🇺🇸 Mount Vernon was treated as neutral ground during the Civil War. Both sides still claimed George Washington. To the South he was a Virginian first. They put him on the Confederate seal and swore Davis in on Washington’s birthday. To the North he was the father of the Union. They said the man who warned against sectional parties in his Farewell Address would never have left it. My take? If Washington had been alive in 1861 there would have been no war. The father of the country would not have let his children tear it apart. Painting: He Returns Victorious by John Buxton

🇺🇸 In May 1865, the 30th Iowa were marching north for the Grand Review. They wanted to see Mount Vernon. It was 7 miles out of the way. They were coming up from Aquia. Their general, Charles R. Woods, paid $200 for the privilege of taking his division through the grounds. On the way they forded a waist-deep creek. A soldier named Wood, a Baptist preacher at home, climbed onto a loaded mule. The mule stumbled, threw him under its head, and dunked him every time he came up. The men yelled “Baptize him again” and “Amen.” They called it Wood’s Baptism. They halted half an hour at Pohick Church. Then they parked the wagons outside, went in with muffled drums, and passed the tomb of George and Martha Washington. They passed the house. They stacked arms in a field, made coffee, got dinner, and looked the place over for two hours. Then they marched on to Alexandria. Seven miles out of the way. Seven miles back. Twenty more for the corps. Thirty-four miles that day. Private William Lewis Miller of Company I wrote it down years later: “I am glad since it was the only chance I ever had to see Mt. Vernon.” Photos: Mount Vernon and Washington’s tomb as they would have seen it circa 1865-66

🇺🇸 The U.S. Treasury Guards threw a ball to celebrate Lee’s surrender. At Ford’s Theatre. Two nights before Lincoln was shot. They floored over the seats, draped their unit flags on the boxes, and hosted Commodore Winslow of the Kearsarge, fresh from sinking the Alabama. After the party, John T. Ford asked them to leave the flags up. The President was coming on the 14th. They did. When John Wilkes Booth leaped from the Presidential Box after firing the shot, his spur caught in their blue Treasury Guard flag. He landed badly and broke his left leg. The tear is still in the flag at Ford’s Theatre. They might have never fought in a battle, but history decided to use them anyway.

🇺🇸 This man sitting at Mount Vernon is believed to be West Ford. His family says he was George Washington’s only biological son. What is beyond dispute is that he was given exceptional treatment by the Washington family. Ford was born enslaved around 1784 at Bushfield, the Westmoreland County plantation of Washington’s brother, John Augustine Washington, and his wife Hannah. His mother was Venus. He was described as light-skinned. Hannah had dozens of slaves. In her 1801 will she set one of them apart. Inoculate “this lad West” against smallpox. Bind him to a good tradesman. Free him at 21. She treated no one else that way. Bushrod Washington, her son and a Supreme Court justice, inherited Mount Vernon in 1802 and brought Ford with him. He became the estate’s carpenter, business agent, and the guardian of George Washington’s tomb. He cared for William Lee, the valet who had ridden through the war with Washington. Visitors met him there. Virginia law made it a crime to teach Black children to read. Ford’s four children with his wife, Priscilla Bell, a free woman, were taught on the estate anyway. When Bushrod died in 1829, he left Ford about 160 acres beside Mount Vernon. Almost no freed man in Virginia received a gift like that from the family that enslaved him. Ford sold the tract and in 1833 bought 214 acres two miles north. That land became Gum Springs, one of the oldest surviving freedmen’s communities in the country. He became one of the wealthiest free Black farmers in Fairfax County. After the MVLA bought Mount Vernon in 1858, they used him as a living memory of the house. Benson Lossing sketched him there in 1859. When he was dying in 1863, they brought him back. Sarah Tracy wrote that it was their duty “to see that he should want for nothing in his old age.” He died at Mount Vernon on July 20, 1863. The Alexandria Gazette said he was about 79 and well known to the older citizens of the town. Ford’s descendants name George Washington as his father. That is not likely. Washington was out of Virginia from Yorktown until Christmas Eve 1783. Venus lived at Bushfield, not Mount Vernon. Most historians also believe George was sterile, as he never fathered children with Martha. Instead, evidence strongly suggests that West Ford was fathered by another member of the Washington family, most likely George's brother, John Augustine Washington, or his nephew, Bushrod Washington. That would make him George Washington’s nephew instead.

🇺🇸 A young Civil War soldier with his Reebok shoes on the ground. Oh wait. That’s me. About 11 years old. I was hooked on history from a young age. I never grew out of it. This account is just that kid, all grown up. Glad to have you along.

🇺🇸 John Augustine Washington III first offered to sell Mt. Vernon to Congress and to Virginia. Both refused. By then George Washington’s 8,000 acres had already been cut to about 1,200. The house was coming apart. The roof sagged. Missing columns had been replaced with ship masts and rough timbers. Paint was peeling. Wood was rotting. Ann Pamela Cunningham founded the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association and raised $200,000 to purchase the estate. What sold was the mansion, outbuildings, tomb, and 200 acres. Today, the MVLA has expanded that 200 acres to approximately 500. Photo is from 1858, MVLA