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Season 1, Episode 1: The Power of Place
Transcript
Dustin Baker: Welcome and thank you for joining us. I'm Dustin Baker, and I'm the chief of interpretation at George Washington Birthplace National Monument. Upon first glance, one might assume that we have a pretty straightforward story to tell. George Washington was one of the most recognizable names in the world, and he was born here. What more needs to be said than that? Well, for many visitors, George Washington Birthplace National Monument is a surprisingly complex, historic site. It is a place where people come to remember George Washington, but also find a story of how the past can be lost, reshaped and rediscovered. It is a place ruled by water. Although Washington, D.C. is only 60 miles up the Potomac River, this place has retained a rural character, and the surrounding area remains essentially undeveloped. Visitors here can still experience sights and sounds that would have been familiar to the Native Americans since the Washington family and the enslaved people from Africa who found themselves all connected by water here in the 17th century. This is a place where seven generations of the Washington family lived and prospered in a colonial Tidewater culture where acquiring land and cultivating tobacco through the use of enslaved labor was essential to building the family's wealth and gentry status. This is a place that was central to one of the earliest federal efforts to memorialize George Washington during the worldwide celebration of his bicentennial birth anniversary. Where inspired nostalgia in the spirit of the undertaking were more important than historical accuracy, leaving behind an interpretive conundrum that we still wrestle with today. And most surprisingly of all, this is a place where the archeological resources that contained critical information about the lives of all who inhabited this land over time are only beginning to be understood. So, on behalf of the staff at George Washington Birthplace National Monument, join us as we share our passion for this place with our new podcast series Upon This Land History, Mystery, and Monuments. For our first episode, we're going to be interviewing Dr. Philip Levy. He's the author of a new historic resource study for the park, which is titled “Upon This Land: Seven Generations of the Washington Family and the Residents of Popes Creek and Mattox Neck.” And you might find that title familiar because it's the direct inspiration for the title of our podcast series. Dr. Philip Levy is a professor of history at the University of South Florida and is an organization of American Historians, Distinguished Lecturer. He is the author of several books, many of which deal with George Washington both as a person and a national icon, where the Cherry Tree grew, the story of Ferry Farm, George Washington's boyhood home, and George Washington written upon the land, nature, memory, myth and landscape focus on the places of Washington's childhood. The permanent resident excavations and explorations of the life of George Washington, winner of the prestigious Society of Historical Archeology, James Dietz Award explores the many sites of Washington's life and how their stories have been shaped by archeology and issues of memory and commemoration. His newest book, Yardbirds the Lives and Times of Americans Urban Chickens, tells a very different story from his other work and explores the fascinating relationships both past and present between urban areas and domestic fowl. Interviewing Dr. Philip Levy today is lead interpretive Park ranger Jonathan Malriat.
Jonathan Malriat: What started you in researching George Washington? What was the starting point?
Dr. Philip Levy: Yeah, I mean, wouldn't it be wonderful if I could say, you know, a lifelong interest in the first president to get an answer like that? And that would not be true. Largely an accident or set of circumstances. I was in grad school at William and Mary, and I was in the history program. I was working with the late, great James Axtell. I still working on Indian colonial relations, which is what I went there to work on. And she had been an advocate of historians coming to understand anthropology that you had to kind of work in different fields. And the program at William and Mary had an internship in historical archeology. So, you could be a history master's student, but you could also do some coursework and field work in historical archeology. And I did that partly because I just want to better understand that field and make some sense out of it. And what I found was that I had an aptitude for it and that I liked it. And over the course of my graduate career, I kind of doubled down on historical archeology, doing more and more work in archeology at the point where that kind of became what I really do. It sort of supplant. I wrote my dissertation, I wrote my first book on Indian colonial relations, but I haven't really worked on that all that much since then. The archeology sort of took over and I got very involved with Colonial Williamsburg digging sites there. And during that time, I worked with David LaRocca, who was a staff archeologist at that colony Williamsburg guy who kind of ran the sites that I was working on. I was supervising all this. And he sort of became my first field mentor, sort of learning a lot of stuff from him, working with other people like Amy Morocco, who helped a lot. So, learning the field from them. And Dave and I kind of struck up a friendship and which is still very much alive and a partnership. And so, by the time I was done with grad school, I had kind of built a little world historical archeology. I got hired at that point at the University of South Florida in the history department, and Dave took a job managing the excavation at George Washington's Childhood home at Ferry Farm. And we had been running field schools together since, you know, the 1990s, the mid-1990s through clay was boring. And we said, well, let's take our field school model and do it over at Berry Farm. This was take, you know, pack up our goods and bring it over there. We both walked into the world of George Washington studies really oddly, both of us sharing a focus on the 17th century. I think we both came in really with a very strong interest in 17th century Virginia landscapes and the rise of slavery. And you know what was going on in that arena. We didn't; George was going to be part of the story. We knew because that was the nature of the site, but that was not what we came in with. And gradually what Dave likes to say about Ferry Farm was it changes everyone, everybody who comes in with one interest, you end up with other ones. And I did not really anticipate it. I had a fellowship one summer nominally to work on 17th century Virginia landscapes. I'd written something about the area of what was called Middle Plantation, which is where Williamsburg is, and I had imagined expanding that into a larger study, and I had a fellowship to work on that, and I spent most of my time looking at 20th century photographs of Ferry Farm, so I got very obsessed with the sequence of buildings trying to understand it. And it took a little while to recognize that that this was going to take over that Washington and that landscape and subsequently other landscapes that that Washington and the memory of his memory in the landscape was going to become what I was doing. And it took a little while, but I got there. So that's sort of how that works. And it's just been it's been endlessly rewarding. There's- there's no reason to stop. There's always more to talk about and more to see. So, you know, one of the things that makes Washington so interesting is that there's- we could talk about Washington as a as an 18th century figure, you know, so he's an ultra for us into the world of the 18th century, which is useful and valuable and understanding American history, his role in American history. But he's one of these people because of his significance at the founding of the Republic. He doesn't go away just because he physically goes away. His memory becomes a very, very important national possession. And, you know, we have everything from national parks to all sorts of resources and objects and commemorations tied to his name. So, there's more to study than just Washington as an 18th century figure there. Also, his impact on the way America thinks of itself and remembers its past and so on. So, there is that I would say there isn't- It's virtually every single dimension of American history has some George Washington angle. What Washington has invoked in virtually every discussion that we have politically, he is always present in some way. You need to enlist him on your side in some cases to make it to make your argument effective. So, he's kind of a scholar's gift that keeps on giving. There's just a lot to talk about beyond just that 18th century life, which could keep people busy for their own careers. So, there's a lot there. And then when you add the materials dimension to it, when you start looking at landscapes and historical sites, it just proliferates. There's just a ton to talk about. So yeah, so I did not plan this, but this is how it has lined up.
Jonathan Malriat: It sounds like quite the journey to get there. one of the other ones. Would you mind taking a second to describe, since you've now talked about how you got into the world of George Washington, How about here the world around George Washington Birthplace National Monument. How did you get started here?
Dr. Philip Levy: Part of the same story. You know, when I began, we began the project at Ferry Farm at the at the childhood site in 2001. I think my first summer digging, there was 2002 Springs students up from Florida, which we do every summer, except for a few we're going to be doing again this summer. And part of that work entailed sort of developing a familiarity with other Washington sites at that time. Ferry Farm was not a preserved site. It was the beginning of a preserved site that had just happened there at GEWA you know, the birthplace was, you know, an established park.
Dustin Baker: Hey, Dustin here. Just wanted to cut in and explain that GEWA is another name for the park, in a way. Every national park site has a four-letter acronym. And so GEWA, G. E. W. A. is our four-letter acronym, and that's why Phil refers to the site as GEWA.
Dr. Philip Levy: And Mount Vernon was sort of the main site, but Mount Vernon. Mount Vernon was in a sort of it was before the library, right? The library, the building of the library about 2013 really changed Mount Vernon and super energized what was happening there. So, we had a few sort of established historical archeology, archeological centers and kind of becoming familiar with the larger world of Washington. We visited places. I remember visiting the birthplace at some point in grad school, and I couldn't tell you exactly when, but I know I visited some because I remember friends of mine and I talking about building X and just having like real suspicions about this, like what we saw on the ground. We weren't doing any research. We're just looking at things, but looking at this thing going, well, that doesn't make any sense. Something, something is amiss here and just not really knowing what was amiss.
Dustin Baker: Hey, this is Dustin again. I just want to clarify that. Dr. Phil Levy just mentioned a site called Building X. Building X is one of the greatest mysteries in the park, and it's a brick foundation. During the construction of the memorial house Museum in the 1930s, the National Park Service located that foundation just a few yards away. And shortly thereafter in the 1930s, it was excavated. Many artifacts were found, leading some to speculate that it was the true location of George Washington's birth house. But the foundation was named Building X due to the uncertainty of what it truly represented. And Phil Levy is going to be talking a lot more about it later on.
Dr. Philip Levy: So that would be before any of this began. But then that became more of an issue as we worked on Ferry Farm and started, started kind of entering the Washington studies world, if that's what you want to call it, a little more fully. And I remember in around 2008 that ferry farm, we were sort of ready to declare that we had what we were looking for. It took a little while before we were ready to say that we had located the home. There were a few problems there, a few things that lines that didn't line up, things we couldn't quite account for, and we sort of had to think our way out of those problems till you get to the point that you really feel like you're certain about something and that doesn't happen quickly. There often is some like one little irritating problem sitting there and you can't quite say that you're confident about what you have until you resolve that problem. In this case, our problem was a stone that was out of place that we couldn't make the wall line up because that stone was just in the wrong place. And you can't. A rectangle has to be a rectangle, it can't be a parallelogram. So, you know, as long as your building is shaped like a parallelogram, you're not reading your building correctly. If something is wrong and you haven't figured out yet what's wrong, but something's wrong. So we had this parallelogram, we couldn't make sense of it. And then we finally realized that we were reading the stone incorrectly the stone that we thought was part of a wall was actually part of a chimney base that was outside of the wall. And once we figured that out, everything lined up, all the lines were parallel and everything made sense. And they were like, okay, we got it. This is this is the building that was about 2008, And at that time I remember talking with the who was then the superintendent at the first place, Lucy Lawless.
Dustin Baker: Hi, Dustin. One more time. Not that Lucy Lawless. Another Lucy Lawless was the superintendent of this site in the early 2000s up until 2013.
Dr. Philip Levy: About that site and saying that, you know, there are questions there. We shouldn't be treating the birthplace site as has done and dusted. Right. There's there are there are questions about that. And there's a lot of research that needs to go on to really make sense of that place. And she was very excited about that enthusiastic and it was beginning with her, but also, you know, carrying through. She set in motion finding the money that enabled the 2013 and 2014 reassessment of the archeological record that we were able to do with some graduate students to really begin to say, all right, what is it that we know? What did the 1930 record tell us without sort of the- the overlay of the discussion of the 1920s and 1930s? And that really sort of started everything in motion that got us to where we are today.
Jonathan Malriat: And that's quite a journey as well on that.
Dr. Philip Levy: It's always like this.
Jonathan Malriat: It's always just like connected. They are how the world has been. As you said, you can always trace the connection to George Washington, it seems like.
Dr. Philip Levy: Yeah.
Jonathan Malriat: Now with all of that connections to George Washington, we know one of the books that you wrote, you wrote several. But Where the Cherry Tree grew of that very famous myth, how do you separate fact from fiction if there's so many people writing about George, there's so much out there, How do you separate that?
Dr. Philip Levy: Well, you know how as a question sort of the poses that you can, right? I'm not sure you always can. Certain kinds of stories take on the lives of their own. And they- they just become facts simply by repetition, Whether they're true or not. It doesn't matter because people believe them to be true and people act on their beliefs, not necessarily unverifiable data. So false assumptions, mistakes, errors, deceptions can become reality by people's actions. They can. If you're acting on false information, then you're sort of the information may as well be real, but it has a real impact on people's lives. When you get into the Washington biography, you know, the body of writing about his life. And that's an interesting place where a lot of different kinds of stories get told and a lot of different writing styles occurred. So if you watch if somebody to write about Washington now and people could do this, we're in a very strange golden age. The level of information that's available to anyone, not just researchers, but anyone about Washington's thoughts and ideas is- is without precedent. You can find online through Sander's online pretty much his entire his entire correspondence and not just their but but annotated like to transcribe that annotated. You can search virtually every letter. You could go to a library. You could pick up a book version of all of that. You can go to the Library of Congress and you can see photos of the actual letters. So if you wanted to move away from a transcription, look at the handwriting and see something in there, you can do that as well. His account books have been turned into a database, so you can go in and look at you can search through his accounts and see his transactions. So you have just an incredible amount of information that lets you really zero in on what he's thinking, what he's doing, where he is, and so on and so on. We're very fortunate that way. That was not always the case. So people writing biographies of Washington, going back into the beginning of the 19th century, had very little actual information to draw on. And what happened was certain stories crystallized certain ways of talking about this sort of became the way this gets done and what biographers generally did for a long time. To some extent, they still do it. Moviemakers do this as well to write a biography. A lot of people will just read five previous biographies and then and then start going and they look for some sources through those previous biographies and then start going. So you get the repetition of certain things again and again and again. And part of the historian's job is to sort of look at these things and sort out, well, what is what is this being repeated versus what is it that I can say, you know, from sources outward. So one way to get at the how of sorting these things out is by being aware of what's in the writing, but trying to move beyond that into the source material and try to look at it with fresh eyes. The same with the archeological record. Don't- don't walk into the archeological record automatically accepting the assumptions of previous excavations. That doesn't mean you have to reject them a priori or just say they're wrong. But- but, you know, be skeptical. Look at everything with fresh eyes. So in the case of Washington, because of the sort of repetitive nature of the biography, you get certain pieces, certain set pieces again and again and again, and you have to kind of comb that out, become aware of what's style and what's actually historical work. It's not really until the 1930s that people had substantive access to actual Washington documentation and there's a change in the biographies that they lose a certain romantic quality that they had of the night in the 19th century, the Washington bicentennial, sort of the publishing of the first major multi-volume edition of Washington's papers that people had access suddenly to actual Washington writing. And so then you end up with a tension in the biography between what sort of the modern practice of history can do and can say versus the way it has always been told. So you get a tension in there, how are you going to approach it? So, you know, there isn't a lot of proper mythology anymore in the Washington biography because of the quality of the information that goes into it. But there are certain assumptions and, you know, there's a lot of Washington biography is very what they call your hagiography or things like that that sort of tends to be in the writing. But there's been particularly, and you have to give credit where credit is due. I think the Fred W Smith Library at Mount Vernon has played a huge role in this. There has been a huge growth in Washington scholarship. So there's a lot of really creative, inventive material out there that is looking it's working away from biography and working into sort of how does Washington fit into a variety of different kinds of questions. So it's a great time for that. But the way to do it is to step the way to get to sort of something outside of the mythology of the 19th century is to is to work with sources, work outward. And that's- that's what we did with the birthplace. You go back to go back to primary sources and not accept just one particular reading. Simply because it's the reading that's there. That's what historians do. It's not what everybody does. That's the job of the historian.
Jonathan Malriat: So, you're just even connecting that story in with the mystery and the different research that had been done here and views on where the birthplace and the birth home once stood. Can you elaborate a little bit for the listeners on why we were and still even are to a bit uncertain where the George Washington birth home stood originally?
Dr. Philip Levy: Yeah, I mean, that's a great question because it touches on something that it's really interesting that I don't fully understand. I've seen several examples of this and I don't quite understand what's going on. I first saw it with Fredericksburg in Ferry Farm in Virginia, and that was that. When Washington died in December 1799, there was a sort of a period of national mourning. His star had fallen somewhat. You know, he was politically unpopular toward the somewhat unpopular toward the end of his political career. He had enemies in in Washington or not Washington, but, you know, in government, I should say. And, you know, he was he was showing his age and people were aware of that. He was he was venerated for his achievements. But he also was not seen as you know, not seen as what the future was going to look like. And if that was not caught up in politics in ways that I don't think he was entirely comfortable with. So when he died, he certainly was a national hero. But it's there was an unevenness to the commemoration of his life at the time of his death. here were a lot of speeches, a lot of, you know, bunting bedecked platforms erected in towns. People would read various, you know, eulogies to Washington. And one thing that struck me is really interesting was that that didn't happen in Fredericksburg. And I never quite understood that there is an acknowledgment in the newspapers references, but there was not everything they did, all the commemoration of Washington waving the flag, the bunting and so on was all pro forma. It all looked exactly the same as everyone else's. And I was surprised because I would think that the town of Fredericksburg would have made more noise about Washington having lived there. And they didn't.
Jonathan Malriat: Especially with how connected he and his mother were to the that town.
Dr. Philip Levy: Some of it may have to do with her, you know, that that her tense relationship with him at the end of her life in some ways may have colored the way the town understood him. They may have been sort of, if you will, marry Partizans, you know. You know, there's the odd question. There'll be a book coming out about this soon. We'll see what he has to say about this. But the there's an odd question around Mary's burial because it doesn't appear that George had He didn’t bring her to Mount Vernon and bury her in Mount Vernon all kinds of people buried Mount Vernon, but not her. He also doesn't appear to have paid for some sort of grave marker so that by the 1830s, when Americans are thinking about there having been an American history, it's not until mid 1830 after the death of Jefferson and Adams, that historians start to say that historians writing about that past identify that. That's kind of when Americans say something is passing, that the revolutionary generation is ending, and we are the next thing. And so, you start to get in the 1830s an awareness of there having been an American history and it's a little earlier example a bit earlier. I mean, the Washington commemorations go back to the 1820s and the Washington biographies go earlier. But as a large-scale interest, it's a new thing and end in Washington's first centennial of 1832 plays a role in this. You start to get a bit of an interest in Washington, and somebody pops up with the we should mark Mary Washington's grave. And he's probably being a bit hyperbolic with saying that, you know, she's in an unmarked grave in a field and the plow was like disrupting her bones. And, you know, I don't think that's actually true. But the point is that nobody's really sure where Mary was buried. It's not as clear as you would expect it to have been. And that sort of ties with this like only sort of halfhearted commemoration of Washington. So, they don't; they, the people of that time, are not really as concerned about this stuff as we might think. They would have been Ferry Farm itself feel this the John Gatsby Chapman painting about 1833 shows it to be a ruin. They know what the home was, but it's just a bunch of stones in the ground. It's not they don't have this preservation impulse. They don't have the sort of save the thing impulse. It's really not until the 1850s and Pamela Cunningham and the Mount Vernon Ladies Association starting the idea that, you know, that's one of the first American House museums. We have to preserve this building. This needs to be saved for the future. And they're not thinking that way in this period. And so, they're sort of lukewarm or maybe just pro forma sort of generic commemoration of Washington in Fredericksburg is an indication of that. And then at the birthplace, you have a whole other version of this problem where by 1813, there's no one now owning the land with the last name Washington, the last, you know, linear. Washington's still off the land and leave. It goes to people who are sort of kin, but they're distant kin and it's just a farm. It just gets farmed, and you have rather famously a park Custis, the George Washington Park Custis, who goes and does the commemoration of Washington's birth in 1815. But I think we've sort of misunderstood that event in some ways also because crucially, because Park Custis was connected to Washington, he became it was also a book coming out soon about him and his use of memory also. And he becomes a sort of interesting symbol so that during the siege of Washington, if I remember correctly, they- they sort of allow him to honorably fire off the first cannon at the British, because, as you know, George Washington Park Custis, this is very strong sense for Americans that the war of 1812 is in some way a second revolution. It's a repeat. And remember that British ships came up the Potomac, they burned Washington. You know, they burned homes on the Potomac as well. So, in 1815, the year after the war, Park Custis and some friends go and put a grave marker, put, sorry- the stone marking where Washington's home had been with the birthplace was. What they're doing in part is sort of rededicating the United States. It's much bigger. The project, in their minds is much bigger than where it was Washington's home. It's like the country has survived a second major war with threat with Great Britain. It is as if it were born anew. And we, these new Americans are sort of like starting the country over again. So the commemoration of the birth home in 1815 has to be read within the context of the war of 1812 and sort of the new rebirth of the country. But they don't know exactly what Washington's home was. They don't know exactly where the building was. We don't know the stuff we don't know about that. Building a lot. We don't know. And we're getting closer. But, you know, it's tricky. You're looking through some foggy lenses to try to understand something, but it's clear that there was no sentiment attached to that hope. The fact of Washington just isn't that important to these people. So much so that the maps of 1810 and 1813, when the land is being surveyed for sale at one of them is done by Samuel Lamp. And I'm not sure that the 1810 map is Samuel Lemkin, but it probably is. That's in private hands not in the park's possession. Neither of those maps make mention of George Washington. It's 1810 - 1813. They know who George Washington is. He's like a major, major figure. And, you know, by that point, they've already moved the capital to a new city named after him. So they just- And these are the people who, you know, live in the world where he was born. These are people who claim kinship to him. But when they draw the map of the land, they don't even refer to them at all. They're just they're surveys are functional documents. You don't do things on surveys. You don't have to. It's also possible that everybody just knows this, and nobody's really sort of paying that much attention. The only thing you get is a little area sequestered off where Park Custis says, or sorry, where Corbin Washington. George Corbin Washington says he keeps a little square where he says the birth home was and he keeps the cemetery. Cemetery out on the park grounds now is the same cemetery, but it wasn't marked. There was no wall. The wall was a product of the 1920s and thirties. So that area was safe for the family when they sell it off. But there is a lot of uncertainty as to where exactly the building was because for whatever reason it just wasn't worthy of their memory. They moved on. So, it's only later that people turn around and say, actually the stuff is very important. And it's interesting that there's another map from the 1850s around the time that they're commemorating Mount Vernon, and that map says, All right, George Washington, George Washington, Geroge Washington. But the one that's closer in time to the Washington family doesn't mention it at all in any meaningful way. So, they are not particularly interested in recording or highlighting or commemorating these things. And they were the ones who were there to see it and they didn't do it. So, we get a gap, right? They could have they could have answered somebody's questions for us. They could have made our lives really easy. Right? Maybe less productive, but certainly easy. But by marking these things, by recording them in some way, they just didn't. And so, we're left decades later with people now by the 1850s wanting to know this information, but not having a direct connection to get it. And they start guessing. They go with what they have, and they just start taking their best guess and they get some things right and they get a lot of stuff wrong.
Jonathan Malriat: So, you've really been the spearhead here on trying to find the where the location is of the birth home or even know more about it. Can you tell us about that search in all the different stages that's gone through the highs and the lows and how that journeys gone?
Dr. Philip Levy: Yeah, and we're still not quite there. So, I don't want to get too far ahead and make claims that, you know, that I might regret later that are contradicting what other people are saying. We're still we're still in a in a sorting out process. So, I'll reserve a definitive judgment. There has been way too much confidence in this whole discussion over the years, way too many people absolutely confident that they know what X or Y is. And, you know, maybe we want to be a little bit more restrained, a little bit more reserved. I think there are things that we can dismiss immediately. There's there are things we can agree upon immediately. One of those very important one is that when you are out on the historic land at the birthplace, you are on the Washington family home. Lot like that that I think we know. I don't think anything can disrupt that. So, there's a difference, though, between knowing that you are on the home lot versus like what this building was, this thing and that building was that thing that I think we're a little grayer on. But there's no question that the park grounds are the grounds. So, anybody who comes to visit, they are on that site. When they look out at Pope’s Creek, they are seeing the view, right, that that is all absolutely 100% real. So, we're not to worry about any of that. That would I mention that because that was a big concern in the 1920s and 1930s, they were not so sure. And a lot of the work they did then was specifically to make the case that that was the land. So, a lot of their research was focused on change of title and lands because there was there were contenders. There are people who made arguments some interesting, some less interesting about where Washington may have been born. There are several contenders in the 1920s for the possibility of Washington's birth site. I don't think we worry about that anymore. I think we know where we are and that the Park Service owns that land and curates that land effectively and that is the place. So, we should not be worried about that. Now, how that landscape functioned, what buildings did, what on that landscape, what dated to when the much trickier question. So, we don't necessarily have, you know, the clarity we will want on that. But what it comes down to and I think part of what motivated me in this is the way that the story of the birthplace site had been told for a long time was one of sort of commemorative error and then correction and everything focused on the memorial house and its reputation. Memorial house was very much sort of, well, here's this 1930s, 1920s commemoration, and it got things wrong in these ways. And I think there's more to say than just- just that. And for a while that was kind of the main focus. This looks like they got it wrong and that has been corrected with this. This building with the other Building X features, which would be fine if, you know, if one had absolute confidence in those identifications. It's not quite as simple as that. What's happening, though, is that, you know, we're headed into 2032 sooner than any of us think. The Washington birth tricentennial and I've said this many times, but it doesn't hurt to say it again. There is going to be a moment when the eyes of the nation, in quite probably the eyes of the world, are going to turn to that piece of land and look to the National Park Service and to the park to say, All right, you're in the spotlight. Here's your moment. And I felt very strongly, after all this work on Ferry farm that we wanted to make sure that the birthplace was able to answer its questions solidly and emphatically and without the shadow of doubt hanging over it. So, we have time to do that. But I think that's what we're working toward being able to say, absolutely. Here is this and this is it. And we know that with a degree of certainty that we've never had before, so that when the moment comes, there it is. It's correct and right. And that's- that's a big motivator. I think that's a very important thing. We're going to want to get this exactly right. And I think we're edging closer, but we know so much more now than we did even just seven or eight years ago. But we're doing well. We're doing well. But this is a national position. I think people are going to want this to be the right answer. I imagine that this is going to be. But I think it's going to be a big deal. I mean, they see what the- the bicentennial was. And I think it will be different because the world functions different. But- but I think there is going to be a moment that's going to focus everything on that landscape. And I think we're going to want to want to be able to deliver exactly what- what the world needs to see.
Dustin Baker: Thank you for joining us for our first episode of Upon This Land: History, Mystery, and Monuments. Next time we'll be continuing the conversation where we left off with Dr. Phil Levy, and we'll be exploring some of what we know about the birth home of George Washington and some of the myths and legends surrounding the state and where it went. So, thank you to Dr. Levy for his time and thank you. We'll see you next time.
Description
On this episode, we interview Dr. Philip Levy, the author of a new historic resource study for George Washington Birthplace National Monument (GEWA). He breaks down how he began studying the Washington family and his involvement with unraveling some of the mysteries surrounding George Washington’s birthplace.
Intro music courtesy of Wolf Patrol. Outro music courtesy of Brumbaugh Family
Date Created
02/22/2024
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