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Animals at Mount Vernon
Modern visitors to Mount Vernon can see many of the same animals who lived here in the 18th century.
Foods such as milk, cream, butter, and cheese were not only produced at Mount Vernon—they were occasionally sold as well, earning money for the estate. Just not as much as Washington had hoped for.
Toward the end of his life, one of George Washington's fondest wishes was that his cattle would provide him with an income from the sale of their milk and other dairy products in the nearby cities of Alexandria, Georgetown, and the future Washington, D.C. He dreamed of constructing "large dayries" on his farms and considered his goal of furthering the dairy business as "much more desirable...than to push the best of my fields, out of their regular course, with a view to encrease [sic] the next, or any other year's crops of grain."
Throughout most of his life at Mount Vernon, however, that industry had been something of a disappointment. His experience seems to have duplicated that of other Virginians of the period. According to archaeologist and writer Audrey Noel Hume, most houses of any size in Williamsburg had a dairy or milk house near the kitchen, but contemporary accounts record that of "milk, cream, butter and cheese...they [the Virginia colonists] made very little-indeed so to speak almost none."1
Dairying appears to have begun at Mount Vernon shortly after George Washington returned home from several years on the frontier and married Martha Dandridge Custis, a young widow, in 1759. Prior to that time, his financial records show purchases of milk; after his marriage, he seems to have bought milk only when traveling or living away from Mount Vernon.
For thousands of years, dairying was almost exclusively "women's work," which probably explains the lack of such activity at Mount Vernon before Washington's marriage brought a wife to the estate who understood and could supervise the work.
Six dozen earthenware milk pans, used for setting milk so the cream would rise to the top, were ordered from England in September of 1760. These were followed by four dozen tin milk pans in 1761 and large numbers of others in a variety of sizes and materials in 1761, 1762, and 1765.
Watch this video to learn more about the "Ruby Red" Devon, a very important and versatile member of the plantation community at Mount Vernon.
The fact that the Mount Vernon slaves may not have received very many dairy products could actually have been something of a blessing. Medical studies have shown that a sizable percentage of adults living in sections of West Africa where the slave trade was conducted lack the enzymes necessary to digest cows' milk.3 According to one historian, the milk that was distributed to slaves on southern plantations probably went only to the very youngest children, whose bodies were still able to digest milk. There is no surviving evidence from Mount Vernon about lactose intolerance among Washington's adult slaves or to suggest that only children received milk, but these are strong possibilities.
Making butter in the 18th century wasn't so different from today. Watch as Mount Vernon's historic interpreters demonstrate the process.
Mount Vernon's Samuel Murphy demonstrates the process of making a favorite Washington family dessert—ice cream.
1. Noël Hume, Audrey. Food. United States: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1978. pp. 49-50.
2. Brissot de Warville, Jacques-Pierre. New Travels in the United States of America, Performed in 1788. New York: A. M. Kelley, 1970. pp. 237-239.
3. Savitt, Todd Lee. Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia. Blacks in the New World. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978. pp. 45-46.
4. Nelly Custis Lewis to Elizabeth Bordley Gibson, 2/23/1823.
5. M.W. to Fanny Bassett Washington, 8/4/1793.
Adapted from research by Mary V. Thompson (Mount Vernon Ladies' Association)