By Frank D. Roylance , Sun reporter|July 03, 2008
After a century of speculation, seven years of digging in the Virginia dirt, and two false starts, archaeologists believe they have finally found traces of George Washington's boyhood home, called Ferry Farm, on the Rappahannock River near Fredericksburg.
Thousands of mid-18th-century artifacts, including a broken tea set, along with the home's complex design, are providing historians with hard evidence that is enabling them to reconstruct, for the first time, the physical and economic circumstances of the first president's formative years.
The clues suggest that Washington did not grow up in the rustic cabin often portrayed in 19th-century drawings, but rather in a relatively comfortable, eight-room, one-and-a-half story clapboard house.
"Most were living in one- or two-room houses in this period," said Mark Wenger, a consulting architectural historian on the project. "I wouldn't say this was three times as large, but it is quite a bit larger than normal houses we see on this landscape" in the mid-1700s.
The 53-foot-by-37-foot home faced the Rappahannock. It had two front rooms flanking a central hall, each with a fireplace for heat. There were several back rooms and several more upstairs under a sloping rear roof.
The diggers found nothing to support the fanciful tale of how young George chopped down his father's cherry tree with his hatchet and confessed rather than tell a lie. Such stories about Washington's boyhood emerged in the popular literature after the president's death in 1799.
Paul Nasca, the staff archaeologist at Ferry Farm, said his crews uncovered several hoe blades, but no hatchets.
Washington's pipe?
Among the most intriguing items recovered was a pipe bowl decorated with Masonic symbols. Washington is known to have joined a Masonic lodge in Fredericksburg in 1753 while living at Ferry Farm. He was 21.
"One can't say this is George Washington's pipe, but we can certainly wonder about that," said David Muraca, director of archaeology at the George Washington Foundation, which operates the Ferry Farm site and museum.
The dig was sponsored by the Commonwealth of Virginia, the Dominion Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the Mary Morton Parsons Foundation and many individual donors. In addition to the main house, the work also uncovered the home's kitchen and slave quarters. Future workers will seek other outbuildings, gardens and orchards.
