Weekend of Washington, Part Two

I'd read in Ellis's book that Washington was 6'2", which is also my height (this hasn't worked out for me quite as well as it did for Washington, but being tall does have its advantages). And it's easy enough to read that someone's the same height as you and think "that's how tall I am." Not that exciting, really.

It's another thing entirely to go to Mount Vernon's musuem and come face-to-face (literally) with the Houdon bust of Washington--generally considered to be the best likeness of GW, carved from life. Looking at the bust, seeing the case's reflection of my eyes lined up with GW's eyes, I understood the physicality of the man in a way I hadn't before, and from now on, whenever something is my height, it's going to get described as "Washington-sized."



We had tried to go to Mount Vernon before, but ran into the following things when we arrived:

1. Rain heavy enough to make it a problem, even under the trees in the long line to enter the house itself.
2. A thousand tour buses (18, but still).
3. People ahead of us in line complaining about how they should get to go to the front of the line to enter the mansion since they're senior citizens.
4. Six thousand schoolkids (this may not be an exaggeration).

So, in one of those joint decisions that might be the reason we're still married, we bailed out of the line, went back to the visitor's center, and plunked down the extra cash to get year-long passes to Mount Vernon. It's the first time I've ever had a year-long pass to anywhere, and I'm inordinately pleased that it's Mount Vernon.

The next weekend, the day after our visit to the GW birthplace in Northern Neck (see previous post), we woke up bright and early and got out to Mount Vernon right when it opened. We skipped past the entrance line, flashing our passes (our photos are on the cards!), and made a beeline for the entrance to the mansion. As you can see, it was a much nicer day:



A quick wait to let a school group (they always win, don't they?) ahead of us, and we were in George and Martha's home. A few thoughts while touring the grounds:

1. Bright paint signified money, which was something Washington could display. So there are some rooms in Mount Vernon that are really green. Shockingly so.

2. For a place that was a private residence for a long time, Mount Vernon has an impressive collection of Washington's stuff. Part of this is due to the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, one of the forerunners of historical preservation societies (and, as Seth Bruggeman points out, a way for women to write themselves into history in a time when they couldn't participate in it), and part of this is due to George Washington Parke Custis, GW's step-grandson, who kept his step-grandfather's stuff in a kind of museum at his other mansion--Arlington.

3. Among that stuff is Washington's campaign chest, which, given the length of the Revolutionary War, must have seen plenty of action, Washington's uncommon chair, and the bed Washington died in. After he died, Martha ordered that wing of the house sealed. She never entered it again, and retired to the third floor of the house, which is off limits to visitors, except during the winter months (annual pass!).

After touring the house, we strolled a short distance past stables and gardens and slave quarters (Mount Vernon is pretty up front about Washington and his slaves; they've got an advantage in the fact that GW freed his slaves in his will, the only president to do so; it'll be interesting to see how Monticello or Montpelier handle the same subject). After a while, we came up to the tomb of Washington--a crypt with George and Martha's marble coffins.

Whoever the other people around us were, they must have been high muckety-mucks, because the guards unlocked the gate to the crypt and opened it up for them. They then posed in the crypt, next to the coffins. I didn't have the chutzpah to sneak in there myself, but I did snap a picture of the open crypt. Imagine a zombie GW stepping out of it (six foot two, remember).



There's really not that long of a line between pilgrims on their way to Lourdes and Elizabeth and I on our way to Mount Vernon: struggles, admiration, a mix of the physical and spiritual. A peek at the relic-like devotion paid to a set of Washington's dentures in the Mount Vernon museum reveals as much, right down to the greatest sign I've ever seen in a museum: Please Refrain from Photographing the General's Dentures. It will be interesting to see how this devotion proceeds as we move on through history.

The Weekend of Washington, Part One

Because I'm a glutton for history but not for punishment, we headed out on our Washington journey the weekend before July 4th; rumor has it that only fools and tourists make the journey on the holiday. So, on Saturday, with a bag of store-brand Cheddar Cheese Sun Chips (totally different texture; oddly unappealing), we pointed the car towards Northern Neck, the Land of Leaders.

(Note: Northern Neck (or Westmoreland County) doesn't actually call itself "The Land of Leaders," but it's not a bad idea. Washington was born there; Robert E. Lee next door (although in the plantation system, that's a few miles down the road. We passed a sign for the James Monroe birthplace, too. Maybe "The Land of Leaders of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries" doesn't look good on a souvenir Frisbee.)

After a short drive, we arrived at the George Washington Birthplace National Monument. As far as National Park Service sites go, it's fairly unassuming (although there's a great obelisk marking the entrance to the site, part of the convoluted history of memorialization there; more on that in a second). Small visitors center, separate gift shop. Living history exhibitions (although none when we visited, which was technically not long before closing).

But the location! Well chosen, Washingtons. Well chosen indeed. Here's a photo of me attempting to look noble on the deck of the visitors center, next to the very wide Popes Creek:



The fact that the weather was just about perfect helped, obviously, but it wouldn't have been a bad place to grow up. Except, of course, Washington didn't grow up here; he grew up at Ferry Farm. He left this site at the age of three, which raises the question: why all the fuss? When did we decide as a country that where you were born was for some reason a place of pilgrimage?

Historian Seth Bruggeman argues in his book Here, George Washington Was Born that the Popes Creek plantation is where this happened. The book is, as we like to say, academically dense--Bruggeman's discussed medieval object fetishism, the Colonial Revival, and how dollhouses create a domestic paradigm, and I'm only on the second chapter--but his essential argument is this: that when Washington's step-grandson George Washington Parke Custis sails up the Potomac with some friends in 1815 and puts a stone engraved with the words "Here, George Washington Was Born" on what he thinks is the site of Washington's birth, he establishes the historical/biographical site in America.

What's especially interesting is that in 1932, the park builds the Memorial House--a replica of a wealthy planter's house, furnished accordingly, on the site of GW's birth. The great thing about this is twofold: one, the Washingtons weren't in that class, and two, it's not on the actual site where Washington was born. That would be what was called "Building X," not too far from the Memorial House. Here's a photo of half of it, or, more accurately, half of the oyster shell outline of the house's foundations:



In the background is Memorial House; close, but not quite.

I was reminded of the Lincoln Birthplace in Kentucky, which takes object fetishism to its grandest heights: a neoclassical temple dropped over a log cabin. The Park Service will tell you that the cabin isn't actually the cabin that Lincoln was born in, although it toured the country at the turn of the twentieth century just as such. The Washington birthplace seems like a more honest version of that, and, as Bruggeman seems to be arguing, a microcosm of historical preservation in the United States, mistakes and all.

The next day: Mount Vernon.