Mount Vernon United States

Legendary

The estate of the first President of the United States, George Washington.

Photo by Warren LeMay

Kid Rating:

In 1853, a woman named Louisa Cunningham was sailing down the Potomac River at night when the ship's bell woke her. She looked out and saw George Washington's house on the hill above her, dark and falling apart.

She wrote an angry letter to her daughter. If the men of the country couldn't save Washington's home, she asked, why didn't the women do it?

Her daughter, Ann Pamela Cunningham, took the question seriously. She founded the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association and asked women across the country to send money, even a few cents at a time.

By 1858 she'd raised $200,000. She bought the house and 200 acres and started fixing it.

The house had been George Washington's home for more than 45 years. He inherited it in 1754 and kept building onto it for the rest of his life.

He turned a modest farmhouse into a 21-room mansion with a wide porch looking out over the river. He designed most of it himself.

Washington called it his favorite place on earth. He left it to lead the army in the Revolutionary War and again to serve as the first president of the United States, and he always wanted to come back.

He died here in December 1799. He and his wife Martha are buried on the grounds.

Mount Vernon was also a plantation, and enslaved people did the work that kept it running. At the time of Washington's death, 317 enslaved men, women, and children lived here.

In his will, Washington ordered that the people he owned be freed after Martha's death. He was the only founding father who did that.

Cunningham's group still owns and runs Mount Vernon today. No government money has ever been used to keep it.

Tour the mansion and step onto the back porch where Washington sat watching boats on the Potomac. Walk down to the tomb, then to the memorial for the enslaved people buried nearby. Visit the working farm to see the 16-sided barn Washington designed for horses to thresh wheat.