Researchers Discover George Washington's Boyhood Home

George Washington's boyhood home has been found.

Researchers announced Wednesday that remains excavated in the last three years were those of the long-sought dwelling, on the old family farm in Virginia, 50 miles south of Washington. The house stood on a terrace overlooking the Rappahannock River, where legend has it the boy threw a stone or coin across to Fredericksburg.

On the subject of legend, the archaeologists who made the discovery could no more tell a lie than young George. No, there was not a single cherry tree anywhere around, not even a stump or a rusty hatchet. The tale of the boy owning up to whacking his father's prized cherry tree, the one thing most people think they know of Washington's youth, has long since been discredited as apocryphal.

But finding the house, archaeologists and historians say, may yield insights into the circumstances in which Washington grew up. Actual documentary evidence of his formative years is scant.

"What we see at this site is the best available window into the setting that nurtured the father of our country," Philip Levy, an archaeologist and associate professor of history at the University of South Florida, said in an announcement of the discovery.

Read the whole story here.

Comments

[Liberalfrombirth]

My father grew up at Ferry Farm during the Depression. His father was a tenant-farmer there. Dad and his older brother used to earn the occasional nickle by showing curious travelers the stump of the "cherry tree". I've always loved this story, and now I can share it with Huffposters. By the way, we in Virginia have long been miffed that the story about George throwing a silver dollar has been mangeled. He lived at Ferry Farm on the Rappahannock River as a boy, so therefore, if he threw a silver dollar across any river, it was the Rappahannock, not the Potomac! This is wonderful news for history lovers everywhere.

[shengirl]

go to fredericksburg.com/flshome/ for a 3 page article and a few pictures. Also timesdispatch.com has an article and a photo gallery. National Geo., which partly funded the dig, will air a show on their channel in November, "The Real George Washington."

[countryrds]

Couple points here, it is common knowledge that old George grew hemp and advocated wide spread use of that plant. Wouldn't it be interesting to test the substance in that pipe?

Never know what we might find.

[rbspickles]

You don't smoke hemp. There's no THC in it. We need to dislodge this notion because it stops the farming of a great cash crop with thousands of uses. Food, clothes, rope, FUEL!

[danoj]

Cool

[macintoshsauce]

Very cool... As a future high school teacher of US History, I love reading about stuff like this.

[Mort]

It's no surprise there's nothing left of the cherry tree. They used it to make George's teeth!

[NoblesseOblige]

I always find these stories fascinating. George Washington is a distant cousin of mine.

As a side note, it was especially intriguing to see a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II sitting alongside Senator John Warner at the dinner she hosted in Washington in May last year. John Warner is a distant cousin of both George Washington and Queen Elizabeth--and me. (I'm certain the Senator and the Queen are cognizant of the family connection.) The three of us (and many others) are all descended from early Virginians, Mildred Reade and Augustine Warner.

This purported "childhood home" is a real find. There's just so much history lurking everywhere!

BTW, if you go back far enough, you can see we're all related. It's just fun to see how closely we can connect to one another.

[IntrepidReader]

Both the coin throw and the cherry tree story were made up by Parson Weems in the 1840s, but I'll still tell this joke:

Q: How was Washington able to throw a dollar across the Rappahannock?
A: Money went further in those days.

[wmbear]

I ALWAYS THOUGHT...

He folded into a paper boat and sailed it across....

[darthdarcy]

Is it a house still, or ruins, or just parts of a foundation of what was his home..?

[shengirl]

Just the foundation, which was buried. I've been there, 20 years ago, it overlooks the river, is a beautiful site, with a grove of large old red cedar trees. The ground was so cushioned with many layers of fallen needles, and the soaring old trees, it was like walking in a cathedral.

[darthdarcy]

Cool Thanks Shengirl; I figured it was a buried foundation after all this time but your description is great I'm sure it's beautiful...

[wmbear]

WHAT, NO GW CHERRY TREE?...

That's like claiming Jesus didn't exist. Because there aren't any cherry trees there now, that "proves" there weren't any then? To quote Daffy Duck, thath ruhdicalus!

[Gma11]

I LOVE this stuff!

[Oilygarch]

At auction:

''Here, very valuable, I hold the skull of George Washington''

''Here, even more valuable, I hold the skull of George Washington when he was a kid''

*LOL*

[eastearll]

If you look real close at the painting you can just see the slave quarters out in the back. Ah, the good old days.

[jahzilla]

Doubtful . . . on several levels.
The structure "in the back" more likely would have been where food was prepared, as every effort was made to (logically) isolate that (potentially fire-prone) structure from the main living quarters. As well, most slaves quarters (within that region and dependent on the size of the property), generally resembled a compound and were situated well away from the land owner's house.

Oh, and . . . Ah, what a moronic reminiscence.

[philinmedford]

One thing to point out, as revolting as it is that we had a history of slavery, at least we as a country outlawed it and made great strides toward an equitable society. That said, one of the most disturbing things on the subject is: Slavery is widespread and at its highest rate TODAY.

People are ripped from their homes and sold at this very moment. A lot of people thought it ended with the Emancipation Proclamation.

Celebrate our Independence Day and our freedoms here, but say a prayer for the unfortunate....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery

[pa104inf]

Again, many of the founding fathers oppossed slavery, including, Ben Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. The individuals who oppossed slavery couldn't figure out any other way to join the 13 colonies together without allowing slavery. John Adams and Ben Franklin were self-made men and felt that slavery was athema to a civilized society. Despite current belief they were the individuals who put into the constitution the 2/3 of a man clause to take away some of the power that the South would have had otherwise. This clause was not to mark the slave as less then a human but to take away some of the power the Southern States would have had otherwise. Thomas J. and other abolitionists did everything they could in the Constitution to end slavery in the future. Slavery is never good for a society because it creates a permanent underclass who have no stake in the survival of a society and also tend to increase in size faster then the society in general.

[shengirl]

there was slavery in the north, too, and America's leading slave trading family were residents of Rhode Island. It wasn't outlawed in NY State till, I believe, the beginning of the 1800s.

[Indubio]

Well...it's a lovely story but unless I missed something the NYT didn't state what makes archaeologists categorically believe this was GW's boyhood home. Levy is a pretty serious professional and I have no doubt he's correct but I always love it when newspapers make such pronouncements without offering up a shred of evidence. I doubt archaeologists found a tea cup with the family name or crest on it so I suspect the proof must be in the form of a written document such as a deed indicating where the farm was located; finding a residence on the parcel and then dating it to the right time would be all the proof necessary to establish the family in residence. "However, one would never suspectthis from Muraca's pronouncement that "this is it." To bad the article didn't present this minor detail. I hope the story doesn;t turn out to be comparable to the purported (later proven bogus) discovery of Jesus' family ossuary some years ago.

[shengirl]

I don't know specifically, but there is the location [Virginia has a wealth of old deeds and documents], the size matching descriptions, and the dating of artifacts to before and after a fire, which they know occurred there at a certain date. The dates of the burned artifacts match that date. They might have found something with an identification, too, who knows? It was common back then to have things made with the family's initial/s.

[NoSillyName]

Cool! I didn't know it was undiscovered.

[totaldisbelief]

Let me guess...It wasn't a gated community with it's own golf course.