Southern Maryland – Did you know? George Washington slept here.
No, really.
The catch phrase grew out of a 1940s movie of the same name, not from the notion that the Father of Our Country slept around, but that after leading his army to victory in the American Revolution and serving as the new nation’s first president, he spent a lot of time on the road.
The former president kept a series of diaries, a great extent of which focused on the weather.
George kept meticulous notes on rain, wind and Mercury (temperature).
They also tell who dined with him and Martha at Mount Vernon, and of his trips to other places, where lodging was procured.
Back in colonial times, it took a lot longer to go from Point A to Point B, and many times the general would stay over, in Baltimore or Bladensburg, where Washington noted in his diaries, “a good house is kept by one Ross ([under the] sign of the Indian Queen).”
So did George ever stay in Southern Maryland?
The answer is probably, but not assuredly.
“We know it’s very likely he visited Thomas Stone in Charles County,” Scott Hill, director of interpretation for the George Washington’s Birthplace in Westmoreland County, VA said. “Stone did legal work for George Washington.
“Gustavus Brown was one of Washington’s personal physicians,” Hill added. “He was in attendance on Washington’s deathbed. Brown lived just down the road from Thomas Stone at Rose Hill Manor. We know Washington took the ferry across the Potomac River at Marshall Hall and visited them on many occasions. General Smallwood [whose “Old Maryland Line” saved Washington’s bacon at the Battle of Long Island during the Revolution] lived in Charles County.
“Washington was very close to the Maryland line soldiers,” he said. “It’s likely he visited them, but we’ve never seen any definitive proof.”
And the general’s own diary entries from 1797 do not mention trips to St. Mary’s County, but according to the late historian Charles E. Fenwick Sr., Washington visited his friend George Plater, former governor of Maryland, after the latter had completed extensive renovations to the old manor house of Sotterley on the Patuxent.
Fenwick speculated that Washington, “got the idea for the stone-like weather boarding for Mount Vernon from Sotterley.” (Chronicles of St. Mary’s, Vol. 23, No. 10, Oct. 1975).
The old St. Mary’s County historian also recounts that in 1797, George Washington visited Tudor Hall in Leonardtown to purchase seed wheat from Philip Key, related of course, to Francis Scott Key.
Citizens from the town gathered to see the general and he obliged them by standing under a majestic white oak tree said to be 29 feet in circumference and addressing the gathering.
The tree was from then on known as “The President’s Oak.”
The old oak fell to storm or age in 1950.
The appendix to this story is that Washington is said to have spent the night at the Old Gough Tavern in Chaptico during his Tudor Hall visit, a wonderful old building dating to the early 18th century that was sadly bulldozed down in the 1970s by the owner who had no knowledge of its extensive history.
Whether the legend of the Father of Our Country having slept there is fact or fiction is really unknown, but it makes for a great story. We do know the old tavern was a hotbed of Confederate activity during the American Civil War, and many a shipment of medicine, blankets and supplies to the rebels were shipped out of Chaptico Bay from the building in the 1860s.
Contact Joseph Norris at joe.norris@thebaynet.com
