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One December day in the year 1788 a Virginia gentleman sat before his desk in his mansion beside the Potomac writing a letter. He was a man of fifty-six, evidently tall and of strong figure, but with shoulders a trifle stooped, enormously large hands and feet, sparse grayish-c...
Washington looked forward to the end of his presidency as does "the weariest traveler, who sees a resting-place, and is bending his body to lay thereon." "Methought I heard him...
14. Chapter 14No one would ever think of characterizing George Washington as frivolous minded, but from youth to old age he was a believer in the adage that all work and no play makes Jack a...
8. Chapter 8The Revolution rudely interrupted Washington's farming experiments, and for eight long years he was so actively engaged in the grim business of checkmating Howe and Clinton and...
12. Chapter 12It is one of the strange inconsistencies of history that one of the foremost champions of liberty of all time should himself have been the absolute owner and master of men, wome...
11. Chapter 11In colonial Virginia, as in most other new countries, one of the greatest problems that confronted the settlers was that of labor. It took human muscle to clear away the forest...
3. Chapter 3The Virginia of George Washington's youth and early manhood was an imperial domain reaching from Atlantic tidewater through a thousand leagues of forests, prairies and mountains...
2. Chapter 2Augustine Washington was a planter who owned thousands of acres of land, most of it unimproved, besides an interest in some small iron works, but he had been twice married and a...
13. Chapter 13Martha Dandridge's first husband was a man much older than herself and her second was almost a year younger. Before she embarked upon her second matrimonial venture she had been...
9. Chapter 9A various times in his career Washington raised deer, turkeys, hogs, cattle, geese, negroes and various other forms of live stock, but his greatest interest seems to have been r...
10. Chapter 10Washington's work as a horticulturist prior to the educating influences of the Revolution was mostly utilitarian. That he had a peach orchard as early as 1760 is proven by an en...
17. Chapter 17In an age when organized charity was almost unknown the burden of such work fell mainly upon individuals. Being a man of great prominence and known to be wealthy, the proprietor...
6. Chapter 6Washington was the most methodical man that ever lived. He had a place for everything and insisted that everything should be kept in its place. There was nothing haphazard about...
15. Chapter 15About thirty miles down the river Potomac, a gentleman, of the name of Grimes, came up to us in his own boat[8]. He had some little time before shot a man who was going across h...
7. Chapter 7A detailed account of all of Washington's agricultural experiments would require several hundred pages and would be tedious reading. All that I shall attempt to do is to give so...
4. Chapter 4"No estate in United America," wrote Washington to Arthur Young in 1793, "is more pleasantly situated than this. It lies in a high, dry, and healthy country, 300 miles by water...
16. Chapter 16A biographer whose opinions about Washington are usually sound concludes that the General was a failure as a farmer. With this opinion I am unable to agree and I am inclined to...
1. Chapter 1One December day in the year 1788 a Virginia gentleman sat before his desk in his mansion beside the Potomac writing a letter. He was a man of fifty-six, evidently tall and of s...
5. Chapter 5Washington took great pains to inform himself concerning any subject in which he was interested and hardly was he settled down to serious farming before he was ordering from Eng...