Mount Vernon

Mount Vernon, situated on a bluff above the Potomac River in Fairfax County, Virginia, preserves the home of George Washington, commander of the Continental Army and first President of the United States. Washington inherited the property in 1754 and transformed it over four decades from a modest farmhouse into a 21-room mansion surrounded by formal gardens, working farms, and a community of more than 300 enslaved people who constituted the estate's primary labor force. The mansion illustrates Washington's evolving architectural ambitions; the most recognizable feature—the two-story piazza facing the Potomac—was Washington's own design innovation, creating a shaded outdoor living space with one of the most celebrated riverscape views of the 18th century. Interior rooms preserve original finishes including the green-painted dining room, considered one of the finest surviving examples of 18th-century American interior decoration, and the New Room, added in the 1780s as a formal entertaining space with a 16-foot ceiling and Palladian window. The Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, which purchased the estate in 1858 and has administered it ever since, has maintained an exceptionally high standard of historic preservation. Many original furnishings remain in place, including Washington's surveying equipment, his writing desk, and the camp bed on which he died in December 1799. A significant interpretive expansion in recent decades has centered the lives of the enslaved community that supported the estate. The Slave Memorial, dedicated in 1983, and the subsequent archaeological excavation of the slave burial ground have recovered evidence of a community whose members included skilled carpenters, blacksmiths, seamstresses, and house servants. The Lives Bound Together exhibit in the Donald W. Reynolds Museum and Education Center uses documentary and archaeological evidence to reconstruct individual enslaved people's biographies alongside Washington's own.