Our Trip to Mount Vernon

The first weekend in November my boyfriend and I had the pleasure of attending a wedding in Washington, D.C. The day after the wedding we made the short, scenic drive out to Mount Vernon to help bring to life the books I had spent the previous few months reading. If you have an interest in our nation's first First Lady and ever get the chance to go, I have two suggestions: 

1) Splurge on the Premium Mansion Tour.  One of the places it takes you to is the third floor, which includes the bedroom in which Martha Washington spent her final years after George Washington had passed away. You only get to peek in from the doorway, and it's not a visually exciting room, but that plainness in itself can be educational for understanding Martha's state during her period of mourning. Visitors on the Standard Tour don't get to see it, and Premium is only an extra $10 per person.   

2) Leave enough time to thoroughly explore the David W. Reynolds Museum & Education Center, in addition to the mansion and grounds. What we saw of the museum was engaging, visually stimulating, and technologically up-to-date, at times innovative – very well-done indeed. And it became clear that a visitor who spends even a little time with one of the museum exhibits is likely to learn much more about the life and time of the Washingtons in the museum than on a short mansion tour and self-guided grounds tour.  

We only left an hour or so for the museum after our tour of the grounds and spent nearly all of it in the main exhibit, "Discovering the Real George Washington." It wasn't until shortly before closing time that we discovered the newest exhibit, "Lives Bound Together: Slavery at George Washington's Mount Vernon." I regret not having the time needed to give the lives interpreted in that exhibit their proper due.   

Interpretations of slavery are lacking in the mansion and on the grounds at Mount Vernon. It's not completely ignored, but it's a shallow presence and tacit acknowledgment of an institution that played a central and tragic role in the building and functioning of the estate. And the story told ends with Washington freeing his slaves in his will; one has to closely read signage in "Discovering the Real George Washington" before it is clearly explained that Washington could only free the slaves he owned – constituting fewer than half of the more than 300 slaves at the estate – and that they were freed only at Martha's death, not his own. Washington had no legal right to free the slaves that came to Mount Vernon with Martha under the Custis estate (her previous marriage). And Martha never came around to George's way of thinking concerning the moral dilemma of owning human beings.