Mount Vernon

Mount Vernon. Situated on the Potomac River in Fairfax County, Virginia, Mount Vernon originated in a 1674 land grant to English emigrant John Washington, the great‐grandfather of George Washington. Inheriting the estate, then an unexceptional tobacco plantation, from his half‐brother Lawrence in 1761, George Washington gradually enlarged it to eight thousand acres and diversified its economy with grain cultivation, a grist mill, a fishery, and a ferry.

The Revolutionary War imparted a civic purpose to such activities. After returning home from the war in 1783, Washington, dedicated to agricultural improvement, attempted to transform Mount Vernon into the new nation's most advanced farming operation, hoping to offer all Americans a model of efficiency, productivity, and industrious labor. Although this grand design never reached fruition (not least because Washington's slaves and free white laborers did not share his vision), innovations undertaken at the estate long influenced agricultural reform.

Following the deaths of George and Martha Washington and their burial on the grounds, even as heirs owned and lived at Mount Vernon, thousands visited “the American Mecca” annually, commemorating the Revolution and honoring the man credited above all others with securing independence and creating the nation. Beginning in the 1820s, politicians and public‐spirited citizens periodically urged the federal government or the state of Virginia to buy and preserve the site. This proved unattainable, however, because of sectional animosities and the lack of any precedent for historic preservation in the United States. An apolitical solution to the impasse was achieved when the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union (1853) conducted a national fund‐raising campaign and bought the site in 1858. So great was public reverence that Mount Vernon was by common consent of both sides preserved as neutral ground during the Civil War.
See also Agriculture: Colonial Era; Agriculture: 1770s to 1890; Architecture: Domestic Architecture; Slavery; Tobacco Industry.

Bibliography

Robert F. Dalzell Jr. , George Washington's Mount Vernon: At Home in Revolutionary America, 1998.
Jean B. Lee , Mount Vernon and the Nation, from the Revolution to the Civil War, forthcoming.

Jean B. Lee