Fires at Washington’s Homes

It happened sometime in the late 1730s. The family was all at home—Mary sitting in the shade of the piazza and five-year-old George playing in the garden. All of a sudden, a cry went up as a terrifying sheet of flame began swallowing up the roof. The family and the enslaved Africans panicked, but little George knew just what to do. No sooner had his mother called his name than he was running up and down a ladder, splashing water onto the flames using a gourd. Finally, an old man showed up and presented George with a wooden shoe to carry the water. That did the trick, and soon the flames were extinguished, even though the damage was extensive and Mount Vernon would need a new roof.

Careful students of Mount Vernon’s architectural history are probably asking a few questions right about now: “Piazza? In the 1730s? But that was a much later addition.” Then there are the other peculiarities, which require no special study to question: Convenient ladders? Old men with wooden shoes? Five-year-olds battling blazes? Something seems odd, to say the least!

That’s because the whole story is a fabrication from the fertile imagination of Mason Locke “Parson” Weems, the early 19th-century preacher/biographer/fiddler/self-promoter best known for his other young-George tale—you know: the one costarring Augustine Washington and a cherry tree. That story became an American icon, excerpted in schoolhouse readers for more than 100 years. Weems related the story of the Mount Vernon fire as having been a dream that Mary Washington shared with her neighbors, who, in time, told Weems. That makes the whole thing a sort of fiction about a fiction. On top of that, Weems meant the story to be an allegory for the American Revolution—the old man was Franklin, the wooden shoe the French alliance, and so on. Weems must have known how strained his allusion was, since he followed his retelling with a full explanation of what it was supposed to mean.

Weems’s fire story was an obvious fiction—but hardly a simple one. In 1741, Augustine Washington received a letter condoling him for the “late calamity” that he “suffered by fire,” making at least some conflagration in Washington’s youth a historical fact. Further, Washington himself commented cryptically that his “father’s house burned” but offered little more to help later sleuths figure out which house or when! In a 1795 letter to the then president, the writer remembered—with some questionable accuracy—a fire on Christmas Eve of an unspecified year.

Recent archaeological excavations at Ferry Farm, Washington’s childhood home on the Rappahannock, showed evidence of a small but damaging fire dating to the early 1740s. That find ended a long discussion of just where and what exactly amounted to Augustine’s “calamity” by fire. But for close to 200 years, biographers of varying skill—and frequently with limited access to sources—spun a wide array of fire stories and then respun one another’s tales. Amid all of that artistry, Weems snuck back into the mix—and the door was most open at Pope's Creek, the site of Washington’s birth.