George Washington's Birthplace at Popes Creek
Near Colonial Beach, Virginia
A short drive south of Colonial Beach, at the point where Popes Creek meets the Potomac, is the spot where the United States began, in a sense, for this is where George Washington was born on the twenty-second of February, seventeen thirty-two. The site was first known as Popes Creek Plantation, and seven generations of the Washington family lived along this shore. George spent his first three years here before his family moved, and he returned as a teenager to stay with his half brother.
The plantation house, later called Wakefield, burned on Christmas Day in seventeen seventy-nine and was never rebuilt. For a long time the birthplace was marked only by memory and a scattering of bricks. In nineteen twenty-three, the Wakefield National Memorial Association formed to preserve the ground, and in nineteen thirty Congress authorized it as a national monument.
A grant from John D. Rockefeller, Junior, helped assemble the land, and the association built a Memorial House of brick made from local clay, furnished to reflect a Virginia tobacco plantation of the seventeen thirties. Today the monument protects more than five hundred acres of quiet fields, woods, and shoreline, where costumed staff tend heritage livestock and gardens.
It does not pretend to be the exact house, but it marks the exact place, at the water's edge, where the first president first drew breath.
