Ferry Farm, Geo Washington's (1732-1799) reconstructed Boyhood Home opens

A rendering of Geo Washington's family house at Ferry Farm in Stafford County, c 1738. A ferry, which gave the farm its name, crosses the Rappahannock River in the foreground

George Washington's reconstructed boyhood home opens

By KRISTIN DAVIS The Free Lance-Star Oct 7, 2017  

FREDERICKSBURG The last photographic evidence of a once-impressive house poised high on the Rappahannock River terrace across from Fredericksburg dates to 1830. America was barely a half-century old then. The Civil War was three decades in the future.

The home where the nation’s first president spent his formative years had crumbled in on itself. Just a heap of rubble remained in the place where George Washington watched English merchant ships sailing upriver and first dreamed of a life of adventure.

Even that would disappear, receding into the earth, it seemed, forever.

Now, it has risen again.

After decades of searching, archaeologists in 2008 announced they had at last uncovered the remains of the house. So began the laborious feat of raising from its footprint a replica so historically accurate that the iron hinges from which the paneled doors hang are hand-wrought.

On Saturday at Ferry Farm, the George Washington Foundation celebrated the home’s construction with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Those responsible for its discovery, including Ferry Farm archaeology director Dave Muraca, as well as the highly skilled artisans and craftsmen who built the replica from the ground up, were on hand to talk about their work.

The house is part of a $40 million fundraising campaign that will include transforming the grounds into a living history museum so that visitors might experience life as it once was.

Guests for the first time will get to wander the rooms that look much as they did when Washington was a boy and the house stood like a sentry on the Rappahannock’s shore.

To understand the significance of Saturday’s event is to know that the Stafford County farm where Washington grew up was nearly lost to commercial development in the mid-1990s. Regents and trustees of what would become the George Washington Foundation, along with community members and organizations, saved the property, with the goal of telling the stories of the nation’s first president, Fielding and Betty Washington Lewis, and their families.

Washington moved to Ferry Farm in 1738 at age 6. He left at 22.

Nearly a century of searching for his boyhood home — once the grandest in at least two counties — had turned up nothing when Muraca arrived in 2001.

“When I got here, I knew it had the potential to be an incredible find,” Muraca said. “It lived up to its potential.”

Much of the work before he arrived involved “small peeks into the ground,” he said. “It became apparent to me we had to approach it in a different way. This is a site that doesn’t like to give up its secrets.”

To put in everyday terms, Muraca knew he and a team of archaeologists would have to “dig really big holes” if they were to ever uncover the Washington house remains.

Six years later, on an autumn day in 2007, he called George Washington Foundation President Bill Garner. The archaeologists had come upon what appeared to be a cellar, cut from Aquia sandstone. The material, once common, had not been mined locally since the 1800s.

Garner knew right away they had found what they’d been looking for. But nine more months would pass before the foundation announced to the public with certainty its find.

“You have to eliminate all other alternate possibilities,” Muraca said. “Then really it’s the only plausible explanation.”

The artifacts they uncovered — 750,000 of them — helped tell how the Washingtons lived, Garner said, all the way down to their diet.

“The soil composition acts almost to preserve what is left,” he said. “Fish scales, peach pits and cherry pits — yes, cherries — eggshell fragments, animals butchered, give us a wonderful opportunity to examine how they lived when they first got here.”

Other artifacts would help put together a picture of the house itself, from oyster-shell mortar and lime plaster to scalloped shingles and handmade brick.

Geo Washington's (1732-1799) Ferry Farm

 

Geo Washington's (1732-1799) Ferry Farm

Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington Digital Encyclopedia by Gwendolyn K. White

...Augustine and Mary Ball Washington moved their family to the 280-acre farm in 1738. A few years later, Augustine rented an adjoining 300 acre tract. The farm was conveniently located near the Little Falls Run property that Mary Washington had inherited from her father, as well as Augustine Washington's iron works located at Accokeek Creek. Primarily involved in growing tobacco, corn, and wheat, Augustine sought to diversify his income through wool production and iron manufacturing. However, neither endeavor was particularly successful. A ferry ran between the Washington property and Fredericksburg, situated on the opposite bank of the Rappahannock River. However, the ferry was never operated by the Washington family.

A dwelling already stood on the site when the Washingtons took possession of the property. The one-and-one-half story frame building had four rooms below with a central hall, four rooms above, and a sixteen-by-sixteen foot cellar. The foundation, stone-lined cellars, and two root cellars of the Washington home were located in 2008, and archaeological excavations are ongoing. The evidence revealed that the house was a clapboard-covered wooden structure of one-and-one-half stories with two end chimneys. 

Archaeologists also found evidence of a fire that damaged the dwelling in December of 1740, but it appears to have been to a small portion of the house, and the Washington family soon resumed living there afterwards. Excavators also found the remains of a kitchen and slave quarters, as well as numerous eighteenth-century artifacts.

Augustine Washington died in 1743 at the age of forty-nine, just five years after the family had moved to Ferry Farm. George Washington inherited the farm, but it remained under his mother’s care until he was twenty-one years old. It was at Ferry Farm that Washington learned the principles of agriculture, a passion that would endure throughout his life. Washington spent much of his time away from Ferry Farm once he began surveying work at the age of sixteen. The farm remained Washington’s principal residence until he moved to Mount Vernon in 1754 after his brother Lawrence's death.

Mary Washington continued to live at Ferry Farm until 1772 when George Washington bought her a house in Fredericksburg. In 1774, Washington sold the 600 acre farm for two thousand pounds to Hugh Mercer, a Scottish immigrant and physician who served as a brigadier general in the Revolutionary forces.

Plants in Early American Gardens - Strawflower

 Strawflower (Helichrysum bracteatum)

Strawflower (Helichrysum bracteatum)

Strawflower, a half-hardy annual that withstands light frosts, was introduced from Australia to England in 1791, and to the United States in the 19C.  In New England it has been collected in roadside fields in Connecticut & Massachusetts.  The species from which the garden plant is descended was created around 1850 in Germany from cuttings from Australia. The strawflower is one of the biological treasures gathered by Napoleon’s wife Joséphine de Beauharnais in her famous garden at Château de Malmaison.  The Latin name bracteatum is derived from 'bractea' & refers to the bracts which are often mistakenly thought to be petals. The actual flowers are tiny & are in the heart. It is treasured for its everlasting quality making it ideal for dried arrangements. They grow in a variety of colors - yellow, orange, white, & purple.

For more information & the possible availability
Contact The Tho Jefferson Center for Historic Plants or The Shop at Monticello 

Plants in Early American Gardens - Arikara Sunflower

Arikara Sunflower (Helianthus annuus variety)

One of the major goals of the Jefferson-sponsored Lewis & Clark Expedition was botanical exploration of North America. In 1805 the members of the “Corps of Discovery” spent 6 winter months at Fort Mandan on the Missouri, near the Arikara, Hidatsa, & Mandan villages. The Arikara people planted these Sunflowers as the ice broke on the Missouri River, with soil temperatures at 45°F, because the seeds will not germinate in intense summer heat.

For more information & the possible availability
Contact The Tho Jefferson Center for Historic Plants or The Shop at Monticello 

18C American Cultural Landscape -

18C New England

Plants in Early American Gardens - Globe Amaranth

Globe Amaranth (Gomphrena globosa)

Globe Amaranth seeds were first planted by Thomas Jefferson at Shadwell, his boyhood home, on April 2, 1767. It was introduced into Europe from India in 1714 and was grown in Virginia by John Custis of Williamsburg as early as 1737. The clover-like flowers bloom from summer through fall in shades of magenta, pink, and occasionally white. This plant thrives in hot, dry weather and the long-lasting flowers are superb for fresh or dried arrangements.

For more information & the possible availability
Contact The Tho Jefferson Center for Historic Plants or The Shop at Monticello 

Gardens Display Economic & Cultural Ambitions - Refuge & Redemption...

Gardening in Early America for 

Refuge & Redemption

In a garden one could order a small corner of the world & each spring begin life all over again.

Nancy Shippen, daughter of Alice Lee Shippen of Stratford Hall in Virginia, had married Col. Henry Beekman Livingston, from a rich, New York family, in March 1781.  Nancy, just 18, moved to his house in Rhinebeck on the Hudson, with Livingston family.  There she soon learned that he was insanely jealous & had several illegitimate children, some with slaves.  Nancy, pregnant soon after marriage, moved back to her parent's house in Philadelphia to give birth to a girl they named Peggy.  She tried to mend her marriage by returning to the Livingston home in Rhinebeck, but left for good in the spring of 1783.  By 1784, Nancy Shippen, whose philandering husband had assumed custody of their only child, retreated with her mother to a country house that was “pleasantly situated on a hill with a green Meadow before it.” Behind the house were “a garden & a nursery of trees,” to which she directed daily attention.  She wrote in her journal of the consolation she expected to find there. Although she could not help feeling like an outcast, “with all these conveniences,” she declared, “I ought to be contented.”  

For centuries gardening had appealed to some fundamental spiritual need of humans, whose religions traditionally depicted a garden as the ideal abode for mankind on this earth & beyond. The ordered garden was, after all, Everyman’s refuge from the terrifying unknown, & certain evils, known & unknown.

The garden offered sanctuary from the threat of wild nature & escape from barbarian outsiders. The great garden of the vast American frontier held some frightening connotations for many early colonists. New Englander Michael Wigglesworth wrote of it in 1662, A waste & howling wilderness,
where none inhabited
But hellish fiends, & brutish men
That devils worshipped.

The evils of avarice & the injustices of power politics drove even wealthy colonists to seek spiritual refuge in a nature, that they ordered around themselves.

In 1771, as frustrations with England mounted, a future signer of the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, wrote to a friend, “The wisest Philosophers, the greatest poets, & the best men have constantly placed the most perfect sublime happiness in rural retirement. Under the shades of Forrests statesmen have sought happiness having in vain sought after it in the perplexed mazes of ambition & interest.”

Charles Willson Peale (741-1827) Portrait of John Beale Bordley America was viewed by some as a seedbed in which to establish natural spirituality; & gardening was one method to nurture higher values. John Beale Bordley (1727-1804) gave up the public life in Annapolis to pursue experimental agriculture & moved to a 1600-acre Wye Island estate he acquired in 1770. He was instrumental in founding, the 1785 Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, an association whose membership included 23 Marylanders by 1798.  In his 1797 Essays & Notes on Husbandry & Rural Affairs, Bordley offered his ideas on keeping the common man happy on the farm. He suggested that each worker be given a garden 80, 90, or 100 feet square, because “it was observed by a clergyman…cottagers who had a garden were generally sober, industrious & healthy; & those who had no garden, were often drunken, lazy, vicious & ailing.”

Thomas Jefferson agreed with Bordley. Jefferson wrote to James Madsion in 1785 that, "It is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious part of a state."

Interestingly, there is a high correlation between those with whom Annapolis craftsman William Faris shared church membership & those with whom he exchanged plants & gardening advice. Even though it was 20 years after the colonial period of mandatory church attendance, the people Faris came to know through nearby St. Anne’s Church formed the nucleus of his pleasure gardening colleagues.

The garden was a symbolic religious battleground, where good battled evil, where temptation & sin were overcome by forgiveness & reconciliation. Philadelphia seed dealer, & writer Bernard M'Mahon (1775-1816) wrote that gardening could even end dangerous “intemperance.”