They cannot tell a lie: They're mad Boyhood home of Washington is gone

make way for Wal-Mart

FREDERICKSBURG, Va. -- George Washington slept here. And there, and everywhere, as every school child once learned. But he grew up here, in the "town of my growing infancy," he once said. It was here, on a sweep of farmland overhanging the Rappahannock River, that he spent his young boyhood, learned how to grow crops, supposedly flung a silver coin across the river and, according to his spinmeister Parson Weems, confessed to cutting down a cherry tree because he could not tell a lie.

For years the Ferry Farm, as it was called, languished in the shadow of Mount Vernon, where Washington lived his adult years. Fifty miles to the north, just across the Potomac from the nation's capital, Mount Vernon became an instant tourist attraction after our first president died (being a Washington insider wasn't considered such a bad thing in those days), while Ferry Farm was largely forgotten.

Last month, however, in the worst example of dramatic timing since John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln after the South lost the Civil War, the local gentry chose the week of Washington's Birthday to announce a deal with Wal-Mart to build a 93,000 square-foot "superstore" on Ferry Farm's pristine doorstep.

This, of course, was an act of supreme irony. Suddenly, the national media had the first interesting George Washington birthday story since Congress created "Presidents' Day" to honor Washington, Lincoln, Ford, Chrysler, Chevy and Toyota.

And it wasn't, of course, the story that Wal-Mart wanted. It was basically, "Rapacious retailer paves paradise."

First, the Associated Press, then the "Today Show" showed up to do stories on the gentle bluff over the Rappahannock. The "CBS Evening News" was hot on the trail. Protests were mounted, rallies planned, a general wailing broke out with its own Web site (http://www.mo.net/cherrytree).

There was only problem. Ferry Farm wasn't there anymore.

The only original thing at Ferry Farm today is a ramshackle shed where young George may have studied surveying. On the spot where the original house stood is a protective building covering the stone and brick remnants of a 1995 fire that obliterated a dwelling whose only connection to the original Washington home was its foundation.

"A gravel pit," a slick young Wal-Mart developer snorted.