On this episode, we are going to dive into some of the oldest oral traditions about the home George Washington was born in. It is not hard to find references to Wakefield being the birthplace of George Washington but who gave it that name and when? Another big one is the ultimate fate of the house. Joining us again during this episode is Dr. Philip Levy. Intro music courtesy of Wolf Patrol. Outro music courtesy of Brumbaugh Family.

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. Fact or fiction? History or mystery? When studying the biography of George Washington, it can be tricky to piece apart. The same is true for the place he was born. Hi, I'm Dustin Baker, and I'm the chief of interpretation here at George Washington Birthplace National Monument. Where does history come from? The power of a place largely comes from how we remember its history and how we talk about it. An oral tradition is a form of human communication held in common by a group of people where knowledge, ideas, and culture are passed through stories from one generation to another. Whenever we are told a story about the past, it might be best to view ourselves as participating in a centuries long game of telephone with specifics and data changing slightly during each retelling. And well, when these stories are repeated or printed by what we might perceive as authoritative or trusted sources, well, then they can go unquestioned as fact. Yet sometimes when we try to trace back a piece of information to a primary source or record, the trail goes, well, cold. Sometimes we even find the answers contradict long held beliefs. On this episode, we're going to dive into some of the oldest oral traditions about the home George Washington was born in. Just before you enter the park on route 204, you'll pass a sign that reads the following:

Jonathan Malriat using a radio voice: Virginia Department of Historic Resources highway marker J 69. George Washington's Birthplace, Wakefield. George Washington's birthplace, is two miles north on Pope's Creek, just off the Potomac River. He was born on 22nd February 1732 and live there only for three years. Washington's father, Augustine, purchased the land in 1718 and built the house by 1726. President Washington's half brother, Augustine Junior, inherited the property after his father's death in 1743. The dwelling, a U-shaped timber frame house, burned on Christmas Day 1779. The present memorial house, erected in 1930-31, is a Colonial Revival style version of a medium size planter's house. Originally known as Pope's Creek, the property was renamed Wakefield about 1770 by George Washington's half nephew, William Augustine Washington.

Dustin Baker: What is presented as simple facts upon closer examination, may actually be rooted in oral tradition. For example, if you were from Westmoreland County, Virginia, Wakefield might be a place name you use frequently, and it's not hard to find references to Wakefield as being the birthplace, or sometimes the birth home of George Washington. So who gave it that name? And when? But the big one is certainly the ultimate fate of the House. On our previous episode, we discuss what we know about building X with Doctor Philip Levy. We know that historical records indicate that the Washington family was no longer living there by 1780. We also know that by the 1800s, visitors were describing only a depression in the ground where it had once stood. So where did the house go? The story of George Washington's birth home burning down on Christmas Day, 1779, is a story that's been told here for over a century. In fact, it is so ingrained that new oral traditions have been born about certain objects in our collections, told to have been saved from the fire by the Washington family themselves. We're going to continue our conversation with Doctor Philip Levy where we left off on the previous episode and trace this story back to its origin. Will the story of the birth home burning go cold? Interviewing Doctor Phillip Levy as myself and lead interpretive ranger Jonathan Malriat.

Dr. Philip Levy: Augustine Jr passed away 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 is 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, it’s not really their habit. George is a bit of an exception, well Lawrence names it 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 don’t. Not everyone slaps a name on their home. Just like today, not everybody names their home, so it's like the home. But then when, when Augustine Washington Junior died and Anne Aylett Washington takes over the property and lives there for about ten years, suddenly she's getting mail 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 it's her thing. It's 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 commemorators want to imagine an Englified 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 it'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. They’re, they really love the name Wakefield and they attached to it. But the only person, historical person who uses that name is Ann Aylett Washington, and it comes with her and it dies with her.

Dustin Baker: And Phil, I'm glad you brought this up. I promise I'm not making this up for the purpose of the podcast. But I was driving home from work yesterday and I stopped at a gas station, so I'm still in my park service uniform. And a gentleman at the pump across from me goes, “hey, you work up at the state park.” And I said, “I work at George Washington's Birthplace”. And he goes, “You mean Stratford Hall?” And I said, “No, George Washington's Birthplace”. And he says, “I don't think I've heard of that.” And I go, “Well, most people around here call it Wakefield.” And he goes, “Wakefield, yes, I know where you're talking about.” So I guess I just would like to know why you think these place names persist for so long into the present era and why stories like the House Fire on Christmas Day. Why do those persist for as long as they do up until, you know, being something that someone today might reference this place as Wakefield?

Dr. Philip Levy: Yeah. I mean, the house fire story is its own complicated thing. There are, its fun to consider this, there is a house fire story for every Washington home, every one of them burned down. Ferry Farm has a story associated with 1740, where we are able to archeologically identify this, but there is two letters that referenced the 1740 fire, one in 1741 that specifically said sorry about your fire. And then in the 1790s you get another letter to George, someone who's reminding him about the fire at Ferry Farm, and that fire was on Christmas. So you got a 1790 letter saying, I lived across the river. And I remember when on Christmas your father's home burned and everybody had to go live in the kitchen. Its a very good letter. Right. That’s a very, that letter documents an actual event that that kind of memory in the lifetime of the people who are writing it. That's good stuff. Tied with another letter at the time in 1740 that references a fire that it immediately happened. So the very farm fire is very, very solid, very well dated and very real. What ended up happening is, remember I said in the biographies, people don't have access to a full range of information. They don't have all these documents. So you get somebody who does have some documents and they write about it. So you can find in the biographies people trying to figure out what house burned. So when a guy named David Humphreys, who was an officer in Washington, Army, one of Washington’s sort of supporting officers, decided to write a biography of Washington, the first attempt at this, in the late 1780s. Washington gave him access to some of his papers and he wrote a biography that ultimately wasn't published in his lifetime. It got published much later. But one of the things that makes that biography really useful is he gave a draft of it to Washington to look over, and Washington commented on some details. And I've always thought the details that he comments on are incredibly important because we get so little where Washington talks about his family. So we get these little bits. They're really quite telling. And one of the comments he makes is when he talks about the events of his childhood, which there's very little mentioned in Humphreys’ biography. He says, My father's house burned. That's it. But it's I think it's either his, I think I think, he, I think Humphrey’s writes his father's house burned, referencing what Washington has said. I don't remember the pronoun, but but the point is that Washington says my father's house burned and he associates that with his childhood. So that's probably the Ferry Farm story. Right, you with me? But that all speaks to the Ferry Farm fire. But the notion of a fire gets locked in the mind. And so you have some biographers in the 19th century who were just trying to solve problems. They know that Augustine left Pope's Creek and they know he left about 1740, 1738, 1736 right, pick your date. They know he leaves in that period. And so they say, Oh, a fire and he left. The home at Pope’s Creek must have burned down. So they look at the existing fire documentation in the letters and say, that must be why they left Pope’s Creek. So you start to get people saying, no, the fire was at Pope's Creek. Ferry Farm gets ignored in that story. In that version, they just ignore it. It's just not enough to say they just ignore it entirely. Parson Weems, the guy who wrote the Cherry Tree story, wrote, you know, one of the first major Washington biographies he wrote a story about, and this is a wacky thing, but he wrote a story about Mary Washington having a dream. And in the dream, Mount Vernon burns down, except that George was like five or six years old, saves the home by running up and down a ladder, pouring water on the fire. So little six year old George saves Mount Vernon from burning down. This is a dream that Mary Washington had and Parson Weems tells us, It's a political allegory and he explains the politics. It's a very strange, but, you know, but any time, any time you have an allegory, and then you got to explain what the allegory means. You haven't done the allegory very well. But that's exactly what he does. Here's what and here's what it means. But the point is, like, now there's a Washin.. Now there's a Mount Vernon fire story also. And the Mount Vernon fire story involves a fire breaking out on the roof of the ell of the house. They are not sure exactly. I mean, I guess you could have sparks coming out of the chimney and landing on wooden shingles. That could be the beginning of a fire on the roof. But there's a crucial pair of details here on the roof of the ell of a house that is buried in in Weem's Life of Washington. So now we've got a fantasy story of a fire at Mount Vernon. We've got documents from the period about a fire that probably tied to Ferry Farm, and the archeology supports that. And we've got historians trying to explain why they left Pope’s Creek and saying, it must have been the fire. So fire is now being used in a bunch of different ways. Then there's a series of biographies and the writers who in the 1880s and 1890s start writing a version of a fire at Pope's Creek and a letter emerges about 1883. It's credited to Sarah Tayloe Washington, who would have been in her eighties at the time. And she says that she learned from her grandfather who she she couldn't have been any older than nine or so when her grandfather died and he was in his seventies at the time. So you've got in 1883, you've got the memory of an 80 year old recalling a story told her by a 70 year old roughly 70 years earlier. It's not exactly a great lineage for a story, not great evidence. And she says there was a fire and they pulled the furniture out. She's a few details and she says it was, she says it was during the revolution. Then you get a landowner, Wilson, who lives nearby, and he knows a version of that story that he learned from her. And he says, no, it was 1779, so he puts a date on it. But then you get a guy who's from New York who's a kind of a forger, forger of credentials for, for objects and. He tells another story and his story says, No, it was 1780. And he says, of all the most wonderful things in the world, that sparks came out of the chimney and it started a fire on the roof of the ell of the house. And that's the story that the Wakefield Memorial Association uses as their fire story. It uses the elements of Mary Washington's dream to tell this story. And it's garbled. It's all, it's like all the stuff gets garbled. It's like you take all these little details of fire and put them in a blender and just, like, blend them all together and pour them out. Like, here's this one, here's that one. So all this, you see what I'm saying, all of this is so corrupted by cross-fertilization and different storytellings, that none of it is credible. There's no reason to to put any stock in any of this. The only one that works is the Ferry Farm story, because it's the only one that's documented in the 18th century by the people alive at the time are talking about it. And then it gets even more confusing because there's a letter from, these are the thing people don’t refer to, that's why you want to go back to documents, there's a letter from 1790, I think is the date from William Augustine Washington that he says he talks about what a bad year it's been because he's had two major barn fires and that would be at the Pope’s Creek property somewhere around it. By 1790, He's living at, living on the Potomac. He’s moved away from Blenheim, but he's in the same area. He owns that land and we don't know where the tobacco plants are. They may have been on the Pope's creek land because they would be all over the place. They'd be wherever they need to be. But two of his barns burned down. And he writes about it as like this kind of disaster that he befalls. So when you go back to Sarah Tayloe, Washington, as a nine year old learning a fire story from a 70 year old. Maybe he was talking about the barns. I mean, the loss of the tobacco barns is a huge financial loss for him. That is a very bad thing to happen to somebody who's growing tobacco. So winter fire that means those barns were full of tobacco. That's why they burned the way they did. He lost it. He lost a year's crop. And that's going to stick with you. You're going to remember that. So maybe what she remembered as a house was actually the tobacco barns. But also everybody at that point already knew the Parson Weems made up fire story. And you find other people, there were biographers of Mary Washington. There's woman in 1902 who writes, I think its 1902, writes about Mary Washington. And she tells she tells the Weem’s fire story. It's a dream that Weem’s made up. She tells that story and sets it at Pope's Creek and tells it as, as if it's historical fact. The ell, the fire on the roof, it's all made up. But what happens is the stuff gets written and it makes it into a book. And when it gets into one book, it makes it into the next book. And when it makes it to that one, it makes it into the third book. And the third person, when somebody says, Why did you say that? They say, Oh, it was, uh, I got two citations worth two other biographers told this story. And so these things just take on lives of their own and they become the ways that people understand a place and that becomes deeply personal. Becomes who you are, how you associate yourself with a landscape. Who, who you are in relation to the community and the story. So having this knowledge, knowing these things, knowing the name Wakefield, is a way of belonging in the community. It's a way of being part of the community. And people take that very seriously and will often hold on to those things and treasure them because they're, they're about identity. They're not the kind of project that we might be interested in, which is historical reality. What can I cite? What can I prove in documents, you know, without necessarily without sort of calling, you know, winners and losers before says, well, what do the documents help me see? what do I see in the documents? But this other experience, this identity piece, this belonging, this being part of something that's less concerned about what the documents have to say and is more concerned with, what did you learn growing up? What did your grandmother tell you? How have you always referred to this place? What stories have you always told about it? And those are comforting. And again, they're about belonging. So they stay because they do real work for people. They're very important. They don't have to be real to be important, though. Historians are not obligated to sort of honor them as if they are historically viable. But they play a role in people's understanding of a place. And in that way they're extremely important. And that's why they survive. They survive because they matter to people.

Dustin Baker: Yeah, and speaking of peoples understanding of a place, you know, we have so many stories that are blended and intermingled with facts for this location, but we also have an idealized physical landscape here now with commemorative buildings that are what visitors see and with, you know, nearly 100,000 visitors coming to this place, trying to form a connection with George Washington every year. As someone who's based in historic fact, I'm just interested in what you make of that.

Dr. Philip Levy: I mean, first of all, 100,000 is great and you'll be grateful more. I mean, that's a great number, particularly for a place that is, you know, off the beaten track. That's a great number. So that's a very exciting. It's a very exciting thing. People want that connection. you know, one of the things that that Park shows that's important to interesting in the Memorial House, is when you read the work of the people, Josephine Wheelright Rust, and people who are sort of working with her. When, what they were talking about was the idea of a fitting commemoration. So remember I said earlier that 1810 people marking the landscape don't really reference George. They either know it to the point where it doesn't feel like it needs to be referenced or it just is just not that important to them. But later generations will completely turn that around and make George the most important thing about the landscape. That's indeed the world that we inhabit, Right? The reason we're talking about the landscape at all is because of the Washington association and the sort of national recognition of the importance of the Washington association. So when they're doing their first commemorations in the 1920s, they they are completely bought in in Washington being great and important and fabulous. And, you know, they want to be the people who commemorated Washington. Like that that is their that's a big identity project for them. That's who they want to be in the world. And so they talk about things. They want to make a fitting a fitting commemoration. In other words, they want something that they think honors the greatness of the memory and the image. That's what they're going for. That's not the same as saying what sat on the land in the 18th century. And let's look at that. It's a very different kind of project. Augustine Washington, whether he built or moved into a home, knows nothing about the future greatness of his son. He’s just building, he’s the guy building a home with with whatever resources he has, and then he's leaving anyway. He goes to England all the time. Right. So, you know, he's I don't know how deeply invested in building a great home Augustine Washington was. That's not his priority but the people who are commemorating George's birth centuries later, they they're very interested in fitting and you read some of their work, particularly Charles Arthur Hoppin, who was an historian for that project, he’s a genealogist, but he does the historical research for them. Hoppin’s an interesting guy because he’s very good at finding documents, but he's terrible at understanding them. So his reads of documents are always a little bit wacky. The, one of the things he is very concerned about, people who are arguing that Washington may have been born somewhere else. Obviously he's concerned about that because he's involved in raising the money for this project. He doesn't want to suddenly find out that they're wrong, right? So so he does everything he can to sort of undermine them by writing stuff mostly, you know, writing snarky things about them being wrong. But there's that painting or that there's the the the Currier and Ives lithograph of of the birth place and that we won't go into that. That's a whole complicated Ferry Farm story. But there's a chain of image that gets us to the to that Currier Ives image. And Hoppin hates that image. He's really, really upset about that and writes extensively about how it's it's an affront to think that Washington could have been born in such a humble, simple, poor looking home. How could that have happened, a man as great as this could never have been born in such a simple home? It's like, Well, that's absurd statement. But it shows you where his personal investment is in this and what he wants of Washington. And so he's part of a project that builds a grand brick mansion to commemorate Washington because they think that fitting. Their Washington, their understanding of him needs to have been born in a grand, magnificent building that befits the status that he will have later in life. We would not talk that way. And this is why it's very important to to recognize the people doing historical work in the 1930s and 1920s. It might be called historical work, but their project is not like our project. They are they're operating on very different sets of assumptions. And what constitutes historical is just very, very different. So, so what do you do then when you have a landscape like the one you have at the birth place, where you have a lot of commemorative buildings? You know, I think you can explain that to people. I'm not sure everybody's going to get that. But I think I think a lot of times people just want to know what's real and what's not real. And while I and many people like me love reconstructions, I love a rebuilt building. Nothing makes me happier. Not everybody's going to see it that way. They want, they want real. Real and not real. I would reject those categories, but I understand it. The best thing to do in those circumstances is to use them as teaching tools. In one nice thing about a rebuilt building is people can handle it. People can sort of touch it and come in contact with it and be in it in a way that you would not want with an actual 18th century building. You would have to keep them a bit at arm's length. So you had these great interpretive platforms to talk about 18th century life. I also, when I've taken students out there, we've talked about the memorial house. It's true that the memorial house sits probably in the wrong place and is not a good representation of what we can tell was on that land. However, it is a pretty good mock up of something like Gunston Hall. It does look like a nice 18th century home and there are a lot of Virginians who would've been very happy to have lived in that home in the middle of the 18th century. And I think there's a lot you can do just by saying here is a good sort of imagined setting for elite, elite Virginians lives. So a lot of the stuff about how you move through a home, how central passages function, how rooms function, which I think is already part of the interpretation, that stuffs all available to you. So I think you can use it very much to your advantage to talk about the world of the 18th century.

Dustin Baker: Thank you for joining us on this episode of Upon This Land History, Mystery and Monuments. We want to thank Doctor Phillip Levy for his time, and we will be continuing the conversation with him on a future episode. But for now, we're going to shift gears. National Park Week is right around the corner, and we want people to leave their national parks not just informed, but also inspired. One of the ways we do that is with the Artist in Residence program. But how do you inspire people with art at a historic site? Well, we're going to be interviewing former artist in residence Selene Jarvis and talking to her about how she did just that at George Washington's birthplace. So join us for our next episode.