CHAPTER 1
The Early Years Along the Potomac
Washington's Ancestors in Virginia
Although today George Washington is primarily associated with his famous Mount Vernon estate on the Potomac River in Fairfax County, the future American president's birthplace, early years and the lives of his colonial forebears were spent in the tidewater county of Westmoreland, over fifty miles downstream. Formed in 1653 and much larger than its present boundaries, Westmoreland County during George Washington's life was a region of flat sandy roads, sluggish tidal creeks and waterside tobacco plantations worked by thousands of slaves. Sparsely populated today, it was anything but remote in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the first Washington put down roots there. In fact, the county was later home to other distinguished Virginians, including future U.S. president James Monroe, two signers of the Declaration of Independence — Richard Henry Lee and Francis Lightfoot Lee — and Confederate general Robert E. Lee.
George Washington was born February 22, 1732, to Augustine and Mary Ball Washington at the family's Popes Creek Plantation, where that small tidal estuary empties into the wide Potomac River. It was in part of the Old Dominion called the Northern Neck, a long peninsula between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers that would eventually come to include all of northern Virginia and part of what is now the state of West Virginia. George was descended from a long line of Washingtons born along the Potomac River beginning in the previous century, after the first known ancestor of his surname decided to leave England and remain in the distant American colony of Virginia. George and his family called Popes Creek home until he was just over three years old, when they moved about sixty miles upriver to what later became the famous plantation called Mount Vernon.
George's adventurous great-grandfather John Washington was the first of his family to settle in Virginia. Known to later historians and genealogists as John Washington "the Immigrant," he was born about 1631 in the English county of Essex and was the son of a Church of England minister who later ran afoul of the ecclesiastical authorities. In 1656, he entered the lucrative tobacco trade and left England as an officer on a merchant ship bound for far-off Virginia, settled by colonists just fifty years earlier. During this voyage, after unloading the ship's cargo in February 1657, his vessel foundered and sank in the Potomac near the mouth of Mattox Creek in Westmoreland County, where tobacco shippers frequently brought their annual crop for transportation to English ports. With the newly loaded cargo ruined and temporarily stranded in the New World, John Washington resigned himself to staying in the tidewater country.
John Washington must have made a favorable impression on his new Westmoreland neighbors because he soon became a friend and business associate of a wealthy plantation owner there, Lieutenant Colonel Nathaniel Pope, whose eldest daughter, Anne, became Washington's wife in 1658.
For a wedding gift, Pope gave the newlyweds 700 acres along Mattox Creek. In 1659, the couple had the first of their five children, Lawrence, grandfather of the future general and president. In 1664, John Washington purchased additional land close by on the east side of Bridges Creek near its mouth on the Potomac. There he and Anne soon established their modest home. John Washington steadily grew into a prominent member of his community. He acquired throughout his life over 8,500 acres, including his purchase on Little Hunting Creek on the Potomac, which would eventually become Mount Vernon. He also served in the Virginia House of Burgesses at Jamestown beginning in 1666, as a local justice of the peace and an officer in the county militia. He owned and operated a grain mill on nearby Rosier's Creek on land he acquired in 1665 (near today's Colonial Beach). Anne Washington died in 1669 and was interred in the family burial ground at Bridges Creek — as was John, who died in 1677. The year before his death he had helped quell Bacon's Rebellion, a dangerous backcountry uprising against royal Governor William Berkeley and the colony's governing elites led by Nathaniel Bacon. During this brief revolt, Bacon's insurgents occupied the Bridges Creek lands for a short period.
John and Anne's eldest son, Lawrence, received a legal education in England and inherited the lands at Mattox Creek, the mill and half interest in the Little Hunting Creek tract upon his father's death. This latter parcel was in (then) Stafford County, "in the Freshes of Pattomomooke River," far away from the brackish water of the lower Potomac. In 1688, Lawrence married Mildred Warner, a daughter of the colony's one-time Speaker of the House of Burgesses, Colonel Augustine Warner Jr. of Warner Hall in Gloucester County. Her mother, Mildred Reade, traced her lineage back to many of England's monarchs, although her grandson George never made much of these lofty connections. Lawrence and Mildred had three children: John, Augustine and Mildred. Starting in 1684, Lawrence served four terms in the House of Burgesses and was a justice of the peace, county coroner, an officer in the militia and high sheriff, but he died young at the Bridges Creek farm in 1698, at the age of thirty-eight.
Lawrence's second son, Augustine, was born in 1694 at Mattox Creek. After his father's death, Augustine (known to friends as Gus) and his family sailed across the Atlantic and took up residence at Whitehaven, England, for several years once his mother remarried. He and his two siblings Jane and John had returned to Virginia by 1704, after their mother's death. He lived with his guardian and cousin John Washington at a plantation along the winding Chotank Creek on the Potomac, east of what would become Fredericksburg. In adulthood, he became a planter, sheriff and justice of the peace in Westmoreland County. He was "six feet in height, of noble appearance, and most manly proportions," a Washington descendant recalled years later. In 1715, he married Jane Butler, a fifteen-year-old orphan, with whom he had four children at the Bridges Creek plantation, which he had inherited. Their surviving sons, Lawrence and Augustine, became George's half brothers.
After Jane Washington's death in 1730 while Augustine was away in England looking after business matters, he married a second time the next year, to Mary Ball of nearby Lancaster County. Mary gave birth to six children, the oldest of whom was George, born in 1732. His other full siblings were Samuel, John Augustine, Charles and Elizabeth (Betty). A second daughter, Mildred, died in infancy in 1740. When George was eleven, his father died near Fredericksburg and was buried in the family graveyard at Bridges Creek.
George Washington's Birthplace
Like most early Virginia planters, the Washingtons were hungry for more land on which they could plant tobacco or sell to others at a profit. Thus, while Augustine was married to his first wife, Jane, he expanded his holdings by purchasing the land on Little Hunting Creek from his sister Mildred for £180 in 1726, along with 150 acres in Mattox Neck on Popes Creek in 1718, to the southeast of the tobacco fields of the Bridges Creek farm. Here he eventually built a new house or expanded an existing one and oversaw the plantation and its many slaves. There has been no discovery of a drawing, plan or painting of this house, but from family recollections it is thought that the brick house had five dormers, four exterior chimneys and as many as eight rooms. In a 1792 letter while president, George Washington described the house as "the ancient mansion seat," which perhaps implies it was a large structure.
George was born on this Popes Creek property and lived there until he was three years old, at which time the family moved briefly to the Little Hunting Creek lands, then known as Epsewasson after a nearby creek of that name (also called Dogue Creek). Then, in December 1738 or early 1739, the Washingtons moved again, this time to what later became known as Ferry Farm, a tobacco plantation on the Rappahannock River across from Fredericksburg, so that Augustine could better manage his business interests in a profitable iron furnace on lands he and Mary owned nearby.
The Popes Creek property was not part of George's patrimony. Augustine Washington II, George's half brother, inherited the fields, structures and slaves on Popes Creek in 1743 upon the death of their father. The property eventually passed on to his son, William Augustine Washington, who renamed the estate Wakefield. On Christmas Day 1779, the house burned to the ground, forcing him and his family to eventually relocate to a new home called Blenheim, built around 1781 a short distance west of Popes Creek, two miles south of the Potomac. Blenheim was a simple brick two-story house of three bays and a central hallway, with interior chimneys at each end. The south addition of this still-existing dwelling may be an older structure moved to the site in the early 1800s. But for one short period, the house has remained in the Washington family since its construction, although William A. Washington's family moved away from Blenheim in 1785 and the Wakefield house was never rebuilt. Subsequently, the area along Popes Creek became known as Burnt House Point.
In 1879 and 1881, the U.S. Congress appropriated funds for a suitable monument to mark the place of Washington's birth and acquired a small parcel of land there from the State of Virginia. In 1923, a group of preservation-minded women formed the Wakefield National Memorial Association to rebuild the house and to maintain the Washington family burial ground located at Bridges Creek, which George Washington called the "Vault of his Ancestors." One of the contributors to this effort was businessman John D. Rockefeller Jr., who helped purchase almost three hundred acres of the plantation. In 1930, the George Washington Birthplace National Monument was established, including several hundred acres and the graveyard, and officially became a unit of the National Park Service.
In the early 1930s, the Wakefield National Memorial Association oversaw construction of what is called the Memorial House, a conjectural reproduction of a typical tidewater Virginia brick planation house of the early eighteenth century. It is not a replica of the old Washington home at Popes Creek, due to the lack of documentation of the original house's appearance. The site upon which this reconstruction now stands was first thought to be the foundation of the Washington home, but modern research and archaeology have now determined that the original site is actually just south of it. It is now clearly marked on the ground with an outline of oyster shells. Other buildings nearby include those of the dairy, weaving room, barn and kitchen.
The George Washington Birthplace National Monument, a National Park Service site, is located at 1732 Popes Creek Road, near Montross, two miles from Virginia State Route 3 on Virginia State Route 204 and ten miles from Colonial Beach. The site may be contacted at (804) 224-1732 and at www.nps.gov/gewa/index.htm.
Washington's Westmoreland
Several other nearby sites in Westmoreland County are associated with George Washington and his family. On the south side of Mattox Creek where Route 205 crosses that stream north of today's crossroads of Oak Grove was the original Mattox Creek plantation of John Washington, on the east side of the highway. The location of the mill acquired by Lawrence in 1728 was on Popes Creek, just west of Route 3 at the end of Potomac Mills Road; although the millpond is now overgrown, it is still recognizable. The site of Mattox Church, where the infant George was likely baptized and may have attended school, was part of the Anglican denomination's Washington Parish and situated on the Potomac at Church Point at the mouth of Mattox Creek, a little over two miles from his birthplace. The church was at the end of Church Point Lane (north of Route 3 about two miles west of Popes Creek) on the east side of the stream, but the actual site is now submerged under the river's waters.
Round Hill Church in Washington Parish was built by the Washington family in the early 1720s, with Augustine Washington acting as parish treasurer to disperse payments to the builder. By 1837, this small Anglican church was nothing more than "a few broken bricks and a little elevation made by the mouldered ruins," according to an Episcopal minister of the time. No longer standing, this lost church was situated about twelve road miles from the Popes Creek house, at the southeastern corner of Routes 218 (Tetotem Road) and 619 (Stoney Point Road) in today's King George County, near Dahlgren.
The extensive Washington lands along Bridges Creek can be seen north of Route 3, along the east side of Route 721 and from Bridges Creek Road, which runs north from the National Park Service parking lot to the Washington family graveyard, which is accessible to the public. William Augustine Washington's home Blenheim is off of Popes Creek Road. It is a privately owned four-hundred-acre farm owned by Blenheim Organic Gardens of Colonial Beach and has a social media presence.
CHAPTER 2
Mary Ball Washington and the Northern Neck
The Mother of Washington
Considering how famous George Washington became even in her lifetime, it is surprising that his mother's early years and family history are not well known. Mary Johnson Ball, George Washington's mother, was born in 1708 or 1709 in the Northern Neck county of Lancaster. Married to Augustine Washington in 1731, she was widowed twelve years later and never remarried — quite unusual among the landed gentry society of the colonial tidewater, especially considering that she had five children to raise alone.
Mary has been treated unevenly by historians. Early biographers of Washington praised his mother, noting her strong will, independent nature and abilities to manage her farm. They noted that George signed his letters to her "Y[ou]r most Dutiful & Obed[ien]t Son," and addressed her as "Honourd Madam." She was typically referred to as "the mother of Washington," as if her first baby was predestined for greatness.
Later histories were rather unkind to her, referring to her as cantankerous, ungrateful and difficult. Washington's award-winning biographer Douglas S. Freeman wrote in the early twentieth century that this relationship was "the strangest mystery of Washington's life." James T. Flexner's work a few decades later is particularly harsh in assessing her personality, but is largely conjectural and based on scant proof. Online sources — including the Papers of George Washington's official blog — are also questionable in their conclusions. In truth, little actual evidence from the eighteenth century exists to make accurate judgments about her character or the full relationship she had with her famous son.
Just as the Washington family can be traced to many sites in the Northern Neck, the family of Mary Ball can be linked to churches and homes in this rural region as well. She was the sole child of Colonel Joseph Ball and his second wife, Mary Johnson, a widow of obscure origins at the time of their union and much younger than her spouse. No record of their marriage or of her birth survives. Their home's location — and the probable birthplace of Washington's mother — is now a matter of dispute. The majority of writers going back hundreds of years assert that she was born at a seven-hundredacre plantation called Forest Quarter in a wooden frame house eventually known as Epping Forest by the nineteenth century. Historian Paula Felder, however, has recently made a strong case based upon Joseph Ball's will that Washington's mother was born at a plantation he was developing at the mouth of Morattico Creek, on the Rappahannock River near the modern Lancaster County community called Simonson (at the end of modern Route 606, Simonson Road). Given the paucity of surviving records for the period, it is unlikely that this question will be definitively answered.
After her father died when she was three years old, Mary's mother married Richard Hues (sometimes given as Hewes and Howes), and subsequently, the family moved to his plantation called Cherry Point, in nearby Northumberland County along the Potomac River at its mouth on Chesapeake Bay. Hues died shortly thereafter, as did Mary's mother in 1720. Her mother's will was filed by an English-born relative, Colonel George Eskridge, a prominent Northern Neck lawyer, tobacco planter and occasional burgess during a thirty-year period, whose home was at Sandy Point on the Potomac in eastern Westmoreland County. He was also a distant relative of the Washingtons by marriage. Contrary to many modern histories, Erskine was not Mary's legal guardian upon her mother's death.
