The Early Years Along the Potomac

Washington's Ancestors in Virginia

Although today George Washington is primarily associated with his famous Mount Vernon estate on the Potomac River in Fairfax County, the future American president's birthplace, early years and the lives of his colonial forebears were spent in the tidewater county of Westmoreland, over fifty miles downstream. Formed in 1653 and much larger than its present boundaries, Westmoreland County during George Washington's life was a region of flat sandy roads, sluggish tidal creeks and waterside tobacco plantations worked by thousands of slaves. Sparsely populated today, it was anything but remote in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the first Washington put down roots there. In fact, the county was later home to other distinguished Virginians, including future U.S. president James Monroe, two signers of the Declaration of Independence — Richard Henry Lee and Francis Lightfoot Lee — and Confederate general Robert E. Lee.

George Washington was born February 22, 1732, to Augustine and Mary Ball Washington at the family's Popes Creek Plantation, where that small tidal estuary empties into the wide Potomac River. It was in part of the Old Dominion called the Northern Neck, a long peninsula between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers that would eventually come to include all of northern Virginia and part of what is now the state of West Virginia. George was descended from a long line of Washingtons born along the Potomac River beginning in the previous century, after the first known ancestor of his surname decided to leave England and remain in the distant American colony of Virginia. George and his family called Popes Creek home until he was just over three years old, when they moved about sixty miles upriver to what later became the famous plantation called Mount Vernon.

George's adventurous great-grandfather John Washington was the first of his family to settle in Virginia. Known to later historians and genealogists as John Washington "the Immigrant," he was born about 1631 in the English county of Essex and was the son of a Church of England minister who later ran afoul of the ecclesiastical authorities. In 1656, he entered the lucrative tobacco trade and left England as an officer on a merchant ship bound for far-off Virginia, settled by colonists just fifty years earlier. During this voyage, after unloading the ship's cargo in February 1657, his vessel foundered and sank in the Potomac near the mouth of Mattox Creek in Westmoreland County, where tobacco shippers frequently brought their annual crop for transportation to English ports. With the newly loaded cargo ruined and temporarily stranded in the New World, John Washington resigned himself to staying in the tidewater country.

John Washington must have made a favorable impression on his new Westmoreland neighbors because he soon became a friend and business associate of a wealthy plantation owner there, Lieutenant Colonel Nathaniel Pope, whose eldest daughter, Anne, became Washington's wife in 1658.

For a wedding gift, Pope gave the newlyweds 700 acres along Mattox Creek. In 1659, the couple had the first of their five children, Lawrence, grandfather of the future general and president. In 1664, John Washington purchased additional land close by on the east side of Bridges Creek near its mouth on the Potomac. There he and Anne soon established their modest home. John Washington steadily grew into a prominent member of his community. He acquired throughout his life over 8,500 acres, including his purchase on Little Hunting Creek on the Potomac, which would eventually become Mount Vernon. He also served in the Virginia House of Burgesses at Jamestown beginning in 1666, as a local justice of the peace and an officer in the county militia. He owned and operated a grain mill on nearby Rosier's Creek on land he acquired in 1665 (near today's Colonial Beach). Anne Washington died in 1669 and was interred in the family burial ground at Bridges Creek — as was John, who died in 1677. The year before his death he had helped quell Bacon's Rebellion, a dangerous backcountry uprising against royal Governor William Berkeley and the colony's governing elites led by Nathaniel Bacon. During this brief revolt, Bacon's insurgents occupied the Bridges Creek lands for a short period.

John and Anne's eldest son, Lawrence, received a legal education in England and inherited the lands at Mattox Creek, the mill and half interest in the Little Hunting Creek tract upon his father's death. This latter parcel was in (then) Stafford County, "in the Freshes of Pattomomooke River," far away from the brackish water of the lower Potomac. In 1688, Lawrence married Mildred Warner, a daughter of the colony's one-time Speaker of the House of Burgesses, Colonel Augustine Warner Jr. of Warner Hall in Gloucester County. Her mother, Mildred Reade, traced her lineage back to many of England's monarchs, although her grandson George never made much of these lofty connections. Lawrence and Mildred had three children: John, Augustine and Mildred. Starting in 1684, Lawrence served four terms in the House of Burgesses and was a justice of the peace, county coroner, an officer in the militia and high sheriff, but he died young at the Bridges Creek farm in 1698, at the age of thirty-eight.

Lawrence's second son, Augustine, was born in 1694 at Mattox Creek. After his father's death, Augustine (known to friends as Gus) and his family sailed across the Atlantic and took up residence at Whitehaven, England, for several years once his mother remarried. He and his two siblings Jane and John had returned to Virginia by 1704, after their mother's death. He lived with his guardian and cousin John Washington at a plantation along the winding Chotank Creek on the Potomac, east of what would become Fredericksburg. In adulthood, he became a planter, sheriff and justice of the peace in Westmoreland County. He was "six feet in height, of noble appearance, and most manly proportions," a Washington descendant recalled years later. In 1715, he married Jane Butler, a fifteen-year-old orphan, with whom he had four children at the Bridges Creek plantation, which he had inherited. Their surviving sons, Lawrence and Augustine, became George's half brothers.

After Jane Washington's death in 1730 while Augustine was away in England looking after business matters, he married a second time the next year, to Mary Ball of nearby Lancaster County. Mary gave birth to six children, the oldest of whom was George, born in 1732. His other full siblings were Samuel, John Augustine, Charles and Elizabeth (Betty). A second daughter, Mildred, died in...