Mount Vernon & Chip and Dale

Today's adventure took us to Mt Vernon. I learned lots about George and Martha Washington. 

The decor of the home was awesome. I love the plaster ceiling and wall colors. 

I don't know if you can zoom in on the ceiling designs- but everything centers around agriculture. Here, you can see it a little better in the wall relief. Scythes and rakes worked subtly into the design. Seriously- NOTHING is missed. There are details in the details! I love it!

A smaller sitting room and piano. Isn't the wallpaper just delicious? I LOVE it!

The man of the hour, General George.

This was a second sitting room. 

I think they said this was a guest bedroom. 

This is the key to the Bastille in France. It was a gift to Washington from Lafayette. Kind of awesome, right? 

This is the same color it was in Washington's day. This color of green was very hard to come by, so anyone who had this rather garden-hose green was showing off their affluence. 

There are many things in the house that are originals. The only thing original to the house that you can touch is the bannister. 

Very sturdy to last during 200 or so years of tourists!

Most of the time I'm not a fan of mixing prints- but I think this room is just charming!

So pretty!

This room just exudes sunshine. So pretty!

This is the room- the very bed- that George Washington died in. After his death, Martha never slept in this room again. She took a smaller, upstairs room. 

This was his office downstairs. The chair is kind of interesting. It has a blade above it, and a foot pedal. He could sit in the chair and pump the foot pedal and it would fan him. Cool! (pun?)

HIs massive bookcase- all his books!

It's always interesting to see the kitchens in these large estates. They had to feed so many people and it just amazed me how it all got done. 

We took a short stroll through Martha's garden. There were some incredible blooms there. We were hoping to make it back through so I didn't take many pictures- we ran out of time.

The estate is huge! And it's a fraction of the size it was in his day. We walked around to some of the points of interest. 

The cow goes moo.... 

We made our way to the family tomb. Here are the final resting places of George and Martha, and behind them are 25 other members of the family. 

A little bit down the path from their tomb, we came upon something that affected me greatly. Less than 100 yards from their opulent tomb, is a slave graveyard.

It looks like a very peaceful wood, but in this area are buried hundreds of slaves in unmarked graves. 

They're only now starting to use technology on the area to find graves. If you look closely, you can see where string is marking them off. They'll never know who is who. Even sitting here writing this, I'm in tears. This absolutely breaks my heart. You know I love a good cemetery. Why? Because people *want* to be remembered. We leave headstones, heck, we leave graffiti because we want to be remembered. Why to we keep history? Why do we do genealogy? Because people want to be remembered. They want to be able to say, "I was here." And all of these people- worked and lived and died and their names are forgotten. I hope they know they are NOT forgotten. We may not ever learn their names. But they lived. We know they lived. They suffered through so much. I hope in their suffering they had even a little bit of happiness. If not, I hope they have found peace in death. But they are not forgotten. 

I am a little embarrassed about how much this affected me. I bawled. Like, I totally ugly cried. Why are we so mean to each other? How on EARTH can anyone justify owning another human being? I just don't get it. There was a very sweet couple from California. We chatted with them for a while and they were asking if we'd been to the museum of African American History and Culture. Not yet. It was on our list. They were very sweet though. I felt like an idiot crying in front of them. 

In 1929, a group erected a memorial to those buried here, and another, larger memorial was erected in the 1980s. What's sad though- is that at the time, they did not have the technology to search for remains, so the concrete and brick memorials are probably directly over several graves that will now most likely remain unknown.

We were fortunate to be there at the time they did a wreath laying ceremony. I didn't get any pictures of it because Megan volunteered to be part of the ceremony and I was recording it on her phone- so no pictures- only tender memories.

Inside the museum they had several things that were owned by the Washington and Custis family (There was something I didn't know. George Washington did not have his own children. He married the widow, Martha Custis, and raised her children as his own!)

This was some of Martha's jewelry. 

They were a musical family and had many instruments.

They had a few scenes from his life, telling his history. I didn't get a picture of it, but they had one talking about how he *could* have been king. Wisely, he turned that down. 

It was a hot and surprisingly emotional day. I did not plan on crying my face off at Mt Vernon. 

We headed out to pick up our final arrival from the airport. Katie got in that evening. On our way, we stopped by the Fairfax County Courthouse. We were there around 5 pm when court should have been getting out. What was the big deal? The Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial was going on inside! There was a news truck parked outside, but we did not see anything exciting.

After we picked up Katie, we drove into Leesburg to eat at a fancy schmancy restaurant that used to be a bank. It was a fun atmosphere. I don't know why I didn't take any pictures. Sorry!

As we were walking back to the car, a vigil march passed by. They were protesting gun violence and mourning the deaths of those in Buffalo the week before. They were singing, "This little light of mine" as they marched. We did not march with them- but we sang with them as they went by. One lady even threw me her little candle (an electric tea light) as she passed. It was very moving. I'm glad I got to be part of it! I still have the tea light. It's sitting on my countertop. 😊

When we got back to Marie's we decided to take it easy. It was funny- I took my massager with me because I knew my feet were going to hate all the walking. Marie got all of her massagers out too- she has a really nice one for feet, back, neck, shoulders, a whole spa's worth! We sat down to watch the new Chip and Dale movie since it had just come out that day (I was wearing my C&D shirt coincidentally!) and passed massagers back and forth. I think the most popular one was the foot massager... oh man. I have got to get me one of THOSE!