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Colonial Sense visited the home of our first President, Mount Vernon on October 5, 2011. Our first part at the tour was taken in the interior of George Washington's Mansion. As a three year old in 1735, George lived on the property with his father, Augustine Washington, and family. Augustine acquired the property from his sister in 1726. The Mansion at Mount Vernon did not exist as we know it today, although a home existed on the site. By 1740, the property was given to George's older half-brother, Lawrence Washington. Prior to his death in 1752, Lawrence razed the original house and built a new one and one-half story home wider and longer likely on the site of the original foundation. The initials "LW" were found on a small rectangular stone in the partition wall of the Mansion basement. The stone would have been originally as a foundation corner of Lawrence's newly constructed home. It would have been moved into the wall by George Washington during the reconstruction of the basement in the 1770's.

New article at Colonial Sense on the upcoming Historic New England homes tour.

This drawing and those of figures 9 and 10 are from specifications, sketches, and photographs, now in the files of the division of transportation, U.S. National Museum, taken in 1925 by Paul E. Garber from a wagon then the property of Amos Gingrich, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. This wagon is illustrated in John Omwake's Conestoga six-horse bell teams, 1750-1850, Cincinnati, 1930, pp. 57, 63, 87.

history of private property