Description
This project is a study of Washington's celebrated childhood in landscape, lore, and history and rests on extensive documentary and archaeological research and recounts the complicated and often quite strange and amusing story of George Washington's childhood and its physical setting as objects of memory, commerce, historical preservation, and bitter contestation. Washington's boyhood home was made famous by Parson Weems whose early 1800s tales of Washington's childhood are still amongst the best known American stories. But Americans have a love-hate relationship with stories like the young boy who could not tell a lie about his father's cherry tree, alternately viewing them as near gospel or ironic lies. This dichotomy has also imprinted itself on the landscape of Ferry Farm, the site of much of Weem's best known story telling--and of course, the home of the cherry tree itself. The book therefore, is a landscape history of a place as associated with lies as it is with core American truths. It is a story of how a wide array of American's, including Civil War soldiers, Romantic painters, New South businessmen, prim genealogists, Vaudeville promoters, socialist utopian science fiction writers, ambitious document forgers, well intentioned, but sometimes ill-informed preservationists, and modern corporate executives, to name a few, came to Ferry Farm to find George Washington, and succeeded either by historical imagination or by invention.
