Mount Vernon's Farming Economy and the People Who Made It Work
Near Dc Northern Virginia, Maryland
George Washington spent most of his adult life trying to get away from Mount Vernon. The presidency, the Continental Army, the long years of politics in Philadelphia kept him from the place he described repeatedly as where he most wanted to be. He was a farmer by self-conception. The estate on the Potomac was his life's project.
What he rarely wrote about, in a correspondence that runs to tens of thousands of letters about crop rotation, soil chemistry, architectural improvements, and agricultural experimentation, was the three hundred seventeen people whose labor made all of it possible.
Washington had transformed Mount Vernon from a tobacco plantation, which was depleting the Tidewater soil that every Virginia planter was confronting, into a diversified farming operation. He grew wheat. He ran a commercial fishery on the Potomac that processed and packed shad and herring for export. He operated a grist mill, a distillery, a textile operation, a blacksmith shop. The operation was economically sophisticated and genuinely innovative. Washington read the latest European agricultural literature and applied it.
Every tool he used, every bushel of grain, every barrel of fish, was produced by the labor of the people he enslaved. Hercules, the enslaved chef who managed the kitchen at Mount Vernon and at the presidential residences in New York and Philadelphia, escaped on Washington's birthday in seventeen ninety-seven and was never recaptured. Ona Judge, Martha Washington's personal attendant, escaped in seventeen ninety-six and remained free for the rest of her life despite Washington's attempts to return her.
Mount Vernon's archaeologists and historians have spent three decades reconstructing the lives of the enslaved community. They have found names, family relationships, burial sites, and evidence of personal objects. Washington's own meticulous records, which documented everything about the farm's operation, documented the people who worked it primarily as labor costs and property.
The estate is forty miles south of the capital. The founding myth of the republic was written here, in both of its versions.
