MOUNT VERNON:
UNCOVERING HISTORY

Michael Deets
HIST 348
Historical Archaeology
March 1, 2015

Mount Vernon was the home to our first President, George Washington. His “great-grandfather John Washington patented (or bought) the property”1 in what was then known as the Little Hunting Creek Plantation in 1674. In 1735, three-year old George Washington moved to Little Hunting Creek Plantation with his family. George’s father, Augustine Washington, started to build the one and a half story farmhouse that same year. George lived there for three years with his parents and his older step-brother Lawrence. In 1738, Augustine Washington “relocated the family near Fredericksburg, Virginia.”2 Lawrence received the property in the will following the death of Augustine Washington in 1743. Lawrence lived there with his wife, Anne Fairfax. Lawrence renamed Little Hunting Creek Plantation to “Mount Vernon, after Admiral Edward Vernon, his commander in the British Navy.”3 Upon Lawrence’s death in 1752, Anne and her second husband leased the mansion to George Washington. “He expanded the house in 1758, raising the roof to make the Mansion two and a half stories high.”4 Washington lived at Mount Vernon as a bachelor for five years before he married Martha Dandridge Custis in 1759. George Washington finally inherited Mount Vernon after the death of Lawrence Washington’s widow in 1761. George Washington lived at Mount Vernon until his death in 1799. Today George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon, is an amazing archaeological site that holds “valuable resources for the study of eighteenth century plantation life in the Chesapeake region of the United States.”5 In 1987, the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association (MVLA) established a professional archaeology program “to enhance the authenticity of the interpretation and restoration of the historic site and to preserve and manage all of their archaeological resources.”6 There are several major excavations at Mount Vernon which include the House for Families slave quarter, Washington’s Distillery, and the south grove midden. Along with these major excavations there are “more than one hundred archaeological sites documenting almost four thousand years of habitation on the estate’s 425 acres.”7 Mount Vernon’s archaeology team uses several methods to process the archaeological site. They use Terminus Post Quem (TPQ) and Seriation Analysis “to date layers of soil by identifying the most recent artifact from that stratum.”8 The archeological team goes through “multiple processes to recover everything from the largest artifacts to microscopic plant and chemical remains.”9 The different processes they use are “dry screening, water screening, flotation, soil sampling, and pollen/phytolith sampling.10 They do not perform each processing method on every layer that they excavate. “For most layers, we dry screen the soil and take a soil sample. If the layer is deemed significant in some way (for example, it is the fill of a feature or deposited during a significant time period), we perform a combination or sometimes all of the processes to recover the most information from that layer.”11 One of the major excavation sites is at The House for Families. It was home to approximately sixty seven slaves that worked at the Mansion Farm House. The House for Families was built during the 1760’s. “These slaves performed duties as house servants, blacksmiths, carpenters, spinners, weavers, and as other domestic retainers and craft workers.”12 Archaeologists began excavations at this particular site in 1984 and completed it in 1991. “Excavation of a brick-lined root cellar, located below the slave quarter, contained more than 60,000 artifacts, including 25,000 animal bones or faunal remains.”13 The findings of these artifacts helped provide archaeologists an idea of how the slaves went about their daily work and meal routines. “As a result of an intensive