Attachment_N_GEWA_StandardParkTour_May2023.pdf

Updated by Dustin Baker May 2023 1

Theme: The layers of history at George Washington Birthplace National Monument offer insight into the family and culture in which George Washington was born and reveal how we, as Americans, remember and honor the past.

Goals: This 60-minute tour will help visitors connect to the unique cultural history of Tidewater, Virginia, and better understand the concept of collective memory-making (how and why we remember the past).

Objectives: 1) At the end of the program, most visitors will understand that seven generations of the Washington Family have lived upon the land and that archeologic sites are all that remain from their inhabitance here.

2) At the end of the program, most visitors will recall that the Memorial House Museum was constructed as a memorial to George Washington and is not the house in which George Washington was born.

3) At the end of the program, half of tour visitors will be inspired to consider how we, as a nation, still engage in collective memory-making.

Inventory: Historical Photographs, Tobacco Seeds, and Assisted Listening Equipment (If requested).

• Organize the group on the back deck of the visitor center.

• Greetings and personal introduction.

• Tour rules and logistics.

On December 12, 1799, George Washington passed away at his Mount Vernon home just up the

Potomac River from this place – the place he was born 67 years earlier. His death was a significant event that shook a young nation and sparked a sense of unity through shared sorrow.

It also sealed Washington’s status as an American icon.

Many of you are here today to reflect on the life of George Washington. Without his leadership during the American Revolution, it is improbable that independence would have been gained from Great Britain. Without his leadership at the Constitutional Convention, it is doubtful a unified system of government would have been the outcome. And without his example as the first President, it is unlikely that a fledgling government would have had a chance to firmly establish the precedent for the power that the office should hold. We know George’s accomplishments, but what do we know about the place where it all started, and the world that would shape the person he would become?

Attachment N

Updated by Dustin Baker May 2023

You are now standing along the shores of Popes Creek. This is a place where we find examples of rich land and water resources that attracted Native Americans and later attracted seventeenth-century Europeans to the Northern Neck of Virginia. This is a place where seven generations of the Washington family lived and prospered in a colonial Tidewater culture, which forever shaped Washington's life. This place was also central to one of the earliest national and federal efforts to memorialize Washington during a worldwide celebration of his bicentennial birth anniversary. During this tour, we will peel back the layers of history to explore the place where he was born and the culture that shaped him.

Transition: We will now walk along the shore of Popes Creek, the name of which reveals the story of how the Washington Family settled in Virginia.

Point: Use of this landscape goes back thousands of years before the seven generations of the

Washington family.

Tangibles: Fields, Forest, Pope’s Creek, Potomac River, Archeological Sites, Cemetery.

Intangibles: Culture, Change, Family lineage, Origins.

• Although Washington, D.C., is only 60 miles up the Potomac, the Birthplace has retained its rural character, and the surrounding area remains largely undeveloped.

• Humans have subsisted off the natural bounty of this place for thousands of years.

• This shoreline contains numerous oyster shell middens, revealing that Indigenous people returned to these waters for generations to harvest and consume oysters.

• By the time English settlers arrived in what is now the park, many Indigenous people had been pushed out of the area.

• Less than 50 years after the founding of Jamestown, English colonists began settling in the Northern Neck. One such person is Nathaniel Pope, a wealthy Tobacco Farmer and member of the Maryland Assembly with extensive landholdings in Maryland and Virginia, for whom the creek is named.

• Nathaniel Pope crossed the Potomac to resettle in Virginia during a period of civil unrest in Maryland. During these years, England suffered a civil war which pitted the King against the Puritan allied Parliament, which affected colonies here.

• The first Washington to permanently move from England to the Virginia Colony arrived in the mid-1600s. This was George’s Great-Grandfather, John.

• John was an aspiring merchant living in London who was hired to serve as superintendent of cargo on a commercial voyage to Virginia. They brought manufactured goods not available in the colonies and traded them for goods using a ship called the Sea Horse.

• The ship ran aground, straining the structure of the ship and allowing water to ruin the cargo in the winter of 1657. John Washington and his employer, Edward Prescott, are having an argument witnessed by Nathaniel Pope.

• John could have returned to England to start over. However, after Nathanial Pope offered to personally resolve his alleged debt to Prescott, he decided to stay in Virginia and carve out a new life for himself in the colonies. He married Nathaniel’s daughter

Anne. Nathaniel gave the newlywed couple 80 pounds sterling and about 700 acres on

Mattox Creek, thus establishing the Washington Family in Virginia.

• John was a relatively well-educated and ambitious man for the place and time. John could read and write, which Nathaniel saw as an asset since he himself was illiterate.

Pope also recognized John’s worldly experience outside of the colonies. He sought to grow his family’s prosperity by expanding his property holdings in an area that was largely unsettled, and land was still cheap and tobacco prices were on the rise.

• John purchased land overlooking Bridges Creek in 1664 and built a home there. While the buildings are no longer standing, you can still visit the Bridges Creek house site in the park near the Washington family burial grounds where both John and Ann were laid to rest.

• John was not just a gentleman-farmer and businessman. His neighbors elected him to the Virginia House of Burgesses for the Northern Neck for the term beginning in October of 1666. He also received paid salaries from the royal governor as county coroner, trustee of estates, justice of the county court, and lieutenant colonel in the Virginia militia, initiating a noble tradition of Washington family service.

Transition: John Washington established himself in an emerging Tidewater culture and society. What would have been essential to expanding their wealth and influence?

Point: This place existed in what is known as the Tidewater region of Virginia, and the people here developed a distinct culture that shaped the man George Washington would become and influenced the destiny of the United States of America.

Tangibles: Tobacco, Potomac River, Farmland, Livestock, Other Cultural Institutions in the NNK.

Intangibles: Agriculture, Economy, Slavery, Gender Roles, Expectations, Wealth, Exploitation.

• By 1640, London was importing nearly a million and a half pounds of tobacco annually from Virginia.

• Coastal Virginia is part of what is known as the Tidewater region, so named for the numerous tidal creeks and rivers.

• The Tidewater region developed a distinct culture based on a plantation economy that gave rise to the gentry, a small class of individuals who acquired wealth and extensive land holdings through the cultivation and sale of tobacco.

• By the end of his life, John Washington had established his family as gentry.

• Cultivating and selling tobacco through enslaved labor and indentured servitude was essential to supporting the gentry's way of life.

• In addition to managing the business of a tobacco plantation, gentry men were also expected to serve in government and community positions that preserved the social, economic, political, and religious order.

• 18th-century gentry women were expected to maintain an orderly home where they educated and prepared their children to participate in gentry society. The state of the household was considered a reflection of the woman’s virtue and skills in domestic pursuits.

• The gentry dominated political, social, and economic life in much of 17th and 18th century Virginia.

• John Washington’s eldest son Lawrence was involved in colonial politics and he built on the Pope/Washington societal connections.

• He married Mildred Warner, the daughter of the Speaker of the House of Burgesses and granddaughter of an Acting Governor of Virginia. They had 3 children that made it into adulthood: John, Augustine, and Mildred. Augustine was George’s father.

• George Washington’s father, Augustine Washington, purchased this land in 1718.

Augustine, his second wife Mary, and their children lived here with British indentured servants and enslaved individuals of African descent.

• Family names we still recognize today, such as Lee, Carter, and Monroe, got their start in the Northern Neck of Virginia.

• An extreme example of the gentry class, Robert “King” Carter was the wealthiest man in the Northern Neck by his death in 1732. He possessed over 295,000 acres of land and at least 700 enslaved men, women, and children. By comparison, the Washingtons were middling gentry.

Transition: How much of what we see today would have been recognizable to the Washingtons?

Point: This place has a quality and breadth of archeological resources that contain critical information about the lives of all who inhabited this land over time.

Tangibles: Brick Foundations, Disturbed Soil, Artifacts.

Intangibles: Archeology, Age, Abandonment, Discovery, Possibility, Technology.

• Lawrence married Mildred Warner in 1686 and had three children, John Washington III (1692–1746), Augustine (1694–1743) and Mildred (1698–1747).

• Augustine Washington was born at Bridges Creek on November 12, 1694.

• Augustine married twice. His first marriage was to Jane Butler, and together they had four children. One of whom was Augustine Jr.

• His second marriage in 1730 to Mary Ball produced the six children: George, Elizabeth "Betty", Samuel, John, Charles, and Mildred Washington.

• George Washington was born right here in 1732.

• When George Washington was born here, no one knew who he would become.

Therefore, no one thought it would be important to preserve this site.

• George and his family were British subjects in a British world. Imagine if Augustine knew at that time that his son would lead a rebellion against the crown? How would he possibly react?

• Augustine moved his family upriver when George was a toddler. They moved to the

Little Hunting Creek Plantation (now Mount Vernon) and again, when George was 6, to

Ferry Farm, near present-day Fredericksburg, VA.

• Augustine died when George was eleven. This property remained in the family through George’s older half-brother, Augustine Jr., and then George’s nephew, William Augustine Washington.

• William Augustine would be the last to live in George’s birth home, moving to build a new house called Blenheim, just over a mile west of here, in 1780. At this point George’s life, he was fighting in the Revolution. Consider what it might have been like here during that time with the British Navy nearby.

• This land reverted to agricultural use for nearly a century to follow.

• All that remains of the original structures are now underground filled in and covered over time by natural processes and human intervention. When we stand here now, we are surrounded by underground building foundations that we can’t see.

• There are over 20 different underground foundations scattered throughout the Commemorative Area.

• One of the greatest mysteries at George Washington Birthplace National Monument is where the birth home once stood.

• During the building of the Memorial House Museum in the 1930s, the National Park Service located a foundation just yards away. The NPS waited until completion of the Memorial House Museum before further investigation of the site. When the excavation began just a few years later, many artifacts were discovered, leading some to speculate that this was the original location of George Washington's birth house. The foundation was named “Building X”, due to the uncertainty of what it truly represented.

• In 2022, an archaeological project to re-examine the foundations called “Building X” sought to shed light on 86 years of uncertainty.

• The foundations were originally excavated without the use of modern archaeological methods or standards and did not systematically collect artifact and context data necessary for archaeological analysis, which means important information was lost forever.

• More recent examinations of the records from the 1930s excavations recommended reopening the foundations to employ modern methodologies to examine them and determine their age and character.

• The site was re-excavated in 2022. Modern technology allowed architectural historians to gather samples and 3-D scan the structure.

• Archeological research is the future of understanding the lives of the Washingtons and the people who lived here.

• There are not a lot of records from this period. Archeology can significantly contribute to our understanding of this place and time.

Transition: If the only remnants of the Colonial Era are in the ground we walk on, what are we seeing above ground today?

Point: Established to honor the 200th birthday of the first president of the United States, this place represents one of the earliest national and federal efforts to memorialize George

Washington.

Tangibles: Memorial House Museum, Commemorative Farm, Livestock, Furniture, Gardens.

Intangibles: Historic Memory, Commemoration, Memorialization, Patriotism, Bias.

• Around 1815 or 1816, George’s adopted grandson George Washington Parke Custis laid a memorial stone near the remnants of a building at this site. By doing so, Custis commemorated the birthplace for the first time.

• Custis and his helpers placed it at this spot based on oral tradition as being the site of the Washington family home. Over the ensuing years the stone was moved several times, broken, and eventually lost, along with the memory of “the spot”.

• In 1858, the Commonwealth of Virginia acquired the family cemetery and what was believed to be the birth house site , but the Civil War prevented any preservation efforts. The state donated the land to the Federal government in 1882. Unfortunately, the exact birth site became obscured by the effects of farming, changes in the landscape, and fallibility of human memory.

• Constructed in 1896, at what was believed to be the birth site of George Washington, the granite obelisk that now sits at the entrance to the park originally stood in this spot.

It was 50-foot high with a 12-foot square base and weighed nearly 35 tons.

• On December 2, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed a joint resolution that established a commission to oversee the Bicentennial of George Washington’s birth (1732 -1932).

• Leading up to 1932, commemorations of George Washington were taking place nationwide, such as the dedication of the George Washington Bridge, George

Washington Parkway, and the carving of Mount Rushmore. George Washington’s face was put on the quarter for the first time in 1932.

• President Hoover created George Washington Birthplace National Monument during this era in 1930.

• Josephine Wheelwright Rust was the founder and first president of the Wakefield National Memorial Association in 1923. Rust desired to build a memorial at the birthplace of George Washington.

• She had the connections to construct this Memorial House Museum due to her status and position in prominent social circles, such as the Daughters of the American Revolution, Daughters of the Confederacy, and Colonial Dames. She raised additional funds from individuals, governments, and prominent donors during the Great Depression.

• With Congress's approval for the group to build a replica, the Association planned to move the obelisk as it was located where the group wanted to erect the Memorial House. It was moved to its present location in 1931.

• This was problematic because there are no existing descriptions, drawings, or depictions of the original birth home.

• That didn’t deter Josephine. She moved forward by building a home she thought befitted the first president of the United States. The spirit of honoring of George

Washington was more important than accurately representing the house in which he was born.

• This kind of thinking was representative of Colonial Revival Monument, which was in full swing at the time.

• This Movement was a response to rapid societal changes such as increased industrialization, immigration, the aftermath of war, and newly formed wealth in the hands of individuals who had not inherited it. Those who benefitted from the status quo saw these changes as undesirable, even dangerous, for our country. In a time of change and uncertainty, the Colonial Revival Movement sought stability by evoking the “virtues” of an earlier age. It promoted an idealized past and a belief in the moralizing power of places and things associated with historical figures like George Washington.

• The Movement represented, for many people, what it meant to be American, and it played a perceived role in “Americanizing” new immigrants. At the same time, the Movement reaffirmed the patriotism, moral superiority, and a sense of timeless good taste some thought inherent in monied families who claimed colonial heritage.

• Heavily influenced by the Colonial Revival Movement, nostalgia and nationalism were more important to WNMA than historical accuracy. The Association’s effort was all about honoring Washington by evoking a sense of reverence and grandeur they thought befitted him as a Revolutionary War hero and our country’s first president.

• Despite ideals that were ultimately out-of-step with the values of an emerging historic preservation movement in America, Colonial Revival-influenced groups were critical to saving thousands of historic sites in our country. Without these groups' political savvy and tireless fundraising, many sites, including this one, may have been lost.

Transition: Now that we better understand the purpose of the Memorial House Museum, please feel free to step inside and ask questions.

Conclusion: The layers of history at George Washington Birthplace National Monument offer insight into the family and culture in which George Washington was born and reveal a story of how we, as

Americans, remember and honor the past. George Washington has become synonymous with America, and so the commemoration of this place also tells a story of people trying to define the origins of what it means to be American. Our story is preserved in the land the Washington’s walked on and the Potomac

River that brought them here. We preserve them for future generations to learn about, experience, and remember.