, these people were about to launch a revolution. They weren’t into pablum.

The Lewises might have started rich, but Fielding lost a ton of money from a gunnery he’d established in Fredericksburg. After his death in 1781, Betty eventually moved, in 1795. It wasn’t long before the house left the family. The Kenmore Association, a group of history-minded citizens, bought it in 1922. It opened as a museum in 1925 and has got to be seen. In terms of high style, it stands with Monticello and Mount Vernon.

Kenmore is owned by the George Washington Foundation, a nonprofit that bought the site of Ferry Farm in 1996. It was a leap of faith. Washington wasn’t born at Ferry Farm, and the farmhouse, where he lived from 1738 into the early 1750s, is not only no more; it was the second of many houses on the site. It wasn’t until 2008, after a decade of archeological digging and research, that the outlines of Washington’s boyhood home were found. In the mid-1990s, though, Walmart wanted nearby land for an “Always the Lowest Price” experience, big-box style. The foundation acted, fearing desecration. A handsome replica house opened in 2018. The nearby visitor center is in a mock Georgian building that once housed a school for wayward boys seeking to straighten up and fly right, I presume, through Washington’s virtuous example via Parson Weems.

How did we get from empty land to the site today? The replica house is more instructive than inspirational and is a triumph of archeology, not of antiquity but of colonial life in the 1730s and ’40s, when Fredericksburg was on the edge of the wild-and-wooly west. It’s a story of how we discover the past. Lazy thinkers and historians with a grudge — the 1619 Project crowd — should take note. You need evidence. Good history isn’t a string of fantasies and hoaxes.

The visitor center interprets the archeological story with snappy, engaging wall panels and dozens of excavated artifacts. They call it “the science of history.” The search for Washington’s boyhood home started with land records and anecdotes such as letters from Union soldiers camped there during the Civil War. They took pieces of the house then standing there — a house built after Washington’s death — and used them for firewood, but locals insisted that George once lived somewhere close by.

George’s own survey of Ferry Farm in 1772 gave more clues. He’d inherited Ferry Farm, and his mother had lived there until 1772, when she moved to the center of Fredericksburg and George sold it. It specified the length of fencing surrounding the garden and pasture near the house, and the distance from the house to the road. Then there were the artifacts, some 700,000 found over the years from the time of the Native Americans to our time. Soon, the outline of a cellar was found, then chimney foundations, then the remains of a landing from the Rappahannock River to the front door, then a sense of the house as big, some 30 by 50 feet.

George’s father, Augustine, left a will and inventory from which rooms could be determined. Architectural historians then looked at examples of houses in Virginia to develop the home’s look. The inventory also describes furniture, its wood, dimensions, and hardware, china, textiles, and silver, describing things and sometimes calling items “the best,” some “second best.” Then there are shards reconstructed into quality pottery, some painted with “GR” initials — Georgius Rex — for George III, brass hardware exhumed from the ground, parts of toys, and wig curlers to maintain powdered wigs for Augustine and Mary’s four sons. Wig care must have been an outdoor operation, since curlers were found just outside where the house stood.

Artifacts, architectural history, archaeology, and intuition lead to a blueprint and then the house we see today. No log cabin, to be sure. Still, it gives a physical, domestic dimension to Washington as well-born but not so well-born that he didn’t have to use his natural wits and ambition to make himself into someone extraordinary.

Then there’s the Mary Ball Washington House, where George Washington’s mother lived from 1772 to her death in 1789. Mary wasn’t the Mama Rose of Fredericksburg, but she was a tough cookie who George revered and feared. She gave him many bouts of agita. It’s owned by Washington Heritage Museums, a Fredericksburg-based nonprofit that also owns the Rising Sun Tavern, where George’s brother, Charles, lived. The museums also own the Mary Washington Monument, an obelisk — like Mary, larger than life — near where we think she’s buried.

Mary, born between 1707 and 1709, uneducated and hardly highbrow, was widowed with five young children when her husband died in 1743. She never remarried, unusual for a widow then, and stayed at Ferry Farm, running the place until George came of age and inherited the place from his father. Practically, though, she ran it day to day well into old age, since George was a busy man. Mary was an heiress herself but always land-rich and cash-poor and, as a woman, legally under the thumb of trustees.

George bought the house, then three rooms and a big yard, for his mother when she finally tired of living at isolated Ferry Farm and wanted to be near her only daughter, Betty, whose home and plantation backed into the yard that would be Mary’s. She told her son she wanted “a commodious house with land.” That’s what he found for her. The house was much expanded after Mary died, but today it can still be imagined as hers.

A well-informed costumed guide took us through the house. I never liked costumed guides in old house museums until I moved back to Vermont, where everyone looks colonial, so I don’t think it’s odd anymore. I focused on Mary’s bedroom and lifestyle. Her “best looking glass” hangs there, a polished tin-and-mercury mirror, the treasure among the few things in the house that actually belonged to her. Her slave maid slept on a thin mattress on the floor by her bed. The kitchen is in a separate brick-floored building a few steps from the house. Kitchens were fire hazards, so that was the norm.

Mary probably spent a lot of time in the kitchen, which was also her activity room. The one we see was built in 1804, after Mary died, but it’s likely similar to what she would have known. It’s an open space, about 15 by 15 feet, with a complete set of iron hooks and chains, pots and kettles of all dimensions, chafing dishes, toasters, fire dogs, roasters, a Dutch oven, a butter churn, and rows for plates and vessels. There’s a corner for spinning wool and a spot for canning and drying fruits and vegetables.

The museum has attentively restored a half-acre kitchen garden, moving it years ago from an ornamental flower garden to a garden that feeds a household. The garden includes espaliered fruit trees, dwarf red currants, vegetable and herb beds, pollinator flowers, grape vines, and beds for climbing edibles such as corn, beans, and squash. Mary had a cow for milk. Today, a landscape architect advises on features of colonial gardens. On the scene, too, is a paid gardener and the local garden club for intrigue and infighting. Mary’s sundial is in the garden as well.

Mary had a reputation among historians as a battle axe and the Mother of All Complainers, but this, we’re learning, might be inaccurate. Letters between her and George show a state of perennial negotiation after she left Ferry Farm, but she had, after all and in effect, surrendered her checkbook to her son. She wasn’t an ardent Loyalist at heart, as some have suggested. She was certainly stingy with praise. On the triumph at Yorktown, she was silent. She was a tad tyrannical but raised four sons, so this is to be expected.

On the one hand, Washington Irving, George’s first high-end biographer — let’s not count Parson Weems — said Mary would now and then note in conversation that George was “a good son” and had “done his duty as a man.” George traveled to her house in Fredericksburg in 1788 to ask her for her blessing on the cusp of his presidency, which he got.

On the other hand, she complained a lot about George’s inattentiveness to her. She sabotaged George’s youthful wish to join the British Navy, fearing she’d never see him again. “What nonsense,” she snapped when she heard someone refer to George as His Excellency. Mary doesn’t seem to have liked Martha and never, as far as we know, visited Mount Vernon. George often lent her money, waspily and correctly observing that she’d never pay him back. She was barmy in later life. Still, she’s the most famous of presidential mothers. Mary Washington College was named for her. It was first the Commonwealth’s public college for women, later a teachers’ college, and now a liberal arts college in Fredericksburg that’s stupidly called the University of Mary Washington.

I’ll write about my visit to Charlottesville and about Civil War battlefields near Fredericksburg in a couple of weeks. Two were virtually on Kenmore’s doorsteps. Praise the Lord for those 317,000 bricks and two-foot thick walls.