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Season 1, Episode 2: The Power of Mystery
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Dustin Baker: George Washington. It's one of the most recognizable names in the world. His story is a foundational stone in American history. Yet at the place he was born, only remnants remain of the buildings and the stories of people who once lived here. One might think that the birthplace of a national icon is an easy story to tell, but it's actually one of the most complex and surprising historic sites preserved by the National Park Service. So, join us as we piece together the past, present and future of this place brick by brick. On this podcast series upon this Land History, mystery and monuments.
Dustin Baker: Welcome to episode two of Upon This Land History, Mystery and Monuments. My name is Dustin Baker, and I'm the chief of interpretation here at the park. On this episode, we're going to be tackling one of the biggest mysteries of the park, and that's its name. We know that George Washington was born at Pope's Creek, but when we think of the term birthplace, we might also conjure a building. Yet, by the time the park was created in the 1930s, there was no longer a building here to preserve. And for over a century, people have searched for proof of where it once stood and what it looks like. Helping us shed light on this mystery is Dr. Philip Levy. And we're picking up in our conversation where we left off on the previous episode Interviewing Dr. Philip Levy today is Lead Interpretive Park ranger Jonathan Malriat.
Jonathan Malriat: One of the other mysteries tied in with that birthplace is why did it vanish? So not just why are we uncertain or where stood, why did disappear in the first place? What happened to that original birth home? There's always the Washington family story that it burned down. But what does the archeology and the historical record say?
Dr. Philip Levy: Well, remember, we have a few different features, so we're still trying to figure out that was sort of in the later stages of hammering out how to make sense of all the different features of the building that's been called Building X.
Dustin Baker: Hey, this is Dustin. Cutting in real quick to remind everybody that Building X is an archeological foundation in the memorial area of the park that shows 17th and 18th century features that have led some people to speculate that it could be the original birth home of George Washington.
Dr. Philip Levy: There are some questions that of hang over this and become very, very deeply immersed in the facts of 18th century records. So, it's like I can present you with a lot of confusion here. Here are things we know, what things we don't know there. So, let's go to before we get to the end of the building, let's get sort of the beginning of what we understand to be the beginning of the building and Augustine and Jane Washington, -
Dustin Baker: Hey, this is Dustin again. Philip Levy is introducing us to two important people in the story. This Augustine Washington is George's father. Jane Washington, though, is not his mother. She is Augustine's first wife and mother to George's surviving brothers, Augustine Jr and Lawrence. She will pass away in November of 1729.
Dr. Philip Levy: - when they got married, they were living in a home that was on the west side of Bridge's Creek up along the river somewhere. It was probably the home of Daniel Liston, who was a compatriot of John Washington. That land and that property meant something to Lawrence Washington, Augustine Washington's father. And I have to, as always with this stuff, it's you know, but it's always good to stress with people. We all have to apologize for the fact that the Washington's only used a few names because there's an endless stream of Johns and Lawrence that gets you know, it gets very difficult to clarify which one you mean. But Lawrence, Washington, Augustine's father, John's son, had some attachment to that piece of land that his family didn't own, because he one of the major things he did was fighting to acquire that property. He was in court. He was dealing with people in England to try to get the rights to it. It was a big project for him. He clearly cared. You know, it was difficult to do something. You know, they would have stopped. But he fought for this. He wanted that piece of land. And then he left it to Augustine Washington after his death. So, when Augustine came of age, that was the home that he moved to on, probably an older home. We know they're older because Laurence Washington referred to the buildings being older. So that's he's on that property. He and Jane Washington were on that property were they living in an old home or something that they built there. We just don't know. But by about 1723, he acquired land on the other side of Bridge’s Creek, the Pope's Creek land. He bought it from a guy named Joseph Addington, who was a descendant of a very large family called the Brooks, who Henry Brooks was one of the first English settlers on that piece of land. When people coming over from Maryland in the 1650s. He was one of the first people to come over from Maryland. And a whole other story which we could deal with another time. But a really interesting one. You know, the Marylanders coming over to Virginia, but Brooks had a bunch of daughters. The daughters all got married. They all had children. And you end up with this Brooks family land being divided into many little, smaller properties and little Brooks descendants all over the place. And Abington was one of these people. He was late in life, and he sold his land. He's going to go live with his sister in Baltimore, and he sold it to Augustine and Jane. They also acquired a couple other properties. And immediately something interesting happened, which was that at that point they had two young sons, Lawrence Again, because that's how they do this. Lawrence and Augustine Jr and Augustine Sr, the father was getting involved in a mining enterprise, very different than the tobacco planting at enterprise, which of course he did. But the mines really matter. He puts a lot of energy into that. He went to England several times, really focused on these mines. And here's the interesting thing. When he acquired the land that Pope's Creek, he immediately sold it to the two allies. And what he did was sort of bequeath it to his son, Augustine Jr, and sold it to these other people for like £5 for them to keep in security. So, he didn't own that land any longer. He was basically a lifetime tenant on it. So that's a logical it's a very shrewd business move. What he's doing is protecting his children's inheritances from his own possible financial ruin and possible financial ruin associated with these mining enterprises. If they fail and he ends up in debt, then these properties that he's going to leave to his children cannot be taken from him because he no longer owns them. So, he buys it and immediately puts it in trust for Augustine Jr. So, it's kind of a funny thought that the land on which George Washington was born was owned by his brother, not by his father. So, it's got a fun little trivia detail there. But here's where it becomes very convoluted where did Joseph Addington live? He sold the land, and the deed of sale has all the usual language of referring to the buildings and the orchards and the fences. But he seems to have lived there. But where did he live? Did his building survive? Is it of another piece of the land that we've just never located? That's one of the things about archeology. We don't ever there's no system for digging the entire property of something, you know, there are always going to be places we haven't seen. We see a lot of one area, but we see nothing of huge swaths of the other area. We have methods for figuring out where buildings were. We're habitations where we also can miss things because we're not allowed to dig everywhere. So, there are places we just don't know about pieces of the property that we just have never seen. We don't know it's there. There are houses all over that landscape, 18th century or 17th century, estimating such ruins all over the place. I got five or six people identified who have plantations on that land. I know the names of enslaved people. We know stuff about their inventories. We had a carpenter living right near the dancing marsh. Right. Who's living on the on west side of that? I don't think he's on Park Service land at this point. Think might be the Muse property, but there's a lot of buildings there. We just haven't found them. We haven't seen them. So, we've seen what we've seen. But we don't want to assume that just because it's the thing that we've seen, it must be the most important thing. So where did Addington live when Augustine and Jane moved over from Bridge’s Creek, which we know they do, because he has a document where he says he's living on Pope's Creek. But that tells that he's shifted his main home. But did they build a home to live in or did they move into Addington’s Home? We just don't know. There's nothing to really clarify this. There's a little bit we're getting hints about this. We'll get to that in a minute. And then the next thing that happens is a guy named David Jones, who's a local builder, local carpenter, who probably was the tenants of Augustine's living on the land that Augustine Washington owned. He passed away. And there's some reason, some legal reason why there's a problem with his account in Augustine Washington's account book, there's some reasons the law needs to know about this, And the David Jones portion of Augustine Washington's business account book gets read into the court records. So, we have those. We have a record of all of that transaction. We have like a little miniature version of Augustine Washington's account book. We don't have the rest of the account book its lost, so we don't know who else he's doing business with. When you have an account book, you have an amazing glimpse into the detailed operations of this person's personal finances. We have an amazing body of records for George. The best thing we have for the birthplace is William Augustine Washington. We have his account from 1776 all the way through to about 1795 or so. So, we know a lot of detail about what he's buying, who he's trading with. And we know a lot we don't know a lot for Augustine, Washington. What we have is this one little portion of the account book read into the court records because the county needed to know about this. And that's what survived. And what we see is that the builder had died and hadn't finished whatever building project he was doing for Augustine. And Augustine referred to that project as my house. So now, okay, what does that mean? Is the carpenter completing a house? Is he adding on to a house? We just don't know. We just know that it wasn't finished and there's money involved. He also was building a church building one of the Washington Parish churches. So, now we know that they've moved that there might be the Abbington home out there and that David Jones was working on something, but he hadn't. But he died before the project was completed. So, we didn't we don't know, you know, the remaining piece there. So, a people looked at that record in the past and said, that's him building the first phase of Building X. And you could say that if you want. You can't prove any of that. All you can do is say, you know, I know that he's building something, but I also know that there's a building out there already. So, one clue, though, that's telling us that the Abington House may be somewhere else is when we looked at the archeology of the landscape and looked at the distribution of artifacts across the park grounds, we could see concentrations and we could put dates on those concentrations because the artifacts have dates associated with them. We do not have a lot of 17th century stuff on the site, and that's very significant because if Abington was living on the park grounds right in the area of the historic area. We would expect there to be at least some of the 17th century ceramics, and we don't see any. So that's a clue that Abington may have been living somewhere, not immediately there. And if that's the case, then David Jones may have been building a new building for Augustine and Jane. And that part of that new building may be the earliest phase of Building X. So, if you see what I mean, the earliest part of that building may be exactly the building that David Jones was working on for Augustine Washington. So, I think that's the direction that we're headed, that there's a core of that building that built by Augustine Washington in the years after 23, after he had taken property, taken possession and started to live on that land. But then what happens to it afterwards? It would it would seem to be sort of what my thinking is, and this is just where my mind is, that with the thought, I'm inclined to think that there's a core piece that is the Augustine Washington building and then additions put onto it later, and I would put those additions in the hands of Augustine, Washington Jr, who was an exceedingly wealthy planter who between he and his wife Ann Aylett Washington, they lived on that property for about 40 years. So, they had plenty of time to make additions after additions after additions. And he's got his inventory is remarkable. I think I mentioned it in the report. It's-
Dustin Baker: Hey, Dustin, again. Phil's just mentioned a report that he completed. That report is the park's current historic resource study upon this land. Seven generations of the Washington family and the residents of Pops Creek in the Mattox Neck. If you would like to explore it for yourself, it can be found on our website.
Dr. Philip Levy: - something you can gain access to, but it's a remarkable inventory. He's got all kinds of fancy stuff, like a big, big four horse carriage and he's a very wealthy planter and it makes sense that he would have a large, impressive home. Augustine Washington's a little different because he moved a lot, but he was living he started out life in Virginia. He moved to England when he was young. He came back from England and lived with a cousin and on maturity he took the possession, took possession of the property on Bridges Creek. Then he purchased the land over by Pope's Creek, which he then left to go to Mount Vernon. And then he left. Mount Vernon wasn't called Vernon then, but you get the point. At this point in history, Mount Vernon was known as Little Hunting Creek, a native actually already been in the Washington family for three generations. The name was changed to Mount Vernon by George's half-brother, Lawrence. After his commanding officer, Admiral Edward Vernon of the Royal Navy. So, the home that is almost synonymous with George Washington was named after a British admiral. He left Mount Vernon to go to Ferry Farm where he finally passed away. So, Augustine was not a let's sit in one place. Let's build our empire and build a beautiful home kind of guy. Is he's that's not that's not his temperament. He finds houses, then he moves into them, and he's been doing that his whole life. So, he's not a great builder and he's only at the Pope’s Creek property for about nine years anyway. He's out of there pretty quickly. So, when we look at who is the great builder, who is the person there with the wherewithal and time to make a massive home, it's Augustine Jr, it's his son. So, I think that's a lot of what we look at building. A lot of what we're seeing is there's Augustine Jr's building and then what happens to that? That's a good question. Augustine Jr passed away. And so, when you get the date wrong, it's like 1764, I think.
Dustin Baker: Just a quick correction. Augustine Jr. passed away in 1762, not 64.
Dr. Philip Levy: And left to his wife, Ann Aylett Washington, a lifetime tenancy in the estate and she's an interesting character a very interesting thing happens with her that nobody really has picked up on. But I think it's really fascinating. Up until throughout Augustine Washington, Jr's life, this is just called the Washington home or the home, because this is the building just where they live. The Washingtons don't do a lot of naming, but really their habit. George is a bit of an exception. Lawrence names Mount Vernon. But George So George didn't name anything, right? It was Mount Vernon when he got it. The Washingtons just don't do a lot of naming. The ferry farm home is called the Home House, and a lot of people do not remember his last name on their home. Just like today, not everybody names their home, so it's like the home. But then when Augustine Washington Jr. died and Ann Aylett Washington takes over the property and lives there for about ten years, suddenly she's getting mails sent to her at Wakefield. She the name Wakefield is her choice, and it appears only in connection with her. There are a few letters that are addressed to Wakefield and references to Wakefield, and then when she died, I think it's 1774 and the property goes to William Augustine, Washington, her son, the name falls out of favor and they're not using it anymore. It's gone. So, it's really, it's her thing. It's her choice to call it Wakefield, and it only lasts her lifetime. That habit falls away. It gets resuscitated in the 19th century because it's romantic. You know, it fits it fits the way the 19th century commemorators and the 20th century, early 20th century collectors want to imagine an Anglophile colonial past. They love the idea of this property having a name, and they think the property special because they care a lot about the fact that Washington was born there. His immediate family. They don't care so much about that. But that's land. They're going to make money off of that land and sell it if they want. So, they're not particularly invested in the romantic side of this. But later, people who are invested in the sort of colorful, charming English countryside stuff there, they really love the name Wakefield and they attached to it. But the only person or historical person who uses that name is Ann Aylett Washington, and it comes with her, and it dies with her. William Augustine, Washington never, never used that name. So. So, what happens to him? Well, he ends up inheriting that property. He he's very young at the time, I think about 17 when his mother died. And he's got a brother-in-law and older brother-in-law who I think it's a brother-in-law who plays a big role, plays a custodial role, and there's all sorts of weird little sales and transfers. I don't quite understand what's going on there, but William Augustine Washington. Mary's within sort of the family network and he's there. He's living there presumably until about 1780, when we suddenly see him living at the Blenheim home, which is about a mile inland. There isn't anything to specifically account for exactly why he stopped living there. It's hard to tell. And the archeology of the features of building X have the building being a ruin. It's hard to tell exactly when we'd have to kind of look really closely, but it seems to it's a little bit earlier than that. Maybe the 1770s, we start to see the beginning of it being a ruin. What that means archeologically is that the cellars were open, they were open holes and they filled with rubbish. So, they're collecting garbage into the 19th century, into the early 19th century, and visitors say that they can see the depression of the of the cellar in the early 19th century. But we don't have we have a silt at the bottom and a chimney that got pushed in. That's the main set of ruined features. So, bricks that got just some bricks get shoved in. Not a lot, not enough to suggest that the building was made of brick. It's mostly just dirt, some burned stuff, but the burned stuff is all fireplace refuse. It's not house fire, it's all small bits. Things burned in varying degrees and a lot of dirt at the bottom. If you have a house fire, the first thing you get is burn and you get large, burned things. Whatever was in the house the night of the fire that gets burned and it ends up in the bottom and then dirt goes above the burned stuff. In this case, we've got dirt and silt going into an empty building and then fire ruptures on top of that. So, either it was abandoned and burned down later, or people are just throwing garbage in it, meaning they're living somewhere nearby and they're dumping their fire, refuse their fireplace, refuse into it, filling the hole. And gradually we know that there was a chimney that was pushed in most of the bricks that are in the future. In the 1930s, those were associated with a chimney that fell in. So it appears to have been abandoned at some point. Again, we know that William Augustine Washington had moved away from it by 1780, and then a decade later, he's moved again, moved up to Haywood, which is another property on the Potomac. So, he's another one who's moving. But, you know, one of the nice things about having his account book, which nobody had looked at, nobody had taken that account book into account, nobody had nobody considered what was in that account book. What you don't have in his account book in the period of 17 nights, 1779 and 1780. Crucially, what you don't add is him re acquiring the things you need to run a domestic, you know, a gentry home. If he had had a major fire and needed to get a new mirror and a new sofa and a new bedstead, you would see that in the account book that we have, his account book. He's not buying any of those things. None of that is happening. That's possible. We're not seeing those transactions. But, you know, we have the account book. He's not doing that. He's a merchant and he's selling a lot of stuff. It's possible we're looking at his business account. Nothing is domestic one, I don't know. But we also see him we see him hiring bricklayers when he's building Haywood and some extent when he's building Blenheim. We see him. We're working up. Let him. We see him hiring the people. He needs to do the work on building the new homes. So, we do see something of the domestic economy. So why does he leave? I don't have a simple explanation. My inclination is to say it has something to do with the American Revolution in 1781, an English gunboat named the Savage went up the Potomac River a little bit like what would happen in the War of 1812. This gunboat went up the river. It burned some plantations on the Maryland side, didn't burn anything in Virginia. As far as I know, the enslaved people of the area were fleeing because the English offered them freedom. So, they were getting in boats and pushing off and going to the going to the English boat because that would make them free. And that they went all the way up to Mount Vernon, had a whole incident there. So, you've got this disruption now it's we know the outcome of the revolution, but, you know, the people in it don't. And it's pretty terrifying to have an English gunboat going up the river, burning homes. One of the things that happens when the savages going up the river is they open fire on two smaller sloops on the river because they see them in there, they see them moving quickly. And so, the British opened fire on them. And when the boats strike their sails and the English catch up to them, they turn out to be English privateers. So, the English first thought they were American and opened fire on them. Then when they get to them, know another two boats are actually English privateers. Well, that's really important because that tells us that there's raiding happening on the Potomac. People are people homes being robbed by English privateers. It may well be that Augustine, that William Augustine Washington said, let's move a little bit inland. Let's let's get away from the river front here and settle ourselves a little further back. So that's speculative explanation. But I think it accords with the way the world looked in 1780 and 1781 that there's ample reason to move away from the coast and settle a little bit further in and avoid the conflict a little bit, which again, the alarm was all up and down the river. People were terrified. And you can understand why. I mean, it's you know, this is a terrifying thing. So, at that point, though, sometime around that time, the building was abandoned and that's that. Now we know that there's a fire at some point because by 1810, they're referencing a burned house on the landscape. But 1810 is not 1780. Right. I mean, still, you got, you know, 30 years for something to burn between 1780 and 1810. There's no reason to assume that a fire reference 1810 was in a 1780 fire. Right. It's a lot of time between them and buildings burned all the time. There are any number of burned house roads all up and down the Potomac, all up all across the Chesapeake. It's a very common marker. There's also a piece of land called the Ruins, which is over near Blenheim. So, there are these place memories in the landscape in 1810. A burnt house, something called the ruins. So, there's been a long habitation there and lots of opportunity for these buildings to vanish in a variety of different ways. And a lot of people living there. There's a change, there's a decline in the number of people living there over the period of the Washington occupancy. At first there's lots of small planters, but gradually under the Washingtons, all that land gets bought up by them and it starts to be one plantation rather than about a dozen or more small ones. So, there's a lot of buildings around, a lot of buildings that can burn. The other thing about what's called the road to the burned house is typical of these maps. We don't see where it goes. We just see the beginning of it. We just see it going up. The neck of land. We don't see where it goes. So, it's the main road is what used to be the county road, the maintained road that appears in the documents of the 18th century as the road up Mattox neck. There's a road, there's a road to the Mattox Ferry, which is another one. And unfortunately, you can look at that map and see it's like we are part of that, but we don't have the whole thing, so we don't know to which burned house that road went. We just know that there's a burned house somewhere along that road in 1810 or a memory of a burned house in 1810.
Dustin Baker: Thank you for joining us in this episode of Upon this Land History, Mystery and Monuments. And this episode, we talked a lot about the ongoing research around the archeological sites in the park. But on the next episode, we're going to dive into the oral traditions, the stories that have persisted through generations about what took place here. Where did the buildings go and how do we collectively remember the birthplace of George Washington.
Description
On this episode, we're tackling one of the biggest mysteries of the park, and that's its name. We know George Washington was born at Popes Creek, but when we think of the term birthplace, we might also conjure a building. Yet, by the time the park was created in the 1930s, there was no longer a building here to preserve. Helping us shed light on this mystery is Dr. Philip Levy. Intro music courtesy of Wolf Patrol. Outro music courtesy of Brumbaugh Family.
Date Created
03/28/2024
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