Here, George Washington Was Born: Memory, Material Culture, and the Public History of a National Monument

Notes

205 NOTES Abbreviations fac United States Fine Arts Commission gewa George Washington Birthplace National Monument hfc National Park Service Harpers Ferry Center nab National Archives Building, Washington, D.C. nacp National Archives, College Park, Maryland namar National Archives, Mid-Atlantic Region, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania nps National Park Service rg Record Group sar Superintendent’s Annual Report smr Superintendent’s Monthly Report Introduction. Birthing Washington 1. Harriman, “Westmoreland County,” e1.The earliest use of this phrase that I have found appears when Benjamin Lossing described its origins in 1859: “This name has been given to Westmoreland on account of the great number of men, distinguished in our annals, who were born there. Washington; the two Lees, who signed the Declaration of Independence; the brothers of Richard Henry Lee (Thomas, Francis, and Arthur); General Henry Lee; Judge Bushrod Washington, and President Monroe, were all born in that county.” See Lossing, The Pictorial Fieldbook of the Revolution, 217 n. 2. 2. Schlereth, Cultural History and Material Culture, 305–6. 3. Henry Brooks was the first European to settle in the area during the 1650s. The Virginia Assembly organized Westmoreland County in 1653 and Nathaniel Pope bought a portion of Brooks’s land for his daughter Anne and her new husband, John Washington. In 1664 John and Anne built a home on the old Brooks tract, started a family, and established the American seat of the Washington family near the creek named after Anne’s father. John purchased more land and staked his fortunes on tobacco. John’s son Lawrence continued the process and handed down the operation to his son Augustine in 1698. Augustine renovated an old home near Popes Creek for his family in 1727, but his wife Jane Butler died two years later. He married Mary Ball in 1731.The early history of the area surrounding Washington’s birthplace is discussed at length in Hatch, Popes Creek Plantation; Hosmer, Preservation Comes of Age; Beasley, “The Birthplace of a Chief ”; and Treadway, “Popes Creek Plantation,” 192–205. 4. K. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, 299–302; Sobel, The World They Made Together, 135–36. 5. Local tradition holds that the house was ignited by a stray ember from the chimney and burned on Christmas Day, 1779. In her history of Mary Washington , Ella Bassett Washington attributed the fire to an accident caused by servants burning “trash” during the spring. Washington, “The Mother and Birthplace of Washington,” 832. No one, to my knowledge, has linked the fire to the American Revolution. 6. Horace Albright cited in Ise, Our National Park Policy, 325. 7. Hal Rothman discusses the park’s significance during the formative years of nps expansion into historic preservation in America’s National Monuments, 197–202. 8. For an introduction to the issues manifest in struggles over the form and meaning of public commemoration, see chapter 1 of Bodnar, Remaking America. 9. Ellis, His Excellency, George Washington, 151–52. 10.This brief historiographical synthesis is itself a synthesis of Don Higginbotham , introduction to Higginbotham, George Washington Reconsidered. For a favorable review of Hughes’s first volume that refers to these controversies, see “Paints Washington as Human, Ardent,” New York Times, 14 October 1926, 14. Hughes’s remarks appear in “Rupert Hughes, Author, 84, Dies,” New York Times, 10 September 1956, 27. 11. Roman general Coriolanus curses his native city in William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Santesso, “The Birth of the Birthplace,” 383. 12. Wenceslas Hollar’s Long View of London (1647), for example, directed wellheeled travelers to Edmund Spenser’s birthplace. Santesso, “The Birth of the Birthplace,” 383. Santesso cites Bruce, “Spenser’s Birth and Birthplace,” 283–85. 13.Twain, “A Lincoln Memorial,” 8. 14. Although this may be changing, as evidenced by the annual meeting of the National Council on Public History in Santa Fe, New Mexico, April 2007, where lively discussion surrounded a session titled “Going Home Again: Birthplace and Childhood Homes as Historic Sites.” 15.Thanks to Frank Grizzard, formerly associate editor for the Papers of George Washington, University of Virginia, for explaining to me why this quote cannot be genuine. 16. Washington, “The Mother and Birthplace of Washington,” 831, 836–37, 840. 17. Ibid., 842. 18. Hay, “George Washington,” 782. 19. Higginbotham, introduction to George Washington Reconsidered, 4. 20. Michael Saler provides an excellent overview of the tendency in recent scholarship to characterize modernity as disenchanted, that is, to imply that the notion of wonder typical of early modern Europe somehow yielded to science and secularism. See Saler, “Modernity...