Rescuing Mount Vernon

During his presidency and in his retirement, George Washington was besieged by visitors. In his own words, his house, Mount Vernon, was comparable to "a well-resorted tavern, as scarcely any strangers who are going from north to south or from south to north do not spend a day or two at it." After his death in 1799 his portrait appeared on everything from handkerchiefs to prints and needlework pictures, and people continued to flock to his house on the Potomac River to pay their respects at his tomb.

It is hard to believe that by 1840 Mount Vernon was in a ruinous state: discarded ship's masts held up the long piazza facing the river, and the gardens, lovingly tended in Washington's time, were overrun with weeds. Five owners of the house, all members of the Washington family, had straggled to keep up the large estate, but the land, exhausted from being fanned for so many years, provided little income. In 1853, Louisa Dalton Bird Cunningham was aboard a steamer on the Potomac sailing from Philadelphia to her plantation in South Carolina when she saw Mount Vernon in a shambles. She wrote to her daughter Ann Pamela about the sorry state of the house and suggested that a group of ladies might band together to save it. Ann Pamela took up the gauntlet and founded the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association of the Union in 1853. After five years of grassroots fundraising, the group was able to sign a contract with John Augustine Washington III to purchase the house and two hundred acres for $200,000, payable in install ments. In 1859, two years in advance of the deadline, the Ladies' Association made the last installment, taking possession on February 22, 1860.

An exhibition celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association is on view at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., until September 21. Underwritten by the Ford Motor Company the show is entitled Saving Mount Vernon: The Birth of Preservation in America and includes paintings, photographs, prints, artifacts, and a replica of Mount Vernon, complete with furnishings created on a one-inch to one-foot scale. The exhibition chronicles the formation of the preservation organization and the steps it took to save the house.

Cunningham and her secretary Sarah Tracy were remarkable women. Tracy moved into Mount Vernon in the hopes that a woman's presence would protect the building during the Civil War. She was able to have Mount Vernon and the land surrounding it declared a neutral zone, and she enforced a rule that soldiers were not allowed to enter the house bearing arms of any kind. Upton Herbert was hired immediately as superintendent and began to make the most urgent repairs to stabilize the building. Since this period the Ladies' Association has attempted to locate and return original furnishings to the house and thereby re-create as closely as possible the rooms in which Washington lived. There were fewer than a dozen objects in the house at the time it was purchased--a number that has been handsomely amplified over the decades. Paint analysis inside the house, archeological investigations on the grounds, and extensive research into period documents all have contributed to making this historic property as accurate a reflect ion of Washington's tastes and way of life as is possible.

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