Washington’s home at Ferry Farm uncovered

BY LAWRENCE LATANE III
Media General News Service
Published: July 4, 2008

Archaeologists said Wednesday that they have found the long-lost remains of George Washington’s boyhood home. Further exploration of the location will replace myths with facts on the formative years of the father of our country, they said.

The site is across the Rappahannock River from Fredericksburg at Ferry Farm, where legend has it that the nation’s first president-to-be chopped down a cherry tree and confessed to it because he could not tell a lie.

The property also figures in the story of the strapping youth throwing a silver dollar across the river.
Until now, no one has been able to point with certainty to the exact location of the house in which Washington grew up.

“Washington the adult is very well-understood to us,” said Philip Levy, an associate professor of history at the University of South Florida who spent the past seven years digging for the Ferry Farm home site. “But the childhood phase is always treated in abbreviated fashion. We are in a position to begin to understand that childhood.”

George’s father, Augustine Washington, uprooted his family from Westmoreland County and moved to Ferry Farm in 1738 when George was 6 years old.

In contrast to the general perception that Ferry Farm was a rustic homestead, the archaeological evidence shows the Washingtons lived in a big house in the style of fairly well-to-do planters.

The findings reveal an eight-room wooden-frame house that was 53 feet long by 37 feet wide, said Mark Wenger, architectural historian for the George Washington Foundation, which owns the Ferry Farm property. The prevalent house of the time consisted of only one or two rooms, said David Muraca, the foundation’s director of archaeology.

The team concluded it had pinpointed the Washington home last winter after seven years of painstaking digging and grappling with confusing evidence.

Through the years, five houses were built on the property, and the land was the site of major Civil War activities, including trench digging. The result was an underground jigsaw puzzle for archaeologists to interpret, the team said.

Muraca said they excavated two house sites before finding the Washington home. One house dated to the 17th century, and the other was built too late to have been inhabited by the Washingtons. The one they pinpointed contained the right age mix of artifacts to have been in use while the Washingtons occupied the property.

Remains of the house are fragmentary, Muraca said. The team found two stone-lined cellar pits, a bit of the house’s brick foundation, fireplaces and so much plaster that it was obvious the house was made of wood, he said.

Wednesday’s announcement of the find was coordinated by the National Geographic Society, which provided financial support for the dig along with the Dominion Foundation and other benefactors. The Dominion Foundation donated $750,000 to help support the dig and research, said Irene Cimino, a spokeswoman for the foundation.

The George Washington Foundation plans to build on the site reproductions of the Washington house and outbuildings the family occupied when George was a youth. The reproductions will be the centerpiece to an interpretive program about Washington’s early life, which is planned to open by 2011 or 2012, said Barbara Moffet, a National Geographic Society spokeswoman.

“Our ultimate goal,” Muraca said, “is to put the Washington landscape back on the modern landscape and use it as a program about George Washington and his 18th-century life.”

Lawrence Latane III is a staff writer at Media General’s Richmond Times-Dispatch.