Dining with the Washingtons

Vibrant watercolor of Mt. Vernon by modern artist Tom Harris (soon to be on my office wall)

Mt. Vernon most certainly would have been a tale of two estates during its years of most heavy use.  There were so many days, weeks, months and years that Washington was not even present at his own plantation that there is no way to fully come to understand daily living on the banks of the Potomac River Virginia.  When he was there, especially in the time between the end of the Revolutionary War

and before he became our first president, there was much activity.  Travelers and guests are the very ones who wrote of their experiences there, and this, besides Washington's own daily journal entries, is how we might come to know our chief American founder.  It is during these more domestic times, when farming and simple living became the more natural indicator of time and achievement than the ominous winter drudgery at Valley Forge or the years' long haggling with military subordinates and

Congress itself. One guest observer remembers fondly a quaint domestic scene in which Washington, after breakfast and his habitual eight-to-fourteen-mile ride around the estate when "his visitors rambled about the grounds, preparations began for the family's next–and main–meal, which was dinner.  For those who were hungry in the meantime, snacks, both sweet and savory, were available...as the sixteen-month old daughter of Eliza Parke Custis law toddled into the room where adults were talking, Washington called to her; he took from his pocket a roll of peach cheese [a molded paste of fruit and water that is sliced after hardening]; 'Here is something for you,' he said and gave her a piece and embraced her."  On those notoriously routine rides around his estate – for the pleasure of a morning hunt, or a second-checking of any variety of plantings – Washington carried with him what was then termed a 'Farmers Luncheon Box," which carried snacks or a sandwich. As an interesting side story, Washington, who would take his morning horse rides despite rain, snow, sleet, or high wind, would casually gallop except for when he was cutting too close to dinnertime, at which time he would recall his professional ridership skills and gallop in a fury back home so to meet Martha's mealtime deadline.  Indeed, it is said that one of the indirect reasons for his very

death was that the day he died he had ridden in the cold and refused to change his wet clothing at the morning table where his hoecakes, draped in butter and honey, awaited.

Dinner was routinely served at 3 p.m. daily – a standard plantation meal time, often followed by ports, wines and even champagne, leading to a final sit down snack time of tea at 7, perhaps on the piazza overlooking the vast horizon of manicured lawn and flowing Potomac below.  "Occasionally, supper was offered later in the evening, but apparently it was not part of the Washington's normal routine; possibly this was because, as a guest in 1793 noted, 'Suppers and even a glass of wine in the evening afflicted Washington with head ache.' Martha Washington's grandson recalled that during a typical family evening, George Washington would leaf through newspapers 'while taking his single cup of tea, reading aloud 'passages of peculiar interest, making remarks upon the same.' At nine, he would bid everyone good night and head for his bedroom."  Washington desired to return to Mt. Vernon as a planter / gardener / farmer and it was during these hours that he released from the enormous burden of birthing a nation, yet it was his sheer fame and magnitude that distracted him  on the very lawns of this not so private escape, falling under the daily obligations of visitors and perpetually, what he called, 'the drudgery of the pen' – writing letters of introduction and references to old military personnel, among hundreds of other small items.  Mt. Vernon, which had been envisioned as an idyllic retreat from continual public constraints, had turned into what Washington himself had wryly called something close to a southern 'tavern.'