Mount Vernon visit reveals more about Washington the farmer
By BURLON PARSONS bparsons@journal-spectator.com

Staff Photo by Burlon Parsons The 16-sided barn built by George Washington was unique and there's never been another built like it. It used horses running around the second floor to thresh wheat and the threshed wheat fell to the bottom and was loaded for sale or headed to the grist mill. This is a reconstruction of the orginal structure which remained until the 1870s.

While on a recent trip to Washington, D.C., there was a chance to spend our last Saturday at George and Martha Washington's Mount Vernon estate in Virginia.

Much of what I knew about our nation's first president was what had been taught in school.

There was much which is terribly lacking in the school books about the man himself. Our trip gave me a new insight into his life as a hands-on gentleman farmer, thinker, inventor, geneticist and environmentalist.

Washington was a professional farmer who cultivated more than 3,500 acres of his 8,000-acre Mount Vernon estate.

Over the course of his career he experimented with growing more than 60 different crops.

Staff Photo by Burlon Parsons Even the privy at Mount Veron was built with brick made on the estate. It is large and accomodated three people at a time.

Early on, tobacco was Washington's staple crop. By the 1760s he was growing small grains with wheat as his cash crop and corn to provide food for his family and slaves.

Wheat was a crop not taxed by England and Washington concentrated on the crop for export.

He rebuilt a grist mill on the estate and made it larger and more efficient. His market for grain and flour sold locally in Alexandria, Va., and as far away as the West Indies, England and Europe.

To increase the production of wheat Washington the farmer practiced various methods of natural fertilizers. These included composting manure from his stables, growing "green manure" cover crops and grazing sheep in a plot and turning their manure into the soil. He used crop rotation and kept records of when and where to plant his different plots. He also experimented with broadcasting versus planting clumps of wheat seeds in rows.

Staff Photo by Burlon Parsons A slave cabin with garden and animal pens sits on the reenactment area of Mount Vernon reclaimed from a marshy area that Washington referred to as "hell hole."

Washington saw great waste in the wheat threshing process. To better increase his threshing yield he built the first and only 16-sided threshing barn in the U.S. in 1792. A reproduction of the barn, torn down in the 1870s, is now on view on the estate.

The barn was built as a twostoried structure partially in the ground. On the second floor was a slotted floor. Washington experimented with different sizes of slots for the flooring until he found one and one-half inch slots worked for threshing.

In the center of the second floor is where bins of harvested wheat was stacked. Workers spread the wheat out across the slotted floor. Two specially trained horses were brought into the barn's second floor and they ran around the barn as their hooves actually threshed the wheat.

The threshed wheat fell to the first floor where is was scooped up by other workers and placed in center bins. It could then be ground to flour at the grist mill or sold as raw wheat.

Staff Photo by Burlon Parsons Mount Vernon, the home of President George Washington and First Lady Martha Washington was added to twice in its lifetime. Washington designed and supervised the additions himself.

The size of the slots produced 90 percent threshed wheat with 10 percent chaff versus the reverse when it was done by hand or on the ground using animals.

In 1797 Washington finished his second term as president and returned to Mount Vernon. He was convinced to build a distillery to compliment the farm's rye and corn production. It produced whiskey from those two crops.

Washington also operated a seine fishery for herring and shad in the Potomac River bordering Mount Vernon.

By the next year the mill was the third most profitable venture at Mount Vernon, trailing only the farms and the fishery. The distillery was fourth most profitable.

Washington made a profit of L277 ($25,000 in modern purchasing power) from grinding 5,033 bushels of wheat. Another 3,200 bushels of corn were ground for internal use on the plantation.

He personally oversaw the expansion of Mount Vernon, its crops and its businesses.

When his workers headed to the forests surrounding the estate, Washington would remind them to only collect wood from trees already blown down or those which were diseased.

He knew the wildlife, which also provided food for Mount Vernon's table, also needed the shelter of a forest to continue to reproduce and remain a food source.

After spending a day checking his farms, Washington was caught in a sleet storm. He developed an inflamed throat and it turned into what is called today acute inflammatory edema. The first President was dead at age 66.

His body was brought downstairs and kept for three days to be certain he was dead. Martha sat beside a second-floor window and watched the funeral on the lawn below. Two years later she joined him in death.