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These two pictures are scenes from Ferry Farm near Fredericksburg, Virginia, where George Washington spent his childhood. He wasn't born here (you'll see that site in another few reports), but he came to live here with his family when he was six years old. In the first picture you can see the farm as it looks from the road. Below the farm is the Rappahannock River, which is the river that Washington threw a rock over when he was a little older. One early writer took license with that story and said it was a dollar that Washington threw, and he said it was the Potomac, not the Rappahannock. There were no coins in use in those days, only paper bills. And the Potomac is way too wide to throw anything across!

Past the small outbuilding that you can see down at the end of the lane the land drops off into the Rappahannock River, and just alongside the property was a lane down to a ferry across the river. Hence, the name of the farm was Ferry Farm. George's mother thought the traffic along the lane to the ferry was a nuisance at times.

Somewhere on this plantation there were some cherry trees, and there must have been an incident that resulted in George having to tell his father the truth. Probably he had only chopped *at* the tree and hadn't chopped it entirely down. Whatever the original story was, this is the place where it happened!

The second picture shows the stones of the foundation of the house that the Washingtons lived in. It burned down on Christmas Eve when George was eight years old. All the family escaped without injury that night. We know from letters and from George's early surveying efforts that the family built a new home and continued to live on this plantation. Archeologists suspect that the family didn't rebuild right over the original house and that they just filled in the cellar with burned remnants from the house and covered it over with dirt. It was a rich find that archeologists could learn much from.

Mary Washington, George's mother, continued to live on the land after her husband died. George was 11 years old at that time. In 1772, when George was 40 years old, he finally convinced his mother to move into town in Fredericksburg. He sold the farm in 1774, just one year before he was recruited to head up the Continental Army at the beginning of the Revolutionary War .

This is the statue of General Hugh Mercer, Revolutionary War hero of Fredericksburg, Virginia. He was a doctor in Fredericksburg when he left in 1776 to join the Continental Army as a brigadier general. He lost his life in the war.

Fredericksburg is the home of Mary Washington College (named after George's mother), and this picture was taken just two days after Halloween. Do we need any more information than that? Evidently, this trick is an annual event. My daughter-in-law, who graduated from Mary Washington College, informed me that contrary to what we might think, a ladder isn't absolutely necessary for the carrying out of this feat. A human tower works equally well. Now how would she know???

It was in a house on this site, the foundations marked by archeologists, that George Washington was born on February 22, 1732. The plantation was named Popes Creek after the river that flowed past it. It had been purchased by George's father Augustine Washington, to add to land he already owned through inheritance from his father Lawrence, George's grandfather. It was George's great-grandfather John Washington who came over to America from England in 1657 as a sailor. He decided to stay in the colony and married the daughter of planter Nathaniel Pope, who gave the couple 700 acres on Mattox Creek to start their own tobacco farm. John added to his land holdings all through his life, and in the end owned three plantations, covering about 10,000 acres: Mattox Creek, Bridges Creek, and Little Hunting Creek. These three plantations were all handed down to Lawrence and from Lawrence to Augustine. During his lifetime Augustine added Popes Creek and later Ferry Farm to the extensive holdings. So George was born on Popes Creek and moved with his family to Ferry Farm after that was purchased. His older brother Lawrence (named after grandpa Lawrence) inherited the Little Hunting Creek plantation and later renamed it Mount Vernon. He deeded it to George upon his, Lawrence's, death.

That was a long list of generations and land acquired. I include it to show you that the love of the land and a passion for farming were deeply ingrained in George Washington. He always professed to be first and foremost a farmer, taking on public duties only as long as his country needed his services. He happily spent the last years of his life at Mount Vernon, a part of which overlooked the developing new city, Washington, District of Columbia.

It is interesting to note that the house in which Washington was born burned down on Christmas day, 1779, while Washington was far to the north with the Continental Army. The house and the surrounding Popes Creek plantation were by that time owned by a son of Washington's brother, Augustine, Jr. That Christmas fire was 39 years after the house at Ferry Farm burned down on Christmas Eve.

Please see the November 4, 2000 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.

Please see the November 4, 2000 entry in Flat Teddy's Journal.