For many visitors, George Washington Birthplace National Monument is a surprisingly complex historic site. It is a place where people come to remember George Washington, but also find a story of how the past can be lost, reshaped, or rediscovered. Historical documents and archeological resources that contain critical information about the lives of all who inhabited this land are only beginning to be understood. This podcast series explores the history, mysteries, and monuments of the park.
On this episode, we interview Dr. Philip Levy, the author of a new historic resource study for George Washington Birthplace National Monument (GEWA). He breaks down how he began studying the Washington family and his involvement with unraveling some of the mysteries surrounding George Washington’s birthplace.
Intro music courtesy of Wolf Patrol. Outro music courtesy of Brumbaugh Family
Dustin Baker: Welcome and thank you for joining us. I'm Dustin Baker, and I'm the chief of interpretation at George Washington Birthplace National Monument. Upon first glance, one might assume that we have a pretty straightforward story to tell. George Washington was one of the most recognizable names in the world, and he was born here. What more needs to be said than that? Well, for many visitors, George Washington Birthplace National Monument is a surprisingly complex, historic site. It is a place where people come to remember George Washington, but also find a story of how the past can be lost, reshaped and rediscovered. It is a place ruled by water. Although Washington, D.C. is only 60 miles up the Potomac River, this place has retained a rural character, and the surrounding area remains essentially undeveloped. Visitors here can still experience sights and sounds that would have been familiar to the Native Americans since the Washington family and the enslaved people from Africa who found themselves all connected by water here in the 17th century. This is a place where seven generations of the Washington family lived and prospered in a colonial Tidewater culture where acquiring land and cultivating tobacco through the use of enslaved labor was essential to building the family's wealth and gentry status. This is a place that was central to one of the earliest federal efforts to memorialize George Washington during the worldwide celebration of his bicentennial birth anniversary. Where inspired nostalgia in the spirit of the undertaking were more important than historical accuracy, leaving behind an interpretive conundrum that we still wrestle with today. And most surprisingly of all, this is a place where the archeological resources that contained critical information about the lives of all who inhabited this land over time are only beginning to be understood. So, on behalf of the staff at George Washington Birthplace National Monument, join us as we share our passion for this place with our new podcast series Upon This Land History, Mystery, and Monuments. For our first episode, we're going to be interviewing Dr. Philip Levy. He's the author of a new historic resource study for the park, which is titled “Upon This Land: Seven Generations of the Washington Family and the Residents of Popes Creek and Mattox Neck.” And you might find that title familiar because it's the direct inspiration for the title of our podcast series. Dr. Philip Levy is a professor of history at the University of South Florida and is an organization of American Historians, Distinguished Lecturer. He is the author of several books, many of which deal with George Washington both as a person and a national icon, where the Cherry Tree grew, the story of Ferry Farm, George Washington's boyhood home, and George Washington written upon the land, nature, memory, myth and landscape focus on the places of Washington's childhood. The permanent resident excavations and explorations of the life of George Washington, winner of the prestigious Society of Historical Archeology, James Dietz Award explores the many sites of Washington's life and how their stories have been shaped by archeology and issues of memory and commemoration. His newest book, Yardbirds the Lives and Times of Americans Urban Chickens, tells a very different story from his other work and explores the fascinating relationships both past and present between urban areas and domestic fowl. Interviewing Dr. Philip Levy today is lead interpretive Park ranger Jonathan Malriat.
Jonathan Malriat: What started you in researching George Washington? What was the starting point?
Dr. Philip Levy: Yeah, I mean, wouldn't it be wonderful if I could say, you know, a lifelong interest in the first president to get an answer like that? And that would not be true. Largely an accident or set of circumstances. I was in grad school at William and Mary, and I was in the history program. I was working with the late, great James Axtell. I still working on Indian colonial relations, which is what I went there to work on. And she had been an advocate of historians coming to understand anthropology that you had to kind of work in different fields. And the program at William and Mary had an internship in historical archeology. So, you could be a history master's student, but you could also do some coursework and field work in historical archeology. And I did that partly because I just want to better understand that field and make some sense out of it. And what I found was that I had an aptitude for it and that I liked it. And over the course of my graduate career, I kind of doubled down on historical archeology, doing more and more work in archeology at the point where that kind of became what I really do. It sort of supplant. I wrote my dissertation, I wrote my first book on Indian colonial relations, but I haven't really worked on that all that much since then. The archeology sort of took over and I got very involved with Colonial Williamsburg digging sites there. And during that time, I worked with David LaRocca, who was a staff archeologist at that colony Williamsburg guy who kind of ran the sites that I was working on. I was supervising all this. And he sort of became my first field mentor, sort of learning a lot of stuff from him, working with other people like Amy Morocco, who helped a lot. So, learning the field from them. And Dave and I kind of struck up a friendship and which is still very much alive and a partnership. And so, by the time I was done with grad school, I had kind of built a little world historical archeology. I got hired at that point at the University of South Florida in the history department, and Dave took a job managing the excavation at George Washington's Childhood home at Ferry Farm. And we had been running field schools together since, you know, the 1990s, the mid-1990s through clay was boring. And we said, well, let's take our field school model and do it over at Berry Farm. This was take, you know, pack up our goods and bring it over there. We both walked into the world of George Washington studies really oddly, both of us sharing a focus on the 17th century. I think we both came in really with a very strong interest in 17th century Virginia landscapes and the rise of slavery. And you know what was going on in that arena. We didn't; George was going to be part of the story. We knew because that was the nature of the site, but that was not what we came in with. And gradually what Dave likes to say about Ferry Farm was it changes everyone, everybody who comes in with one interest, you end up with other ones. And I did not really anticipate it. I had a fellowship one summer nominally to work on 17th century Virginia landscapes. I'd written something about the area of what was called Middle Plantation, which is where Williamsburg is, and I had imagined expanding that into a larger study, and I had a fellowship to work on that, and I spent most of my time looking at 20th century photographs of Ferry Farm, so I got very obsessed with the sequence of buildings trying to understand it. And it took a little while to recognize that that this was going to take over that Washington and that landscape and subsequently other landscapes that that Washington and the memory of his memory in the landscape was going to become what I was doing. And it took a little while, but I got there. So that's sort of how that works. And it's just been it's been endlessly rewarding. There's- there's no reason to stop. There's always more to talk about and more to see. So, you know, one of the things that makes Washington so interesting is that there's- we could talk about Washington as a as an 18th century figure, you know, so he's an ultra for us into the world of the 18th century, which is useful and valuable and understanding American history, his role in American history. But he's one of these people because of his significance at the founding of the Republic. He doesn't go away just because he physically goes away. His memory becomes a very, very important national possession. And, you know, we have everything from national parks to all sorts of resources and objects and commemorations tied to his name. So, there's more to study than just Washington as an 18th century figure there. Also, his impact on the way America thinks of itself and remembers its past and so on. So, there is that I would say there isn't- It's virtually every single dimension of American history has some George Washington angle. What Washington has invoked in virtually every discussion that we have politically, he is always present in some way. You need to enlist him on your side in some cases to make it to make your argument effective. So, he's kind of a scholar's gift that keeps on giving. There's just a lot to talk about beyond just that 18th century life, which could keep people busy for their own careers. So, there's a lot there. And then when you add the materials dimension to it, when you start looking at landscapes and historical sites, it just proliferates. There's just a ton to talk about. So yeah, so I did not plan this, but this is how it has lined up.
Jonathan Malriat: It sounds like quite the journey to get there. one of the other ones. Would you mind taking a second to describe, since you've now talked about how you got into the world of George Washington, How about here the world around George Washington Birthplace National Monument. How did you get started here?
Dr. Philip Levy: Part of the same story. You know, when I began, we began the project at Ferry Farm at the at the childhood site in 2001. I think my first summer digging, there was 2002 Springs students up from Florida, which we do every summer, except for a few we're going to be doing again this summer. And part of that work entailed sort of developing a familiarity with other Washington sites at that time. Ferry Farm was not a preserved site. It was the beginning of a preserved site that had just happened there at GEWA you know, the birthplace was, you know, an established park.
Dustin Baker: Hey, Dustin here. Just wanted to cut in and explain that GEWA is another name for the park, in a way. Every national park site has a four-letter acronym. And so GEWA, G. E. W. A. is our four-letter acronym, and that's why Phil refers to the site as GEWA.
Dr. Philip Levy: And Mount Vernon was sort of the main site, but Mount Vernon. Mount Vernon was in a sort of it was before the library, right? The library, the building of the library about 2013 really changed Mount Vernon and super energized what was happening there. So, we had a few sort of established historical archeology, archeological centers and kind of becoming familiar with the larger world of Washington. We visited places. I remember visiting the birthplace at some point in grad school, and I couldn't tell you exactly when, but I know I visited some because I remember friends of mine and I talking about building X and just having like real suspicions about this, like what we saw on the ground. We weren't doing any research. We're just looking at things, but looking at this thing going, well, that doesn't make any sense. Something, something is amiss here and just not really knowing what was amiss.
Dustin Baker: Hey, this is Dustin again. I just want to clarify that. Dr. Phil Levy just mentioned a site called Building X. Building X is one of the greatest mysteries in the park, and it's a brick foundation. During the construction of the memorial house Museum in the 1930s, the National Park Service located that foundation just a few yards away. And shortly thereafter in the 1930s, it was excavated. Many artifacts were found, leading some to speculate that it was the true location of George Washington's birth house. But the foundation was named Building X due to the uncertainty of what it truly represented. And Phil Levy is going to be talking a lot more about it later on.
Dr. Philip Levy: So that would be before any of this began. But then that became more of an issue as we worked on Ferry Farm and started, started kind of entering the Washington studies world, if that's what you want to call it, a little more fully. And I remember in around 2008 that ferry farm, we were sort of ready to declare that we had what we were looking for. It took a little while before we were ready to say that we had located the home. There were a few problems there, a few things that lines that didn't line up, things we couldn't quite account for, and we sort of had to think our way out of those problems till you get to the point that you really feel like you're certain about something and that doesn't happen quickly. There often is some like one little irritating problem sitting there and you can't quite say that you're confident about what you have until you resolve that problem. In this case, our problem was a stone that was out of place that we couldn't make the wall line up because that stone was just in the wrong place. And you can't. A rectangle has to be a rectangle, it can't be a parallelogram. So, you know, as long as your building is shaped like a parallelogram, you're not reading your building correctly. If something is wrong and you haven't figured out yet what's wrong, but something's wrong. So we had this parallelogram, we couldn't make sense of it. And then we finally realized that we were reading the stone incorrectly the stone that we thought was part of a wall was actually part of a chimney base that was outside of the wall. And once we figured that out, everything lined up, all the lines were parallel and everything made sense. And they were like, okay, we got it. This is this is the building that was about 2008, And at that time I remember talking with the who was then the superintendent at the first place, Lucy Lawless.
Dustin Baker: Hi, Dustin. One more time. Not that Lucy Lawless. Another Lucy Lawless was the superintendent of this site in the early 2000s up until 2013.
Dr. Philip Levy: About that site and saying that, you know, there are questions there. We shouldn't be treating the birthplace site as has done and dusted. Right. There's there are there are questions about that. And there's a lot of research that needs to go on to really make sense of that place. And she was very excited about that enthusiastic and it was beginning with her, but also, you know, carrying through. She set in motion finding the money that enabled the 2013 and 2014 reassessment of the archeological record that we were able to do with some graduate students to really begin to say, all right, what is it that we know? What did the 1930 record tell us without sort of the- the overlay of the discussion of the 1920s and 1930s? And that really sort of started everything in motion that got us to where we are today.
Jonathan Malriat: And that's quite a journey as well on that.
Dr. Philip Levy: It's always like this.
Jonathan Malriat: It's always just like connected. They are how the world has been. As you said, you can always trace the connection to George Washington, it seems like.
Dr. Philip Levy: Yeah.
Jonathan Malriat: Now with all of that connections to George Washington, we know one of the books that you wrote, you wrote several. But Where the Cherry Tree grew of that very famous myth, how do you separate fact from fiction if there's so many people writing about George, there's so much out there, How do you separate that?
Dr. Philip Levy: Well, you know how as a question sort of the poses that you can, right? I'm not sure you always can. Certain kinds of stories take on the lives of their own. And they- they just become facts simply by repetition, Whether they're true or not. It doesn't matter because people believe them to be true and people act on their beliefs, not necessarily unverifiable data. So false assumptions, mistakes, errors, deceptions can become reality by people's actions. They can. If you're acting on false information, then you're sort of the information may as well be real, but it has a real impact on people's lives. When you get into the Washington biography, you know, the body of writing about his life. And that's an interesting place where a lot of different kinds of stories get told and a lot of different writing styles occurred. So if you watch if somebody to write about Washington now and people could do this, we're in a very strange golden age. The level of information that's available to anyone, not just researchers, but anyone about Washington's thoughts and ideas is- is without precedent. You can find online through Sander's online pretty much his entire his entire correspondence and not just their but but annotated like to transcribe that annotated. You can search virtually every letter. You could go to a library. You could pick up a book version of all of that. You can go to the Library of Congress and you can see photos of the actual letters. So if you wanted to move away from a transcription, look at the handwriting and see something in there, you can do that as well. His account books have been turned into a database, so you can go in and look at you can search through his accounts and see his transactions. So you have just an incredible amount of information that lets you really zero in on what he's thinking, what he's doing, where he is, and so on and so on. We're very fortunate that way. That was not always the case. So people writing biographies of Washington, going back into the beginning of the 19th century, had very little actual information to draw on. And what happened was certain stories crystallized certain ways of talking about this sort of became the way this gets done and what biographers generally did for a long time. To some extent, they still do it. Moviemakers do this as well to write a biography. A lot of people will just read five previous biographies and then and then start going and they look for some sources through those previous biographies and then start going. So you get the repetition of certain things again and again and again. And part of the historian's job is to sort of look at these things and sort out, well, what is what is this being repeated versus what is it that I can say, you know, from sources outward. So one way to get at the how of sorting these things out is by being aware of what's in the writing, but trying to move beyond that into the source material and try to look at it with fresh eyes. The same with the archeological record. Don't- don't walk into the archeological record automatically accepting the assumptions of previous excavations. That doesn't mean you have to reject them a priori or just say they're wrong. But- but, you know, be skeptical. Look at everything with fresh eyes. So in the case of Washington, because of the sort of repetitive nature of the biography, you get certain pieces, certain set pieces again and again and again, and you have to kind of comb that out, become aware of what's style and what's actually historical work. It's not really until the 1930s that people had substantive access to actual Washington documentation and there's a change in the biographies that they lose a certain romantic quality that they had of the night in the 19th century, the Washington bicentennial, sort of the publishing of the first major multi-volume edition of Washington's papers that people had access suddenly to actual Washington writing. And so then you end up with a tension in the biography between what sort of the modern practice of history can do and can say versus the way it has always been told. So you get a tension in there, how are you going to approach it? So, you know, there isn't a lot of proper mythology anymore in the Washington biography because of the quality of the information that goes into it. But there are certain assumptions and, you know, there's a lot of Washington biography is very what they call your hagiography or things like that that sort of tends to be in the writing. But there's been particularly, and you have to give credit where credit is due. I think the Fred W Smith Library at Mount Vernon has played a huge role in this. There has been a huge growth in Washington scholarship. So there's a lot of really creative, inventive material out there that is looking it's working away from biography and working into sort of how does Washington fit into a variety of different kinds of questions. So it's a great time for that. But the way to do it is to step the way to get to sort of something outside of the mythology of the 19th century is to is to work with sources, work outward. And that's- that's what we did with the birthplace. You go back to go back to primary sources and not accept just one particular reading. Simply because it's the reading that's there. That's what historians do. It's not what everybody does. That's the job of the historian.
Jonathan Malriat: So, you're just even connecting that story in with the mystery and the different research that had been done here and views on where the birthplace and the birth home once stood. Can you elaborate a little bit for the listeners on why we were and still even are to a bit uncertain where the George Washington birth home stood originally?
Dr. Philip Levy: Yeah, I mean, that's a great question because it touches on something that it's really interesting that I don't fully understand. I've seen several examples of this and I don't quite understand what's going on. I first saw it with Fredericksburg in Ferry Farm in Virginia, and that was that. When Washington died in December 1799, there was a sort of a period of national mourning. His star had fallen somewhat. You know, he was politically unpopular toward the somewhat unpopular toward the end of his political career. He had enemies in in Washington or not Washington, but, you know, in government, I should say. And, you know, he was he was showing his age and people were aware of that. He was he was venerated for his achievements. But he also was not seen as you know, not seen as what the future was going to look like. And if that was not caught up in politics in ways that I don't think he was entirely comfortable with. So when he died, he certainly was a national hero. But it's there was an unevenness to the commemoration of his life at the time of his death. here were a lot of speeches, a lot of, you know, bunting bedecked platforms erected in towns. People would read various, you know, eulogies to Washington. And one thing that struck me is really interesting was that that didn't happen in Fredericksburg. And I never quite understood that there is an acknowledgment in the newspapers references, but there was not everything they did, all the commemoration of Washington waving the flag, the bunting and so on was all pro forma. It all looked exactly the same as everyone else's. And I was surprised because I would think that the town of Fredericksburg would have made more noise about Washington having lived there. And they didn't.
Jonathan Malriat: Especially with how connected he and his mother were to the that town.
Dr. Philip Levy: Some of it may have to do with her, you know, that that her tense relationship with him at the end of her life in some ways may have colored the way the town understood him. They may have been sort of, if you will, marry Partizans, you know. You know, there's the odd question. There'll be a book coming out about this soon. We'll see what he has to say about this. But the there's an odd question around Mary's burial because it doesn't appear that George had He didn’t bring her to Mount Vernon and bury her in Mount Vernon all kinds of people buried Mount Vernon, but not her. He also doesn't appear to have paid for some sort of grave marker so that by the 1830s, when Americans are thinking about there having been an American history, it's not until mid 1830 after the death of Jefferson and Adams, that historians start to say that historians writing about that past identify that. That's kind of when Americans say something is passing, that the revolutionary generation is ending, and we are the next thing. And so, you start to get in the 1830s an awareness of there having been an American history and it's a little earlier example a bit earlier. I mean, the Washington commemorations go back to the 1820s and the Washington biographies go earlier. But as a large-scale interest, it's a new thing and end in Washington's first centennial of 1832 plays a role in this. You start to get a bit of an interest in Washington, and somebody pops up with the we should mark Mary Washington's grave. And he's probably being a bit hyperbolic with saying that, you know, she's in an unmarked grave in a field and the plow was like disrupting her bones. And, you know, I don't think that's actually true. But the point is that nobody's really sure where Mary was buried. It's not as clear as you would expect it to have been. And that sort of ties with this like only sort of halfhearted commemoration of Washington. So, they don't; they, the people of that time, are not really as concerned about this stuff as we might think. They would have been Ferry Farm itself feel this the John Gatsby Chapman painting about 1833 shows it to be a ruin. They know what the home was, but it's just a bunch of stones in the ground. It's not they don't have this preservation impulse. They don't have the sort of save the thing impulse. It's really not until the 1850s and Pamela Cunningham and the Mount Vernon Ladies Association starting the idea that, you know, that's one of the first American House museums. We have to preserve this building. This needs to be saved for the future. And they're not thinking that way in this period. And so, they're sort of lukewarm or maybe just pro forma sort of generic commemoration of Washington in Fredericksburg is an indication of that. And then at the birthplace, you have a whole other version of this problem where by 1813, there's no one now owning the land with the last name Washington, the last, you know, linear. Washington's still off the land and leave. It goes to people who are sort of kin, but they're distant kin and it's just a farm. It just gets farmed, and you have rather famously a park Custis, the George Washington Park Custis, who goes and does the commemoration of Washington's birth in 1815. But I think we've sort of misunderstood that event in some ways also because crucially, because Park Custis was connected to Washington, he became it was also a book coming out soon about him and his use of memory also. And he becomes a sort of interesting symbol so that during the siege of Washington, if I remember correctly, they- they sort of allow him to honorably fire off the first cannon at the British, because, as you know, George Washington Park Custis, this is very strong sense for Americans that the war of 1812 is in some way a second revolution. It's a repeat. And remember that British ships came up the Potomac, they burned Washington. You know, they burned homes on the Potomac as well. So, in 1815, the year after the war, Park Custis and some friends go and put a grave marker, put, sorry- the stone marking where Washington's home had been with the birthplace was. What they're doing in part is sort of rededicating the United States. It's much bigger. The project, in their minds is much bigger than where it was Washington's home. It's like the country has survived a second major war with threat with Great Britain. It is as if it were born anew. And we, these new Americans are sort of like starting the country over again. So the commemoration of the birth home in 1815 has to be read within the context of the war of 1812 and sort of the new rebirth of the country. But they don't know exactly what Washington's home was. They don't know exactly where the building was. We don't know the stuff we don't know about that. Building a lot. We don't know. And we're getting closer. But, you know, it's tricky. You're looking through some foggy lenses to try to understand something, but it's clear that there was no sentiment attached to that hope. The fact of Washington just isn't that important to these people. So much so that the maps of 1810 and 1813, when the land is being surveyed for sale at one of them is done by Samuel Lamp. And I'm not sure that the 1810 map is Samuel Lemkin, but it probably is. That's in private hands not in the park's possession. Neither of those maps make mention of George Washington. It's 1810 - 1813. They know who George Washington is. He's like a major, major figure. And, you know, by that point, they've already moved the capital to a new city named after him. So they just- And these are the people who, you know, live in the world where he was born. These are people who claim kinship to him. But when they draw the map of the land, they don't even refer to them at all. They're just they're surveys are functional documents. You don't do things on surveys. You don't have to. It's also possible that everybody just knows this, and nobody's really sort of paying that much attention. The only thing you get is a little area sequestered off where Park Custis says, or sorry, where Corbin Washington. George Corbin Washington says he keeps a little square where he says the birth home was and he keeps the cemetery. Cemetery out on the park grounds now is the same cemetery, but it wasn't marked. There was no wall. The wall was a product of the 1920s and thirties. So that area was safe for the family when they sell it off. But there is a lot of uncertainty as to where exactly the building was because for whatever reason it just wasn't worthy of their memory. They moved on. So, it's only later that people turn around and say, actually the stuff is very important. And it's interesting that there's another map from the 1850s around the time that they're commemorating Mount Vernon, and that map says, All right, George Washington, George Washington, Geroge Washington. But the one that's closer in time to the Washington family doesn't mention it at all in any meaningful way. So, they are not particularly interested in recording or highlighting or commemorating these things. And they were the ones who were there to see it and they didn't do it. So, we get a gap, right? They could have they could have answered somebody's questions for us. They could have made our lives really easy. Right? Maybe less productive, but certainly easy. But by marking these things, by recording them in some way, they just didn't. And so, we're left decades later with people now by the 1850s wanting to know this information, but not having a direct connection to get it. And they start guessing. They go with what they have, and they just start taking their best guess and they get some things right and they get a lot of stuff wrong.
Jonathan Malriat: So, you've really been the spearhead here on trying to find the where the location is of the birth home or even know more about it. Can you tell us about that search in all the different stages that's gone through the highs and the lows and how that journeys gone?
Dr. Philip Levy: Yeah, and we're still not quite there. So, I don't want to get too far ahead and make claims that, you know, that I might regret later that are contradicting what other people are saying. We're still we're still in a in a sorting out process. So, I'll reserve a definitive judgment. There has been way too much confidence in this whole discussion over the years, way too many people absolutely confident that they know what X or Y is. And, you know, maybe we want to be a little bit more restrained, a little bit more reserved. I think there are things that we can dismiss immediately. There's there are things we can agree upon immediately. One of those very important one is that when you are out on the historic land at the birthplace, you are on the Washington family home. Lot like that that I think we know. I don't think anything can disrupt that. So, there's a difference, though, between knowing that you are on the home lot versus like what this building was, this thing and that building was that thing that I think we're a little grayer on. But there's no question that the park grounds are the grounds. So, anybody who comes to visit, they are on that site. When they look out at Pope’s Creek, they are seeing the view, right, that that is all absolutely 100% real. So, we're not to worry about any of that. That would I mention that because that was a big concern in the 1920s and 1930s, they were not so sure. And a lot of the work they did then was specifically to make the case that that was the land. So, a lot of their research was focused on change of title and lands because there was there were contenders. There are people who made arguments some interesting, some less interesting about where Washington may have been born. There are several contenders in the 1920s for the possibility of Washington's birth site. I don't think we worry about that anymore. I think we know where we are and that the Park Service owns that land and curates that land effectively and that is the place. So, we should not be worried about that. Now, how that landscape functioned, what buildings did, what on that landscape, what dated to when the much trickier question. So, we don't necessarily have, you know, the clarity we will want on that. But what it comes down to and I think part of what motivated me in this is the way that the story of the birthplace site had been told for a long time was one of sort of commemorative error and then correction and everything focused on the memorial house and its reputation. Memorial house was very much sort of, well, here's this 1930s, 1920s commemoration, and it got things wrong in these ways. And I think there's more to say than just- just that. And for a while that was kind of the main focus. This looks like they got it wrong and that has been corrected with this. This building with the other Building X features, which would be fine if, you know, if one had absolute confidence in those identifications. It's not quite as simple as that. What's happening, though, is that, you know, we're headed into 2032 sooner than any of us think. The Washington birth tricentennial and I've said this many times, but it doesn't hurt to say it again. There is going to be a moment when the eyes of the nation, in quite probably the eyes of the world, are going to turn to that piece of land and look to the National Park Service and to the park to say, All right, you're in the spotlight. Here's your moment. And I felt very strongly, after all this work on Ferry farm that we wanted to make sure that the birthplace was able to answer its questions solidly and emphatically and without the shadow of doubt hanging over it. So, we have time to do that. But I think that's what we're working toward being able to say, absolutely. Here is this and this is it. And we know that with a degree of certainty that we've never had before, so that when the moment comes, there it is. It's correct and right. And that's- that's a big motivator. I think that's a very important thing. We're going to want to get this exactly right. And I think we're edging closer, but we know so much more now than we did even just seven or eight years ago. But we're doing well. We're doing well. But this is a national position. I think people are going to want this to be the right answer. I imagine that this is going to be. But I think it's going to be a big deal. I mean, they see what the- the bicentennial was. And I think it will be different because the world functions different. But- but I think there is going to be a moment that's going to focus everything on that landscape. And I think we're going to want to want to be able to deliver exactly what- what the world needs to see.
Dustin Baker: Thank you for joining us for our first episode of Upon This Land: History, Mystery, and Monuments. Next time we'll be continuing the conversation where we left off with Dr. Phil Levy, and we'll be exploring some of what we know about the birth home of George Washington and some of the myths and legends surrounding the state and where it went. So, thank you to Dr. Levy for his time and thank you. We'll see you next time.
Episode 2
On this episode, we're tackling one of the biggest mysteries of the park, and that's its name. We know George Washington was born at Popes Creek, but when we think of the term birthplace, we might also conjure a building. Yet, by the time the park was created in the 1930s, there was no longer a building here to preserve. Helping us shed light on this mystery is Dr. Philip Levy. Intro music courtesy of Wolf Patrol. Outro music courtesy of Brumbaugh Family.
Dustin Baker: George Washington. It's one of the most recognizable names in the world. His story is a foundational stone in American history. Yet at the place he was born, only remnants remain of the buildings and the stories of people who once lived here. One might think that the birthplace of a national icon is an easy story to tell, but it's actually one of the most complex and surprising historic sites preserved by the National Park Service. So, join us as we piece together the past, present and future of this place brick by brick. On this podcast series upon this Land History, mystery and monuments.
Dustin Baker: Welcome to episode two of Upon This Land History, Mystery and Monuments. My name is Dustin Baker, and I'm the chief of interpretation here at the park. On this episode, we're going to be tackling one of the biggest mysteries of the park, and that's its name. We know that George Washington was born at Pope's Creek, but when we think of the term birthplace, we might also conjure a building. Yet, by the time the park was created in the 1930s, there was no longer a building here to preserve. And for over a century, people have searched for proof of where it once stood and what it looks like. Helping us shed light on this mystery is Dr. Philip Levy. And we're picking up in our conversation where we left off on the previous episode Interviewing Dr. Philip Levy today is Lead Interpretive Park ranger Jonathan Malriat.
Jonathan Malriat: One of the other mysteries tied in with that birthplace is why did it vanish? So not just why are we uncertain or where stood, why did disappear in the first place? What happened to that original birth home? There's always the Washington family story that it burned down. But what does the archeology and the historical record say?
Dr. Philip Levy: Well, remember, we have a few different features, so we're still trying to figure out that was sort of in the later stages of hammering out how to make sense of all the different features of the building that's been called Building X.
Dustin Baker: Hey, this is Dustin. Cutting in real quick to remind everybody that Building X is an archeological foundation in the memorial area of the park that shows 17th and 18th century features that have led some people to speculate that it could be the original birth home of George Washington.
Dr. Philip Levy: There are some questions that of hang over this and become very, very deeply immersed in the facts of 18th century records. So, it's like I can present you with a lot of confusion here. Here are things we know, what things we don't know there. So, let's go to before we get to the end of the building, let's get sort of the beginning of what we understand to be the beginning of the building and Augustine and Jane Washington, -
Dustin Baker: Hey, this is Dustin again. Philip Levy is introducing us to two important people in the story. This Augustine Washington is George's father. Jane Washington, though, is not his mother. She is Augustine's first wife and mother to George's surviving brothers, Augustine Jr and Lawrence. She will pass away in November of 1729.
Dr. Philip Levy: - when they got married, they were living in a home that was on the west side of Bridge's Creek up along the river somewhere. It was probably the home of Daniel Liston, who was a compatriot of John Washington. That land and that property meant something to Lawrence Washington, Augustine Washington's father. And I have to, as always with this stuff, it's you know, but it's always good to stress with people. We all have to apologize for the fact that the Washington's only used a few names because there's an endless stream of Johns and Lawrence that gets you know, it gets very difficult to clarify which one you mean. But Lawrence, Washington, Augustine's father, John's son, had some attachment to that piece of land that his family didn't own, because he one of the major things he did was fighting to acquire that property. He was in court. He was dealing with people in England to try to get the rights to it. It was a big project for him. He clearly cared. You know, it was difficult to do something. You know, they would have stopped. But he fought for this. He wanted that piece of land. And then he left it to Augustine Washington after his death. So, when Augustine came of age, that was the home that he moved to on, probably an older home. We know they're older because Laurence Washington referred to the buildings being older. So that's he's on that property. He and Jane Washington were on that property were they living in an old home or something that they built there. We just don't know. But by about 1723, he acquired land on the other side of Bridge’s Creek, the Pope's Creek land. He bought it from a guy named Joseph Addington, who was a descendant of a very large family called the Brooks, who Henry Brooks was one of the first English settlers on that piece of land. When people coming over from Maryland in the 1650s. He was one of the first people to come over from Maryland. And a whole other story which we could deal with another time. But a really interesting one. You know, the Marylanders coming over to Virginia, but Brooks had a bunch of daughters. The daughters all got married. They all had children. And you end up with this Brooks family land being divided into many little, smaller properties and little Brooks descendants all over the place. And Abington was one of these people. He was late in life, and he sold his land. He's going to go live with his sister in Baltimore, and he sold it to Augustine and Jane. They also acquired a couple other properties. And immediately something interesting happened, which was that at that point they had two young sons, Lawrence Again, because that's how they do this. Lawrence and Augustine Jr and Augustine Sr, the father was getting involved in a mining enterprise, very different than the tobacco planting at enterprise, which of course he did. But the mines really matter. He puts a lot of energy into that. He went to England several times, really focused on these mines. And here's the interesting thing. When he acquired the land that Pope's Creek, he immediately sold it to the two allies. And what he did was sort of bequeath it to his son, Augustine Jr, and sold it to these other people for like £5 for them to keep in security. So, he didn't own that land any longer. He was basically a lifetime tenant on it. So that's a logical it's a very shrewd business move. What he's doing is protecting his children's inheritances from his own possible financial ruin and possible financial ruin associated with these mining enterprises. If they fail and he ends up in debt, then these properties that he's going to leave to his children cannot be taken from him because he no longer owns them. So, he buys it and immediately puts it in trust for Augustine Jr. So, it's kind of a funny thought that the land on which George Washington was born was owned by his brother, not by his father. So, it's got a fun little trivia detail there. But here's where it becomes very convoluted where did Joseph Addington live? He sold the land, and the deed of sale has all the usual language of referring to the buildings and the orchards and the fences. But he seems to have lived there. But where did he live? Did his building survive? Is it of another piece of the land that we've just never located? That's one of the things about archeology. We don't ever there's no system for digging the entire property of something, you know, there are always going to be places we haven't seen. We see a lot of one area, but we see nothing of huge swaths of the other area. We have methods for figuring out where buildings were. We're habitations where we also can miss things because we're not allowed to dig everywhere. So, there are places we just don't know about pieces of the property that we just have never seen. We don't know it's there. There are houses all over that landscape, 18th century or 17th century, estimating such ruins all over the place. I got five or six people identified who have plantations on that land. I know the names of enslaved people. We know stuff about their inventories. We had a carpenter living right near the dancing marsh. Right. Who's living on the on west side of that? I don't think he's on Park Service land at this point. Think might be the Muse property, but there's a lot of buildings there. We just haven't found them. We haven't seen them. So, we've seen what we've seen. But we don't want to assume that just because it's the thing that we've seen, it must be the most important thing. So where did Addington live when Augustine and Jane moved over from Bridge’s Creek, which we know they do, because he has a document where he says he's living on Pope's Creek. But that tells that he's shifted his main home. But did they build a home to live in or did they move into Addington’s Home? We just don't know. There's nothing to really clarify this. There's a little bit we're getting hints about this. We'll get to that in a minute. And then the next thing that happens is a guy named David Jones, who's a local builder, local carpenter, who probably was the tenants of Augustine's living on the land that Augustine Washington owned. He passed away. And there's some reason, some legal reason why there's a problem with his account in Augustine Washington's account book, there's some reasons the law needs to know about this, And the David Jones portion of Augustine Washington's business account book gets read into the court records. So, we have those. We have a record of all of that transaction. We have like a little miniature version of Augustine Washington's account book. We don't have the rest of the account book its lost, so we don't know who else he's doing business with. When you have an account book, you have an amazing glimpse into the detailed operations of this person's personal finances. We have an amazing body of records for George. The best thing we have for the birthplace is William Augustine Washington. We have his account from 1776 all the way through to about 1795 or so. So, we know a lot of detail about what he's buying, who he's trading with. And we know a lot we don't know a lot for Augustine, Washington. What we have is this one little portion of the account book read into the court records because the county needed to know about this. And that's what survived. And what we see is that the builder had died and hadn't finished whatever building project he was doing for Augustine. And Augustine referred to that project as my house. So now, okay, what does that mean? Is the carpenter completing a house? Is he adding on to a house? We just don't know. We just know that it wasn't finished and there's money involved. He also was building a church building one of the Washington Parish churches. So, now we know that they've moved that there might be the Abbington home out there and that David Jones was working on something, but he hadn't. But he died before the project was completed. So, we didn't we don't know, you know, the remaining piece there. So, a people looked at that record in the past and said, that's him building the first phase of Building X. And you could say that if you want. You can't prove any of that. All you can do is say, you know, I know that he's building something, but I also know that there's a building out there already. So, one clue, though, that's telling us that the Abington House may be somewhere else is when we looked at the archeology of the landscape and looked at the distribution of artifacts across the park grounds, we could see concentrations and we could put dates on those concentrations because the artifacts have dates associated with them. We do not have a lot of 17th century stuff on the site, and that's very significant because if Abington was living on the park grounds right in the area of the historic area. We would expect there to be at least some of the 17th century ceramics, and we don't see any. So that's a clue that Abington may have been living somewhere, not immediately there. And if that's the case, then David Jones may have been building a new building for Augustine and Jane. And that part of that new building may be the earliest phase of Building X. So, if you see what I mean, the earliest part of that building may be exactly the building that David Jones was working on for Augustine Washington. So, I think that's the direction that we're headed, that there's a core of that building that built by Augustine Washington in the years after 23, after he had taken property, taken possession and started to live on that land. But then what happens to it afterwards? It would it would seem to be sort of what my thinking is, and this is just where my mind is, that with the thought, I'm inclined to think that there's a core piece that is the Augustine Washington building and then additions put onto it later, and I would put those additions in the hands of Augustine, Washington Jr, who was an exceedingly wealthy planter who between he and his wife Ann Aylett Washington, they lived on that property for about 40 years. So, they had plenty of time to make additions after additions after additions. And he's got his inventory is remarkable. I think I mentioned it in the report. It's-
Dustin Baker: Hey, Dustin, again. Phil's just mentioned a report that he completed. That report is the park's current historic resource study upon this land. Seven generations of the Washington family and the residents of Pops Creek in the Mattox Neck. If you would like to explore it for yourself, it can be found on our website.
Dr. Philip Levy: - something you can gain access to, but it's a remarkable inventory. He's got all kinds of fancy stuff, like a big, big four horse carriage and he's a very wealthy planter and it makes sense that he would have a large, impressive home. Augustine Washington's a little different because he moved a lot, but he was living he started out life in Virginia. He moved to England when he was young. He came back from England and lived with a cousin and on maturity he took the possession, took possession of the property on Bridges Creek. Then he purchased the land over by Pope's Creek, which he then left to go to Mount Vernon. And then he left. Mount Vernon wasn't called Vernon then, but you get the point. At this point in history, Mount Vernon was known as Little Hunting Creek, a native actually already been in the Washington family for three generations. The name was changed to Mount Vernon by George's half-brother, Lawrence. After his commanding officer, Admiral Edward Vernon of the Royal Navy. So, the home that is almost synonymous with George Washington was named after a British admiral. He left Mount Vernon to go to Ferry Farm where he finally passed away. So, Augustine was not a let's sit in one place. Let's build our empire and build a beautiful home kind of guy. Is he's that's not that's not his temperament. He finds houses, then he moves into them, and he's been doing that his whole life. So, he's not a great builder and he's only at the Pope’s Creek property for about nine years anyway. He's out of there pretty quickly. So, when we look at who is the great builder, who is the person there with the wherewithal and time to make a massive home, it's Augustine Jr, it's his son. So, I think that's a lot of what we look at building. A lot of what we're seeing is there's Augustine Jr's building and then what happens to that? That's a good question. Augustine Jr passed away. And so, when you get the date wrong, it's like 1764, I think.
Dustin Baker: Just a quick correction. Augustine Jr. passed away in 1762, not 64.
Dr. Philip Levy: And left to his wife, Ann Aylett Washington, a lifetime tenancy in the estate and she's an interesting character a very interesting thing happens with her that nobody really has picked up on. But I think it's really fascinating. Up until throughout Augustine Washington, Jr's life, this is just called the Washington home or the home, because this is the building just where they live. The Washingtons don't do a lot of naming, but really their habit. George is a bit of an exception. Lawrence names Mount Vernon. But George So George didn't name anything, right? It was Mount Vernon when he got it. The Washingtons just don't do a lot of naming. The ferry farm home is called the Home House, and a lot of people do not remember his last name on their home. Just like today, not everybody names their home, so it's like the home. But then when Augustine Washington Jr. died and Ann Aylett Washington takes over the property and lives there for about ten years, suddenly she's getting mails sent to her at Wakefield. She the name Wakefield is her choice, and it appears only in connection with her. There are a few letters that are addressed to Wakefield and references to Wakefield, and then when she died, I think it's 1774 and the property goes to William Augustine, Washington, her son, the name falls out of favor and they're not using it anymore. It's gone. So, it's really, it's her thing. It's her choice to call it Wakefield, and it only lasts her lifetime. That habit falls away. It gets resuscitated in the 19th century because it's romantic. You know, it fits it fits the way the 19th century commemorators and the 20th century, early 20th century collectors want to imagine an Anglophile colonial past. They love the idea of this property having a name, and they think the property special because they care a lot about the fact that Washington was born there. His immediate family. They don't care so much about that. But that's land. They're going to make money off of that land and sell it if they want. So, they're not particularly invested in the romantic side of this. But later, people who are invested in the sort of colorful, charming English countryside stuff there, they really love the name Wakefield and they attached to it. But the only person or historical person who uses that name is Ann Aylett Washington, and it comes with her, and it dies with her. William Augustine, Washington never, never used that name. So. So, what happens to him? Well, he ends up inheriting that property. He he's very young at the time, I think about 17 when his mother died. And he's got a brother-in-law and older brother-in-law who I think it's a brother-in-law who plays a big role, plays a custodial role, and there's all sorts of weird little sales and transfers. I don't quite understand what's going on there, but William Augustine Washington. Mary's within sort of the family network and he's there. He's living there presumably until about 1780, when we suddenly see him living at the Blenheim home, which is about a mile inland. There isn't anything to specifically account for exactly why he stopped living there. It's hard to tell. And the archeology of the features of building X have the building being a ruin. It's hard to tell exactly when we'd have to kind of look really closely, but it seems to it's a little bit earlier than that. Maybe the 1770s, we start to see the beginning of it being a ruin. What that means archeologically is that the cellars were open, they were open holes and they filled with rubbish. So, they're collecting garbage into the 19th century, into the early 19th century, and visitors say that they can see the depression of the of the cellar in the early 19th century. But we don't have we have a silt at the bottom and a chimney that got pushed in. That's the main set of ruined features. So, bricks that got just some bricks get shoved in. Not a lot, not enough to suggest that the building was made of brick. It's mostly just dirt, some burned stuff, but the burned stuff is all fireplace refuse. It's not house fire, it's all small bits. Things burned in varying degrees and a lot of dirt at the bottom. If you have a house fire, the first thing you get is burn and you get large, burned things. Whatever was in the house the night of the fire that gets burned and it ends up in the bottom and then dirt goes above the burned stuff. In this case, we've got dirt and silt going into an empty building and then fire ruptures on top of that. So, either it was abandoned and burned down later, or people are just throwing garbage in it, meaning they're living somewhere nearby and they're dumping their fire, refuse their fireplace, refuse into it, filling the hole. And gradually we know that there was a chimney that was pushed in most of the bricks that are in the future. In the 1930s, those were associated with a chimney that fell in. So it appears to have been abandoned at some point. Again, we know that William Augustine Washington had moved away from it by 1780, and then a decade later, he's moved again, moved up to Haywood, which is another property on the Potomac. So, he's another one who's moving. But, you know, one of the nice things about having his account book, which nobody had looked at, nobody had taken that account book into account, nobody had nobody considered what was in that account book. What you don't have in his account book in the period of 17 nights, 1779 and 1780. Crucially, what you don't add is him re acquiring the things you need to run a domestic, you know, a gentry home. If he had had a major fire and needed to get a new mirror and a new sofa and a new bedstead, you would see that in the account book that we have, his account book. He's not buying any of those things. None of that is happening. That's possible. We're not seeing those transactions. But, you know, we have the account book. He's not doing that. He's a merchant and he's selling a lot of stuff. It's possible we're looking at his business account. Nothing is domestic one, I don't know. But we also see him we see him hiring bricklayers when he's building Haywood and some extent when he's building Blenheim. We see him. We're working up. Let him. We see him hiring the people. He needs to do the work on building the new homes. So, we do see something of the domestic economy. So why does he leave? I don't have a simple explanation. My inclination is to say it has something to do with the American Revolution in 1781, an English gunboat named the Savage went up the Potomac River a little bit like what would happen in the War of 1812. This gunboat went up the river. It burned some plantations on the Maryland side, didn't burn anything in Virginia. As far as I know, the enslaved people of the area were fleeing because the English offered them freedom. So, they were getting in boats and pushing off and going to the going to the English boat because that would make them free. And that they went all the way up to Mount Vernon, had a whole incident there. So, you've got this disruption now it's we know the outcome of the revolution, but, you know, the people in it don't. And it's pretty terrifying to have an English gunboat going up the river, burning homes. One of the things that happens when the savages going up the river is they open fire on two smaller sloops on the river because they see them in there, they see them moving quickly. And so, the British opened fire on them. And when the boats strike their sails and the English catch up to them, they turn out to be English privateers. So, the English first thought they were American and opened fire on them. Then when they get to them, know another two boats are actually English privateers. Well, that's really important because that tells us that there's raiding happening on the Potomac. People are people homes being robbed by English privateers. It may well be that Augustine, that William Augustine Washington said, let's move a little bit inland. Let's let's get away from the river front here and settle ourselves a little further back. So that's speculative explanation. But I think it accords with the way the world looked in 1780 and 1781 that there's ample reason to move away from the coast and settle a little bit further in and avoid the conflict a little bit, which again, the alarm was all up and down the river. People were terrified. And you can understand why. I mean, it's you know, this is a terrifying thing. So, at that point, though, sometime around that time, the building was abandoned and that's that. Now we know that there's a fire at some point because by 1810, they're referencing a burned house on the landscape. But 1810 is not 1780. Right. I mean, still, you got, you know, 30 years for something to burn between 1780 and 1810. There's no reason to assume that a fire reference 1810 was in a 1780 fire. Right. It's a lot of time between them and buildings burned all the time. There are any number of burned house roads all up and down the Potomac, all up all across the Chesapeake. It's a very common marker. There's also a piece of land called the Ruins, which is over near Blenheim. So, there are these place memories in the landscape in 1810. A burnt house, something called the ruins. So, there's been a long habitation there and lots of opportunity for these buildings to vanish in a variety of different ways. And a lot of people living there. There's a change, there's a decline in the number of people living there over the period of the Washington occupancy. At first there's lots of small planters, but gradually under the Washingtons, all that land gets bought up by them and it starts to be one plantation rather than about a dozen or more small ones. So, there's a lot of buildings around, a lot of buildings that can burn. The other thing about what's called the road to the burned house is typical of these maps. We don't see where it goes. We just see the beginning of it. We just see it going up. The neck of land. We don't see where it goes. So, it's the main road is what used to be the county road, the maintained road that appears in the documents of the 18th century as the road up Mattox neck. There's a road, there's a road to the Mattox Ferry, which is another one. And unfortunately, you can look at that map and see it's like we are part of that, but we don't have the whole thing, so we don't know to which burned house that road went. We just know that there's a burned house somewhere along that road in 1810 or a memory of a burned house in 1810.
Dustin Baker: Thank you for joining us in this episode of Upon this Land History, Mystery and Monuments. And this episode, we talked a lot about the ongoing research around the archeological sites in the park. But on the next episode, we're going to dive into the oral traditions, the stories that have persisted through generations about what took place here. Where did the buildings go and how do we collectively remember the birthplace of George Washington.
Episode 3
On this episode, we are going to dive into some of the oldest oral traditions about the home George Washington was born in. It is not hard to find references to Wakefield being the birthplace of George Washington but who gave it that name and when? Another big one is the ultimate fate of the house. Joining us again during this episode is Dr. Philip Levy. Intro music courtesy of Wolf Patrol. Outro music courtesy of Brumbaugh Family.
Dustin Baker: George Washington. It's one of the most recognizable names in the world. His story is a foundational stone in American history. Yet at the place he was born, only remnants remain of the buildings and the stories of people who once lived here. One might think that the birthplace of a national icon is an easy story to tell, but it's actually one of the most complex and surprising historic sites preserved by the National Park Service. So join us as we piece together the past, present and future of this place brick by brick. On this podcast series upon this Land History, mystery and monuments. Fact or fiction? History or mystery? When studying the biography of George Washington, it can be tricky to piece apart. The same is true for the place he was born. Hi, I'm Dustin Baker, and I'm the chief of interpretation here at George Washington Birthplace National Monument. Where does history come from? The power of a place largely comes from how we remember its history and how we talk about it. An oral tradition is a form of human communication held in common by a group of people where knowledge, ideas, and culture are passed through stories from one generation to another. Whenever we are told a story about the past, it might be best to view ourselves as participating in a centuries long game of telephone with specifics and data changing slightly during each retelling. And well, when these stories are repeated or printed by what we might perceive as authoritative or trusted sources, well, then they can go unquestioned as fact. Yet sometimes when we try to trace back a piece of information to a primary source or record, the trail goes, well, cold. Sometimes we even find the answers contradict long held beliefs. On this episode, we're going to dive into some of the oldest oral traditions about the home George Washington was born in. Just before you enter the park on route 204, you'll pass a sign that reads the following:
Jonathan Malriat using a radio voice: Virginia Department of Historic Resources highway marker J 69. George Washington's Birthplace, Wakefield. George Washington's birthplace, is two miles north on Pope's Creek, just off the Potomac River. He was born on 22nd February 1732 and live there only for three years. Washington's father, Augustine, purchased the land in 1718 and built the house by 1726. President Washington's half brother, Augustine Junior, inherited the property after his father's death in 1743. The dwelling, a U-shaped timber frame house, burned on Christmas Day 1779. The present memorial house, erected in 1930-31, is a Colonial Revival style version of a medium size planter's house. Originally known as Pope's Creek, the property was renamed Wakefield about 1770 by George Washington's half nephew, William Augustine Washington.
Dustin Baker: What is presented as simple facts upon closer examination, may actually be rooted in oral tradition. For example, if you were from Westmoreland County, Virginia, Wakefield might be a place name you use frequently, and it's not hard to find references to Wakefield as being the birthplace, or sometimes the birth home of George Washington. So who gave it that name? And when? But the big one is certainly the ultimate fate of the House. On our previous episode, we discuss what we know about building X with Doctor Philip Levy. We know that historical records indicate that the Washington family was no longer living there by 1780. We also know that by the 1800s, visitors were describing only a depression in the ground where it had once stood. So where did the house go? The story of George Washington's birth home burning down on Christmas Day, 1779, is a story that's been told here for over a century. In fact, it is so ingrained that new oral traditions have been born about certain objects in our collections, told to have been saved from the fire by the Washington family themselves. We're going to continue our conversation with Doctor Philip Levy where we left off on the previous episode and trace this story back to its origin. Will the story of the birth home burning go cold? Interviewing Doctor Phillip Levy as myself and lead interpretive ranger Jonathan Malriat.
Dr. Philip Levy: Augustine Jr passed away and left to his wife Ann Aylett, Washington, a lifetime tenancy in the estate and she's an interesting character. A very interesting thing happens with her that nobody really has picked up on. But I think is really fascinating. Up until, throughout Augustine Washington Jr's life, this is just called the Washington home or the home, because this is the building just where they live. The Washingtons don't do a lot of naming, it’s not really their habit. George is a bit of an exception, well Lawrence names it Mount Vernon. But George, so George didn't name anything, right? It was Mount Vernon when he got it. The Washingtons just don't do a lot of naming. The Ferry Farm home is called the Home House, and a lot of people don’t. Not everyone slaps a name on their home. Just like today, not everybody names their home, so it's like the home. But then when, when Augustine Washington Junior died and Anne Aylett Washington takes over the property and lives there for about ten years, suddenly she's getting mail sent to her at Wakefield. She, the name Wakefield is her choice and it appears only in connection with her. There are a few letters that are addressed to Wakefield and references to Wakefield, and then when she died, I think it's 1774 and the property goes to William Augustine Washington, her son, the name falls out of favor and they're not using it anymore. It's gone. So it's really it's it's her thing. It's it's her choice to call it Wakefield, and it only lasts her lifetime. That habit falls away. It gets resuscitated in the 19th century because it's romantic. You know, it fits it fits the way the 19th century commemorators and the 20th century, early 20th century commemorators want to imagine an Englified colonial past. They love the idea of this property having a name, and they think the property special because they care a lot about the fact that Washington was born there. His immediate family, they don't care so much about that. But it's land, they're going to make money off of that land and sell it if they want. So they're not particularly invested in the romantic side of this. But later, people who are invested in the sort of colorful, charming English countryside stuff. They’re, they really love the name Wakefield and they attached to it. But the only person, historical person who uses that name is Ann Aylett Washington, and it comes with her and it dies with her.
Dustin Baker: And Phil, I'm glad you brought this up. I promise I'm not making this up for the purpose of the podcast. But I was driving home from work yesterday and I stopped at a gas station, so I'm still in my park service uniform. And a gentleman at the pump across from me goes, “hey, you work up at the state park.” And I said, “I work at George Washington's Birthplace”. And he goes, “You mean Stratford Hall?” And I said, “No, George Washington's Birthplace”. And he says, “I don't think I've heard of that.” And I go, “Well, most people around here call it Wakefield.” And he goes, “Wakefield, yes, I know where you're talking about.” So I guess I just would like to know why you think these place names persist for so long into the present era and why stories like the House Fire on Christmas Day. Why do those persist for as long as they do up until, you know, being something that someone today might reference this place as Wakefield?
Dr. Philip Levy: Yeah. I mean, the house fire story is its own complicated thing. There are, its fun to consider this, there is a house fire story for every Washington home, every one of them burned down. Ferry Farm has a story associated with 1740, where we are able to archeologically identify this, but there is two letters that referenced the 1740 fire, one in 1741 that specifically said sorry about your fire. And then in the 1790s you get another letter to George, someone who's reminding him about the fire at Ferry Farm, and that fire was on Christmas. So you got a 1790 letter saying, I lived across the river. And I remember when on Christmas your father's home burned and everybody had to go live in the kitchen. Its a very good letter. Right. That’s a very, that letter documents an actual event that that kind of memory in the lifetime of the people who are writing it. That's good stuff. Tied with another letter at the time in 1740 that references a fire that it immediately happened. So the very farm fire is very, very solid, very well dated and very real. What ended up happening is, remember I said in the biographies, people don't have access to a full range of information. They don't have all these documents. So you get somebody who does have some documents and they write about it. So you can find in the biographies people trying to figure out what house burned. So when a guy named David Humphreys, who was an officer in Washington, Army, one of Washington’s sort of supporting officers, decided to write a biography of Washington, the first attempt at this, in the late 1780s. Washington gave him access to some of his papers and he wrote a biography that ultimately wasn't published in his lifetime. It got published much later. But one of the things that makes that biography really useful is he gave a draft of it to Washington to look over, and Washington commented on some details. And I've always thought the details that he comments on are incredibly important because we get so little where Washington talks about his family. So we get these little bits. They're really quite telling. And one of the comments he makes is when he talks about the events of his childhood, which there's very little mentioned in Humphreys’ biography. He says, My father's house burned. That's it. But it's I think it's either his, I think I think, he, I think Humphrey’s writes his father's house burned, referencing what Washington has said. I don't remember the pronoun, but but the point is that Washington says my father's house burned and he associates that with his childhood. So that's probably the Ferry Farm story. Right, you with me? But that all speaks to the Ferry Farm fire. But the notion of a fire gets locked in the mind. And so you have some biographers in the 19th century who were just trying to solve problems. They know that Augustine left Pope's Creek and they know he left about 1740, 1738, 1736 right, pick your date. They know he leaves in that period. And so they say, Oh, a fire and he left. The home at Pope’s Creek must have burned down. So they look at the existing fire documentation in the letters and say, that must be why they left Pope’s Creek. So you start to get people saying, no, the fire was at Pope's Creek. Ferry Farm gets ignored in that story. In that version, they just ignore it. It's just not enough to say they just ignore it entirely. Parson Weems, the guy who wrote the Cherry Tree story, wrote, you know, one of the first major Washington biographies he wrote a story about, and this is a wacky thing, but he wrote a story about Mary Washington having a dream. And in the dream, Mount Vernon burns down, except that George was like five or six years old, saves the home by running up and down a ladder, pouring water on the fire. So little six year old George saves Mount Vernon from burning down. This is a dream that Mary Washington had and Parson Weems tells us, It's a political allegory and he explains the politics. It's a very strange, but, you know, but any time, any time you have an allegory, and then you got to explain what the allegory means. You haven't done the allegory very well. But that's exactly what he does. Here's what and here's what it means. But the point is, like, now there's a Washin.. Now there's a Mount Vernon fire story also. And the Mount Vernon fire story involves a fire breaking out on the roof of the ell of the house. They are not sure exactly. I mean, I guess you could have sparks coming out of the chimney and landing on wooden shingles. That could be the beginning of a fire on the roof. But there's a crucial pair of details here on the roof of the ell of a house that is buried in in Weem's Life of Washington. So now we've got a fantasy story of a fire at Mount Vernon. We've got documents from the period about a fire that probably tied to Ferry Farm, and the archeology supports that. And we've got historians trying to explain why they left Pope’s Creek and saying, it must have been the fire. So fire is now being used in a bunch of different ways. Then there's a series of biographies and the writers who in the 1880s and 1890s start writing a version of a fire at Pope's Creek and a letter emerges about 1883. It's credited to Sarah Tayloe Washington, who would have been in her eighties at the time. And she says that she learned from her grandfather who she she couldn't have been any older than nine or so when her grandfather died and he was in his seventies at the time. So you've got in 1883, you've got the memory of an 80 year old recalling a story told her by a 70 year old roughly 70 years earlier. It's not exactly a great lineage for a story, not great evidence. And she says there was a fire and they pulled the furniture out. She's a few details and she says it was, she says it was during the revolution. Then you get a landowner, Wilson, who lives nearby, and he knows a version of that story that he learned from her. And he says, no, it was 1779, so he puts a date on it. But then you get a guy who's from New York who's a kind of a forger, forger of credentials for, for objects and. He tells another story and his story says, No, it was 1780. And he says, of all the most wonderful things in the world, that sparks came out of the chimney and it started a fire on the roof of the ell of the house. And that's the story that the Wakefield Memorial Association uses as their fire story. It uses the elements of Mary Washington's dream to tell this story. And it's garbled. It's all, it's like all the stuff gets garbled. It's like you take all these little details of fire and put them in a blender and just, like, blend them all together and pour them out. Like, here's this one, here's that one. So all this, you see what I'm saying, all of this is so corrupted by cross-fertilization and different storytellings, that none of it is credible. There's no reason to to put any stock in any of this. The only one that works is the Ferry Farm story, because it's the only one that's documented in the 18th century by the people alive at the time are talking about it. And then it gets even more confusing because there's a letter from, these are the thing people don’t refer to, that's why you want to go back to documents, there's a letter from 1790, I think is the date from William Augustine Washington that he says he talks about what a bad year it's been because he's had two major barn fires and that would be at the Pope’s Creek property somewhere around it. By 1790, He's living at, living on the Potomac. He’s moved away from Blenheim, but he's in the same area. He owns that land and we don't know where the tobacco plants are. They may have been on the Pope's creek land because they would be all over the place. They'd be wherever they need to be. But two of his barns burned down. And he writes about it as like this kind of disaster that he befalls. So when you go back to Sarah Tayloe, Washington, as a nine year old learning a fire story from a 70 year old. Maybe he was talking about the barns. I mean, the loss of the tobacco barns is a huge financial loss for him. That is a very bad thing to happen to somebody who's growing tobacco. So winter fire that means those barns were full of tobacco. That's why they burned the way they did. He lost it. He lost a year's crop. And that's going to stick with you. You're going to remember that. So maybe what she remembered as a house was actually the tobacco barns. But also everybody at that point already knew the Parson Weems made up fire story. And you find other people, there were biographers of Mary Washington. There's woman in 1902 who writes, I think its 1902, writes about Mary Washington. And she tells she tells the Weem’s fire story. It's a dream that Weem’s made up. She tells that story and sets it at Pope's Creek and tells it as, as if it's historical fact. The ell, the fire on the roof, it's all made up. But what happens is the stuff gets written and it makes it into a book. And when it gets into one book, it makes it into the next book. And when it makes it to that one, it makes it into the third book. And the third person, when somebody says, Why did you say that? They say, Oh, it was, uh, I got two citations worth two other biographers told this story. And so these things just take on lives of their own and they become the ways that people understand a place and that becomes deeply personal. Becomes who you are, how you associate yourself with a landscape. Who, who you are in relation to the community and the story. So having this knowledge, knowing these things, knowing the name Wakefield, is a way of belonging in the community. It's a way of being part of the community. And people take that very seriously and will often hold on to those things and treasure them because they're, they're about identity. They're not the kind of project that we might be interested in, which is historical reality. What can I cite? What can I prove in documents, you know, without necessarily without sort of calling, you know, winners and losers before says, well, what do the documents help me see? what do I see in the documents? But this other experience, this identity piece, this belonging, this being part of something that's less concerned about what the documents have to say and is more concerned with, what did you learn growing up? What did your grandmother tell you? How have you always referred to this place? What stories have you always told about it? And those are comforting. And again, they're about belonging. So they stay because they do real work for people. They're very important. They don't have to be real to be important, though. Historians are not obligated to sort of honor them as if they are historically viable. But they play a role in people's understanding of a place. And in that way they're extremely important. And that's why they survive. They survive because they matter to people.
Dustin Baker: Yeah, and speaking of peoples understanding of a place, you know, we have so many stories that are blended and intermingled with facts for this location, but we also have an idealized physical landscape here now with commemorative buildings that are what visitors see and with, you know, nearly 100,000 visitors coming to this place, trying to form a connection with George Washington every year. As someone who's based in historic fact, I'm just interested in what you make of that.
Dr. Philip Levy: I mean, first of all, 100,000 is great and you'll be grateful more. I mean, that's a great number, particularly for a place that is, you know, off the beaten track. That's a great number. So that's a very exciting. It's a very exciting thing. People want that connection. you know, one of the things that that Park shows that's important to interesting in the Memorial House, is when you read the work of the people, Josephine Wheelright Rust, and people who are sort of working with her. When, what they were talking about was the idea of a fitting commemoration. So remember I said earlier that 1810 people marking the landscape don't really reference George. They either know it to the point where it doesn't feel like it needs to be referenced or it just is just not that important to them. But later generations will completely turn that around and make George the most important thing about the landscape. That's indeed the world that we inhabit, Right? The reason we're talking about the landscape at all is because of the Washington association and the sort of national recognition of the importance of the Washington association. So when they're doing their first commemorations in the 1920s, they they are completely bought in in Washington being great and important and fabulous. And, you know, they want to be the people who commemorated Washington. Like that that is their that's a big identity project for them. That's who they want to be in the world. And so they talk about things. They want to make a fitting a fitting commemoration. In other words, they want something that they think honors the greatness of the memory and the image. That's what they're going for. That's not the same as saying what sat on the land in the 18th century. And let's look at that. It's a very different kind of project. Augustine Washington, whether he built or moved into a home, knows nothing about the future greatness of his son. He’s just building, he’s the guy building a home with with whatever resources he has, and then he's leaving anyway. He goes to England all the time. Right. So, you know, he's I don't know how deeply invested in building a great home Augustine Washington was. That's not his priority but the people who are commemorating George's birth centuries later, they they're very interested in fitting and you read some of their work, particularly Charles Arthur Hoppin, who was an historian for that project, he’s a genealogist, but he does the historical research for them. Hoppin’s an interesting guy because he’s very good at finding documents, but he's terrible at understanding them. So his reads of documents are always a little bit wacky. The, one of the things he is very concerned about, people who are arguing that Washington may have been born somewhere else. Obviously he's concerned about that because he's involved in raising the money for this project. He doesn't want to suddenly find out that they're wrong, right? So so he does everything he can to sort of undermine them by writing stuff mostly, you know, writing snarky things about them being wrong. But there's that painting or that there's the the the Currier and Ives lithograph of of the birth place and that we won't go into that. That's a whole complicated Ferry Farm story. But there's a chain of image that gets us to the to that Currier Ives image. And Hoppin hates that image. He's really, really upset about that and writes extensively about how it's it's an affront to think that Washington could have been born in such a humble, simple, poor looking home. How could that have happened, a man as great as this could never have been born in such a simple home? It's like, Well, that's absurd statement. But it shows you where his personal investment is in this and what he wants of Washington. And so he's part of a project that builds a grand brick mansion to commemorate Washington because they think that fitting. Their Washington, their understanding of him needs to have been born in a grand, magnificent building that befits the status that he will have later in life. We would not talk that way. And this is why it's very important to to recognize the people doing historical work in the 1930s and 1920s. It might be called historical work, but their project is not like our project. They are they're operating on very different sets of assumptions. And what constitutes historical is just very, very different. So, so what do you do then when you have a landscape like the one you have at the birth place, where you have a lot of commemorative buildings? You know, I think you can explain that to people. I'm not sure everybody's going to get that. But I think I think a lot of times people just want to know what's real and what's not real. And while I and many people like me love reconstructions, I love a rebuilt building. Nothing makes me happier. Not everybody's going to see it that way. They want, they want real. Real and not real. I would reject those categories, but I understand it. The best thing to do in those circumstances is to use them as teaching tools. In one nice thing about a rebuilt building is people can handle it. People can sort of touch it and come in contact with it and be in it in a way that you would not want with an actual 18th century building. You would have to keep them a bit at arm's length. So you had these great interpretive platforms to talk about 18th century life. I also, when I've taken students out there, we've talked about the memorial house. It's true that the memorial house sits probably in the wrong place and is not a good representation of what we can tell was on that land. However, it is a pretty good mock up of something like Gunston Hall. It does look like a nice 18th century home and there are a lot of Virginians who would've been very happy to have lived in that home in the middle of the 18th century. And I think there's a lot you can do just by saying here is a good sort of imagined setting for elite, elite Virginians lives. So a lot of the stuff about how you move through a home, how central passages function, how rooms function, which I think is already part of the interpretation, that stuffs all available to you. So I think you can use it very much to your advantage to talk about the world of the 18th century.
Dustin Baker: Thank you for joining us on this episode of Upon This Land History, Mystery and Monuments. We want to thank Doctor Phillip Levy for his time, and we will be continuing the conversation with him on a future episode. But for now, we're going to shift gears. National Park Week is right around the corner, and we want people to leave their national parks not just informed, but also inspired. One of the ways we do that is with the Artist in Residence program. But how do you inspire people with art at a historic site? Well, we're going to be interviewing former artist in residence Selene Jarvis and talking to her about how she did just that at George Washington's birthplace. So join us for our next episode.
