Rescuing Mount Vernon. (Current and Coming).

During his presidency and in his retirement, George Washington was besieged by visitors. In his own words, his house, Mount Vernon, was comparable to "a well-resorted tavern, as scarcely any strangers who are going from north to south or from south to north do not spend a day or two at it." After his death in 1799 his portrait appeared on everything from handkerchiefs to prints and needlework pictures, and people continued to flock to his house on the Potomac River to pay their respects at his tomb.

It is hard to believe that by 1840 Mount Vernon was in a ruinous state: discarded ship's masts held up the long piazza facing the river, and the gardens, lovingly tended in Washington's time, were overrun with weeds. Five owners of the house, all members of the Washington family, had straggled to keep up the large estate, but the land, exhausted from being fanned for so many years, provided little income. In 1853, Louisa Dalton Bird Cunningham was aboard a steamer on the Potomac sailing from Philadelphia to her plantation in South Carolina when she saw Mount Vernon in a shambles. She wrote to her daughter Ann Pamela about the sorry state of the house and suggested that a group of ladies might band together to save it. Ann Pamela took up the gauntlet and founded the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association of the Union in 1853. After five years of grassroots fundraising, the group was able to sign a contract with John Augustine Washington III to purchase the house and two hundred acres for $200,000, payable in install ments. In 1859, two years in advance of the deadline, the Ladies' Association made the last installment, taking possession on ...