After two years of excavations, the first potential house site turned out to be too early, Muraca said.
"It looked more like the 17th-century structures we're used to seeing farther east in the Tidewater," he explained, and was "totally unrelated to the Washingtons."
Artifacts from the second site seemed to point to the right period. But after two more years of digging, that spot, too, began to look wrong, Muraca said. A critical piece of pottery put it squarely in the mid-1800s.
So, the archaeologists turned to the third site.
"If we didn't hit it on this one, we didn't have any other place to look," he said.
They began the work three years ago and immediately found traces of a very large building for the period. It featured a stone foundation, the remains of two stone fireplaces - one at either end - and two stone-lined cellar holes for food storage.
Best of all, the team's discoveries dated to precisely the right period. They also aligned with room-by-room property inventories taken after Augustine Washington's death.
"Every day we excavated, we felt better and better," Muraca said. "We felt without a doubt we had found the Washington house."
The dig uncovered fragments of cutlery, stemware, glassware, ceramics and bone from table waste - all providing clues to the family's wealth and well-being. One of the most unusual was a type of bead previously known only from a slave necklace found in a grave site in Barbados.
Philip Levy, an associate professor of history at the University of South Florida who oversees the USF field school at Ferry Farm, said the home site on the Rappahannock placed Washington at the nexus of the trans-Atlantic trade and the young colony's westward expansion.
While he lived there, Washington considered enlisting in the Royal Navy but turned instead toward the interior, helping to survey the western wilderness.
The Ferry Farm discoveries reveal the comparative comfort the family initially enjoyed, Levy said, helping to dispel the folklore that came to surround Washington's youth.
Augustine Washington, while not a player in colonial-level politics, was nevertheless "a very powerful, wealthy man within the county," Levy said.
frank.roylance@baltsun.com
AT FERRY FARM Major events in George Washington's life that took place while he lived at Ferry Farm:
* His sister Mildred died in 1740.
* The house caught on fire on Christmas Eve 1740 and was repaired.
* His father died in 1743.
* Washington learned surveying.
* He learned how to behave in society by writing out the Rules of Civility (a book of etiquette based on maxims in a 1595 French manuscript).
* He applied for his first military appointment on June 10, 1752. The letter is in the collection of the foundation and was generated at Ferry Farm.
* Washington became a Mason at Fredericksburg Masonic Lodge No. 4 on Nov. 4, 1752.
Source: National Geographic Society
