George Washington's Ferry Farm

FUN FACT:  Did you know that all four presidents depicted on Mount Rushmore were registered surveyors?  That's right!  According to our guide at George Washington's Ferry Farm, this was so.  Our guide related that only George Washington and Abraham Lincoln actually worked as professional surveyors.  He said that Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson, while trained and registered, only used their skills for their own purposes, or to support their other endeavors.  Some internet research suggest that this was not quite accurate.  According to a 2018 article in American Surveyor titled, "Three Surveyors... and Another Guy," Thomas Jefferson actually served as a county surveyor, but Teddy Roosevelt only used surveying skills in his travels.  Well, it made a great historic sound bite.

But back to our story.

While visiting the D.C. area, we toured George Washington's Mount Vernon by ourselves in 2012,  and again with Matt, Weina and William in March 2021:

Our earlier tours of Mount Vernon told us the story of George Washington's life during the period that he owned Mount Vernon, but they did not cover his youth.  When he was six years old, his family moved to a farm in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where we are currently staying in our RV.  Although it has had various names over the years, it was most commonly referred to as "Ferry Farm" during George Washington's life because a prominent local river ferry operated across the Rappahannock River to Fredericksburg at the location of the farm.

George Washington's father, Augustine, died when George was twelve years old, and, while George inherited the farm (his older brothers inherited two other plantations, including what was later part of the Mount Vernon plantation), George's mother Mary took charge of the 600-acre farm and its 20 slaves while George was growing up, and eventually moved from the farm to a house in Fredericksburg in 1772.

After the farm was sold in 1772, it passed through a series of private hands, remaining a farm, until the George Washington Foundation purchased a portion of the land in 1996.  Since 2003, the foundation has supported an archeological field school at the site. In 2006-2008 the foundation's archeology team found the cellar to, and thus the location of George Washington's original boyhood home, which had become nearly ruined as early as 1833. In 2015, groundbreaking began on a replica house built above the original foundations using information gleaned from the archaeological remains, contemporary descriptions of the original house, and knowledge of similar houses in Colonial Virginia. The house was built using eighteenth-century building techniques by experts in colonial craftsmanship, and completed and opened to the public in 2018. It is stocked with reproductions of the furniture and objects listed in Augustine Washington's probate inventory as having been in the house when he died in 1743. Since they are reproductions, tour guides encourage guests to interact with all of the objects in the house, allowing them to sit on the furniture, open cabinets, and handle objects.

The reproduced farmhouse illustrates a modified Georgian style that English upper-middle-class homeowners favored:

The house sat on a bluff above the Rappahannock River, with a view much like this view of the present day:

The interior furnishings of the reproduced house are sparse, but represent archaeologists' best guess regarding the type and design of furnishings that were actually used by the Washington family when George lived there as a boy:

His father Augustine had a large portmanteau desk, which sat in the formal hall or parlor that was used for entertaining guests:

Archaeologists have made educated guesses regarding which rooms were bedrooms.  On our tour, we saw a reproduction of Augustine Washington's bed and how the master bedroom would have been furnished:

Our guide, a volunteer who has studied George Washington's biography, as well as the various biographies and biographers that have described it, was very knowledgeable.  He made frequent references to Washington Irving's "Life of George Washington" in his summary of Washington's years at Ferry Farm and the history of the Washington family.

Having finished the guided tour of the house, we returned to the Visitor Center --

-- where we saw a demonstration garden maintained by the Foundation to illustrate the types of plants, flowers and vegetables that were raised at Ferry Farm:

The foundation's archaeologists continue their work on the property.  Their current dig is in one small area of the property near the original house site, where they have discovered a line of post-holes that might have been either a large fence or the wall of another building.  Further investigation is needed to resolve which it is.

The Visitor Center houses the archaeological lab, where we saw a display of what the archaeologists have done and are working on:

Among the exhibits are some of the actual artifacts that have been found and reassembled to provide a much fuller picture of life at Ferry Farm:

After Washington's time at Ferry Farm, it played a large role in the Civil War.  With fighting back and forth across the Rappahannock (considered the true dividing line between the North and South), the Union Army maintained a camp on Ferry Farm, from which, during two different periods, it maintained a pontoon bridge across the Rappahannock to the town of Fredericksburg.  The pontoons were comprised of canal boats floated down to serve as supports for the bridge:

Because the Rappahannock River was a functional boundary between the non-slave North and slave-state South, as soon as Union troops controlled both banks of the Rappahannock River, escaping and former slaves flocked across the river, making their way initially to Washington, D.C. and to other cities and communities in the North.  This photo is said to show refugees crossing the river:

Having finished our exploration of history at Ferry Farm, we paused to participate in a "people's choice" judging of gingerbread houses created by local contestants.  We were allowed to examine (but not touch or eat!) the entries and cast our own ballots for our favorite gingerbread constructions!

Having exhausted all the Ferry Farm had to offer, we looked for lunch, and found some very tasty sandwiches at the local Here and Abroad Bistro & Bakery on Princess Anne Street.  Then, after picking up some of our favorite light-roast Guatemalan coffee from 25 30 Espresso, down that same street, we repaired over to Strangeways Brewing to taste a flight of their Belgian style ales to accompany our tasty sandwiches!

This turned out to be quite an eclectic outing, and we felt it was a great Covid-compliant cultural exploration of some of the unique things that Fredericksburg has to offer.  Except for traveling to Philadelphia for Christmas, we'll be in this area another few weeks, so we hope to include a couple more cultural excursions with some more hikes and bikes.  Stay tuned, and stay thirsty, my friend.