The Women Who Saved Mount Vernon

One of America’s earliest preservation stories—and one worth remembering

My wife recently told me that Mount Vernon may have been the first real example of historic home preservation and restoration in the United States. That sounded like exactly the kind of story I would love, so I wanted to find out more.

As it turns out, she had the heart of the story right, although the answer to whether it was truly the first is a little more complicated.

In 1850, New York State acquired the Hasbrouck House in Newburgh, where George Washington had lived during the final part of the Revolutionary War. It became the first publicly operated historic site in the country.

Mount Vernon was something different. It inspired what is generally considered America’s first nationwide preservation campaign, led by the country’s first national historic-preservation organization.

More interestingly, it was done by a group of women at a time when women had very little formal political power.

By the early 1850s, Mount Vernon was in serious disrepair. The property had stayed in the Washington family, but it was becoming increasingly difficult and expensive to maintain. The mansion was deteriorating, the grounds were overgrown and there was a real possibility that the estate could eventually be lost.

In 1853, Louisa Bird Cunningham was traveling along the Potomac River when she saw Mount Vernon in the moonlight. She was disturbed by its condition and later wrote to her daughter, Ann Pamela Cunningham. Her thought was simple: if the men of the country were not going to save Washington’s home, perhaps the women should.

I love that part of the story. Her daughter did not simply agree with her. She acted on it.

Ann Pamela Cunningham began writing about the plight of Mount Vernon under the name “A Southern Matron.” She appealed first to women in the South and eventually to women throughout the country. Her campaign became the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union.

The Association tried to persuade Congress or the Commonwealth of Virginia to purchase the property. Neither one did.

So the women decided to raise the money themselves.

They created a national network with representatives in states across the country. Membership cost one dollar, although smaller donations were also welcomed. They held fairs and community events and published a newsletter called The Mount Vernon Record. Edward Everett, a former United States senator and a well-known speaker at the time, reportedly gave his lecture about George Washington 139 times to help raise money.

It must have seemed nearly impossible. They were trying to raise $200,000 in the 1850s, with the country moving closer to the Civil War.

But they did it.

In 1858, the Association signed an agreement to purchase the mansion and 200 acres from John Augustine Washington III. It made an $18,000 down payment and continued raising the rest. In the summer of 1860, the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association took possession of the estate.

One of my favorite parts of this story is that the women did not save only the mansion and Washington’s tomb. They also protected the outbuildings, gardens, fields and much of the surrounding landscape.

A home does not exist entirely by itself. Its setting is part of its character and part of its story. The smaller buildings at Mount Vernon help us understand how the property actually worked in a way the mansion alone never could.

Because those buildings survived, Mount Vernon now has what the National Park Service describes as the largest remaining collection of eighteenth-century plantation outbuildings in the country.

The women were figuring out preservation as they went along. There were no generally accepted restoration standards and there was no established profession they could turn to for guidance. Their basic goal was to return Mount Vernon to the way it looked when Washington lived there.

Not every early decision was historically correct. Rooms have been repainted and refurnished more than once as researchers have uncovered new evidence. Gardens and outbuildings have also been reconsidered and, in some cases, reconstructed.

Sometimes preservation works that way. First, you save the place. Then you continue learning from it.

Preserving Mount Vernon also meant preserving a plantation. At the time of Washington’s death in 1799, 317 enslaved people lived on the estate. They farmed the land, cooked, practiced skilled trades, maintained the household and performed much of the work that made Mount Vernon possible.

For many years, the interpretation of Mount Vernon focused primarily on Washington and the estate as a patriotic shrine. Today, archaeology, historical records, surviving workspaces and quarters, and the work of descendants are helping to tell a more complete story of the people who lived and labored there.

That is important. Saving a building does not automatically guarantee that its complete story will be told. It does, however, preserve the physical evidence that allows later generations to keep asking questions and improve our understanding of what happened there.

This is where the story of Mount Vernon starts to feel more personal to me.

I spend a lot of time looking at older homes around Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena and the surrounding communities. They may not have been owned by a president or connected to a nationally important event, but they help tell the story of how our own communities developed.

I also see how quickly the details that give these homes their identity can disappear. Original windows, doors, woodwork and tile are often treated as problems simply because they are old. Sometimes they do need repair or replacement. But sometimes removing them is simply the easiest choice, without much thought given to what will be lost.

I am not suggesting that every old home should be turned into a museum. Homes need to work for the people who live in them.

My own home in Burbank is a fairly modest original Baby Benmar. It is certainly not Mount Vernon, but my wife and I have tried to preserve or recreate its original look and feel. We do that because we like what the house is. We never wanted to remove its character and then try to add some artificial version of it back later.

I feel the same way about vintage cars. My 1958 MGA is not interesting to me simply because it is old. It is interesting because it still looks and feels like an MGA. Repairs and even certain modifications can be made without taking away the things that give it its identity.

Old homes are much the same. Change is not the enemy of preservation. Thoughtless change is usually the bigger problem.

The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association still owns and maintains the estate more than 160 years later. Its work did not end when the purchase was completed. Every generation since has inherited new repairs, new discoveries and new questions about what should be preserved and how the history should be presented.

What I keep coming back to is how the entire effort began. A woman saw a neglected home from a boat and told her daughter that someone needed to save it. Her daughter decided that it should not be lost, and thousands of other people eventually helped her.

That may be how preservation usually begins—not with an official designation or a plaque, but with someone recognizing that a place contains something worth carrying forward.

We don’t inherit great homes from the past. We borrow them from the future.

A Few Sources I Used

• Early History of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association
• Ann Pamela Cunningham — National Park Service
• The American Preservation Movement’s Founding Mother
• Preservation of Mount Vernon — National Park Service
• Featured image: Mt. Vernon, photographed between 1859 and 1860 — Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication.