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.