American Adventures: A Second Trip 'Abroad at home'. Julian Street
Virginia Dare, if she lived, must have been nearing young ladyhood when Peregrine White was born; Captain Christopher Newport passed the Virginia capes when Miles Standish was hardly more than a youth, in Lancashire; and the Susan Constant landed the Jamestown settlers more than a dozen years before the Mayflower landed her shipload of eminent furniture owners at Plymouth. Even Plymouth itself had been visited years before by John Smith, and it was he, not the Pilgrims, who named the place.
I find that some boys, to-day, know these things. But though that fact is encouraging, I am not writing for boys, but for their comparatively ignorant parents.
Not only did the first English colony establish itself in Virginia, and the first known tobacco come from there—a point the importance of which cannot be overstated—but the history of the Old Dominion is in every way more romantic and heroic than that of any other State. The first popular government existed there long before the Revolution, and at the time of the break with the mother country Virginia was the most wealthy and populous of the Colonies. Some historians say that slavery was first introduced there when some Dutchmen sold to the colonists a shipload of negroes, but I believe this point is disputed. The Declaration of Independence was, of course, written by a Virginian, and made good by the sword of one. The first President of the United States was a Virginian, and so is the present Chief Executive. The whole of New England has produced but four presidents; Ohio has produced six; but Virginia has given us eight. The first British army to land on this continent (Braddock's) landed in Virginia, and in that State our two greatest wars were terminated by the surrenders of Cornwallis and of Lee. And, last, the gallant Lee himself was a Virginian of the Virginians—a son of the distinguished Henry Lee who said of Washington that he was "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen."
On the pleasant drive of perhaps a dozen miles, from Harper's Ferry to Charles Town, I noticed here and there, at the roadside, pyramidal stones, suggesting monuments, but bearing no inscription save that each had a number. On inquiry I learned that these were indeed Confederate monuments, but that to find out what they marked it was necessary to go to the county courthouse at Charles Town and look up the numbers in a book, of which there is but one copy. These monuments were set out three or four years ago. They appeared suddenly, almost as though they had grown overnight, and many people wondered, as I had, what they meant.
"Eloise," one Charles Town young lady asked another, "what's that monument out in front of your house with the number twenty-one on it?"
"Oh," replied Eloise, "that's where all my suitors are buried."
One of the things which gives Jefferson County, West Virginia, its Virginian flavor is the collection of fine old houses which adorn it. Many of these houses are the homes of families bearing the name of Washington, or having in their veins the blood of the Washingtons. It is said that there is more Washington blood in Charles Town (which, by the way, should not be confused with Charleston, capital of the same State), than in any other place, if not in all the rest of the world together. The nearest competitors to Charles Town in this respect are Westmoreland County, Virginia, and the town of Kankakee, Illinois, where resides the Spottswood Augustine Washington family, said to be the only Washington group to have taken the Union side in the Civil War. It is rumored also that all the Washingtons are Democrats, although that fact is hard to reconcile, at the present time, with the statement that, among the five thousand of them, there is but a single Federal officeholder.
The settling of the Washingtons in Jefferson County, West Virginia, came about through the fact that George Washington, when a youth of sixteen or seventeen, became acquainted with that part of what was then Virginia, through having gone to survey for Lord Fairfax, who had acquired an enormous tract of land in the neighboring county of Clarke, which is still in the mother State. To this estate, called Greenaway Court, his lordship, it is recorded, came from England to isolate himself because a woman with whom he was in love refused to marry him.
In this general neighborhood George Washington lived for three years, and local enthusiasts affirm that to his having drunk the lime-impregnated waters of this valley was due his great stature. The man who informed me of this theory had lived there aways. He was about five feet three inches tall, and had drunk the waters all his life—plain and otherwise.
Washington's accounts of the region so interested his brothers that they finally moved there, acquired large tracts of land, and built homes. Charles Town, indeed, was laid out on the land of Charles Washington, and was named for him, and there is evidence that George Washington, who certainly gave the lines for the roads about the place, also laid out the town.
Another brother, John Augustine, left a large family, while Samuel, the oldest, described as "a rollicking country squire," was several years short of fifty when he died, but for all that had managed to marry five times and to find, nevertheless, spare moments in which to lay out the historic estate of Harewood, not far from Charles Town. It is said that George Washington was his brother's partner in this enterprise, but excepting in its interior, which is very beautiful, there is no sign, about the building, of his graceful architectural touch.
George Washington spent much time at Harewood, Lafayette and his son visited there, and there the sprightly widow, Dolly Todd, married James Madison. This wedding was attended by President Washington and his wife and by many other national figures; the bride made the journey to Harewood in Jefferson's coach, escorted by Madison and a group of his friends on horseback, and history makes mention of a very large and very gay company.
This is all very well until you see Harewood; for, substantial though the house is, with its two-foot stone walls, it has but five rooms: two downstairs and three up.
Where did they all sleep?
The question was put by the practical young lady whom I accompanied to Harewood, but the wife of the farmer to whom the place is rented could only smile and shake her head.
The bedroom now occupied by this farmer and his wife has doubtless been occupied also by the first President of the United States and his wife, the fourth President and his wife, by Lafayette, and by a King of France—for Louis-Philippe, and his brothers, the Duc de Montpensier and the Comte de Beaujolais, spent some time at Harewood during their period of exile.
Having read in an extract from the Baltimore "Sun" that Harewood, which is still owned in the Washington family, was a place in which all Washingtons took great and proper pride, that it was "the lodestone which draws the wandering Washingtons back to the old haunts," I was greatly shocked on visiting the house to see the shameful state of dilapidation into which it has been allowed to pass. The porches and steps have fallen down, the garden is a disreputable tangle, and the graves in the yard are heaped with tumble-down stones about which the cattle graze. The only parts of the building in good repair are those parts which time has not yet succeeded in destroying. The drawing-room, containing a mantelpiece given to Washington by Lafayette, and the finest wood paneling I have seen in any American house, has held its own fairly well, as has also the old stairway, imported by Washington from England. But that these things are not in ruins, like the porches, is no credit to the Washingtons who own the property to-day, and who, having rented the place, actually leave family portraits hanging on the walls to crack and rot through the cold winter.
If there are indeed five thousand Washingtons, and if they are proud of their descent, a good way for them to show it would be to contribute twenty-five cents each to be expended on putting Harewood in respectable condition.
The last member of the Washington family to own Mount Vernon was John Augustine Washington, of Charles Town, who sold the former home of his distinguished collateral ancestor. This Mr. Washington was a Confederate officer in the Civil War. He had a son named George, whose widow, if I mistake not, is the Mrs. George Washington of Charles Town, of whom I heard an amusing story.
With another Charles Town lady this Mrs. Washington went to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and the two attended the Fair together on Washington Day. On this occasion Mrs. Washington made a purchase in one of the buildings, and ordered it sent to her home in Charles Town.
"What name?" asked the clerk.
"Mrs. George Washington."
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