Samuel Vaughan was an English merchant interested in landscape and gardens. He lived most of his life in Jamaica as a plantation owner. Well connected to colonial America through political involvement, he established relationships with figures such as Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. However, he only made three extended trips to the United States. On his 1787 journey, his principal destination was Mount Vernon. While there, Vaughan sketched a plan of the Mount Vernon mansion and the formal area around it in his journal. From this sketch and his field notes Vaughan derived the finished plan, which was later sent as a gift to Washington from Philadelphia.
Vaughn had previously visited the United States in 1783, primarily travelling in Philadelphia area, he first met George Washington. Washington and Vaughan formed a friendship, corresponding about Washington’s development of Mount Vernon and renovation of the mansion. In 1784 he gifted him a marble mantelpiece for the New Room that arrived the following year, later sending vases to decorate them.1
On June 18, 1787, Vaughan set off on a journey of more than 1,400 miles. His principal destination was Mount Vernon, but his itinerary took him from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, then to Richmond and finally on to Mount Vernon via Williamsburg and Yorktown. Vaughan arrived at Mount Vernon on the eleventh of August and departed for nearby Alexandria on the seventeenth. However, Washington was in Philadelphia presiding over the Constitutional Convention during this time. In his absence, Vaughan was received by George Augustine Washington, a nephew of Washington's, and George Augustine's wife, Fanny Bassett, a niece of Martha Washington.
Although Washington was absent, Vaughn sketched of the Mount Vernon mansion embellishing it with a perspective of the river and the Maryland shore beyond. He sent it to Washington as a gift. In his acknowledgment of November 1787, Washington wrote that the plan "describes with accuracy the house, walk and shrubs." This was a polite oversimplification as there were minor errors both in the ground plan and in the elevation and first floor plan of the mansion. Washington only explicitly corrected how Vaughan situated the trees with the omission of mounds at the west end of the Bowling Green, as the indication of planting in this way would have interrupted a vista. The scale of the ground plan was distorted, indicating that these dimensions were paced, rather than measured by chain or tape.
Washington and Vaughan continued to correspond with one another about foreign and domestic matters including politics.
Notes:
1. “George Washington to Samuel Vaughan, 6 April 1784,” Founders Online, National Archives; “George Washington to Samuel Vaughan, 5 February 1785,” Founders Online, National Archives; “George Washington to Samuel Vaughan, 18 November 1786,” Founders Online, National Archives.
2. “George Washington to Samuel Vaughan, 12 November 1787,” Founders Online, National Archives.
3. “George Washington to Samuel Vaughan, 25 August 1791,” Founders Online, National Archives.
Bibliography:
Martin, Peter. The Pleasure Gardens of Virginia: From Jamestown to Jefferson. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001.
Vaughan, Samuel. Journal of Samuel Vaughan, June-September 1787.
Wulf, Andrea. Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation. New York: Random House, 2011.
