Where the Cherry Tree Grew: The Story of Ferry Farm, George Washington’s Boyhood Home - Hardcover

Levy, Philip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312641869 ISBN 13: 9780312641863

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2013

Synopsis

Noted historian pens biography of Ferry Farm―George Washington's boyhood home―and its three centuries of American history

In 2002, Philip Levy arrived on the banks of Rappahannock River in Virginia to begin an archeological excavation of Ferry Farm, the eight hundred acre plot of land that George Washington called home from age six until early adulthood. Six years later, Levy and his team announced their remarkable findings to the world: They had found more than Washington family objects like wig curlers, wine bottles and a tea set. They found objects that told deeper stories about family life: a pipe with Masonic markings, a carefully placed set of oyster shells suggesting that someone in the household was practicing folk magic. More importantly, they had identified Washington's home itself―a modest structure in line with lower gentry taste that was neither as grand as some had believed nor as rustic as nineteenth century art depicted it.

Levy now tells the farm's story in Where the Cherry Tree Grew. The land, a farmstead before Washington lived there, gave him an education in the fragility of life as death came to Ferry Farm repeatedly. Levy then chronicles the farm's role as a Civil War battleground, the heated later battles over its preservation and, finally, an unsuccessful attempt by Wal-Mart to transform the last vestiges Ferry Farm into a vast shopping plaza.

About this title

About the Author:

PHILIP LEVY holds a Ph.D. in history from the College of William and Mary and is currently associate professor of history at the University of South Florida, where he teaches early American history, public history, and historical archaeology. He is the 2004 recipient of the Virginia Historical Society's prize for best article of the year, and the author of the book Fellow Travelers: Indians and Europeans Contesting the Early American Trail. He lives in Florida.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1
From Unburned Woods to “Clear and Distinct” Views
 

George Washington never described the Rappahannock. He noted it as a busy place of ferries and roads in 1747. In 1772, when he sold off his old family home, he noted the land’s “clear and distinct” overlook of “almost every house” in Fredericksburg on the opposite bank. From the rise by the road one could keep a harbor master’s tally of “every vessel that passes to and from it.”1 He described the river only in terms of what mattered to a man weighing the value of the land as an object for sale.
Washington never mentioned what the river felt like when one jumped into its slow brown water on a hot day. He made no mention of the sound it made slapping on the bank or the smell it gave off when the shad were running. No ice to cut in winter, no stones skipping on the surface or splashing on the far side, no rising and falling of the tides.
No mention also of the home where he learned life’s joys and its abiding fragility. No notice made of the places he walked, rode, ran, and jumped with his siblings. No reflection on the emotional struggles a young man had endured; only a crisp catalogue of the sellable attributes of a place upon which he was turning his back.
The river that passed by the Washingtons’ doorstep was in reality two rivers—two impulses, each stemming from very different places and each functioning very differently amidst the world’s waters. One was a creature of the western mountains—a clear rocky run made from countless collected mountain springs. The other was born of the ocean to the east—a slow-moving, muddy and salty wash pushed and pulled by the tides of the wide Chesapeake Bay and the great Atlantic beyond that. At Ferry Farm, the river’s wild backcountry impulses soften into a more genteel and tamed run. The river becomes bridled and usable—a friend and ally to farmers and sailors.
As the river changes, so does the land itself. To the west, the dips and rises of the hills get steeper and become more frequent. The long views are blocked more and more by the terrain’s ups and downs. Within a dozen or so miles of the river’s bank one can make out the top of the Blue Ridge and see just why the mountains have that name. The dirt becomes redder in color than the brownish, silty, stoney soil at Ferry Farm, and the rocks in the dirt become bigger and flatter than the water-rolled, shattered stones of the Rappahannock.
To the east, though, and to the south as well, the land rolls more gently. The views are longer and the hazy sky is bigger. The rocks of Ferry Farm disappear from the soil. At the Falls they are everywhere, and have been built into local homes for as long as people have settled here. But just a bit downriver, the rocks are gone altogether and there is only sand and clay—covered of course with a rich loamy topsoil. The lapping and occasional flooding of the river makes this fertile, nutrient-rich land; its stone-free, sandy loamy mix has made it wonderful farmland for centuries.
Nature had made this a meeting place of landscapes—a transitional place between terrains. It was up to people, though, to give it meaning and what we like to call history.
In 1607, a group of former soldiers, Puritans, and well-connected dandies pooled their sovereigns, hired some ships, and sent a party of gentlemen and sundry laborers off to make a profit in America. Similar London-based ventures had tried and failed, first at North Carolina’s Outer Banks, and then at a rocky Maine island called Sagadahoc, not to mention uncounted fishing camps and seasonal weigh stations. For more than a century Europeans had been wringing profits from America, and latecomer England was finally getting serious about getting in on the game.
The London Company’s lot were to head over, find a nice spot in what folks around town ambitiously called “Virginia” (a tribute to the by-then dead queen who ruled the last time they tried settling at this latitude), and set about somehow to make a profit for the project backers. At a bend in a river they named after their current monarch, James, they set up a hasty trade fort and did the best that they could manage.2
The men were not the first Europeans to take a stab at settling on these rivers. That distinction went to a group of Spanish Jesuits who tried and failed in the 1570s. But Spain still saw this “Virginia” as, in fact, its own. Fear of the Spanish was uppermost on the fort dwellers’ minds as they cowered and gradually died in their log and earth creation. As it happened, though, bad relations with the local Natives, internal bickering, diseases, famine, and foul water all proved to be far bigger and more immediate problems than were galleonloads of Catholic “Dons” looking to take back their colonial swamp from heretical Protestant interlopers. But in those earliest days, turning a profit and learning the land were paramount.
English colonization sent its ripples up every one of Virginia’s rivers and into every Native town and hamlet. We don’t know when the Natives living along the Rappahannock or near the Falls and Ferry Farm first learned of the new arrivals in the low country. They certainly learned in 1608, thanks to a reconnaissance party of young laborers and gentlemen in a heavy English shallow-draft boat led by Captain John Smith.
The adventurer did not spill much ink describing the Rappahannock River or the land that bounded it. What the short, stout, scruffy captain did make clear was that the Rappahannock tour was no pleasure cruise for the English would-be conquistadors. A few downriver Native towns welcomed them—Smith reported that the people of Pissassack, Nandtaughtacund, and Cuttatawomen, for example, “used us kindly.”3 But more often, conflict with the river’s peoples marked their travels. Principal among these Native foes were the Rappahannock people themselves—the people for whom the river would hereafter be named.
They lived then in a large town in the heart of the river’s tidal run—about fifty miles downriver from the Falls. The town’s martial men devoted themselves fully to making clear to the invaders that this was their river and they were fully prepared and more than willing to defend it from all comers. Ultimately, they and almost all of Virginia’s eastern Indians would lose that fight, but their actions that hot summer ensured that warfare would be imprinted on the river from its very first mention in English writing.
Along the way from the Chesapeake Bay to the Rappahannock’s falls, Smith and his men were harassed by repeated flights of Rappahannock arrows fired by bowmen camouflaged by bushes or hiding behind trees. Where they could, English musket men fired at or pursued their attackers on shore, but the skilled Rappahannock warriors had every home turf advantage and simply disappeared at will, only to reappear later at another place of their own choosing. In one case the defenders mocked the boatmen by “dauncing and singing very merrily” in plain sight after dodging an ineffectual and unimpressive volley of musketry.4
The summer heat also took its toll. It probably was the cause of party member Richard Featherstone’s death on August 16, about twenty miles or so downriver from Ferry Farm. Smith reported that the day after they buried poor Richard with a “volley of shot,” and soon after the party “sayled so high” as their heavy boat “would float.”5
This was the Falls, and the area around Ferry Farm—the first documented visit to the site. On seeing the rocks and the change in the river’s character, the sailors knew they were at the end of this leg of their trip—their bulky conveyance was of no use as the river changed character. In good explorer fashion, though, the English began “setting up crosses” and carving their names into the bark of trees near Ferry Farm.6 They did not plan on staying, but such marks of possession were de rigueur for these “always leave a trace” campers. Souvenirs were nice, too. Eager to find reward for their efforts, the explorers poked around for valuable stones or, better yet, metals, and while searching looked for fiber-rich vegetables to eat and spring water to drink.
Soon, though, quartz-tipped Native arrows once again began to slam into the ground and tree cover. This time it was not the Rappahannocks, but war parties from communities above the Falls eager now to make their force and presence known and defend the edges of their homeland.
A party of men from the town of Hasinninga at the forks of the Rappahannock, about twenty miles distant, had gathered near Ferry Farm in a small hunting town called Mohaskahod and waited for the armed strangers to show up, as they knew they eventually would. These nearly one hundred Hasinninga bowmen infuriated the Englishmen who could not manage to get a bead on their nimble opponents “skipping from tree to tree, letting fly their arrows so fast as they could” while the explorers cowered behind the Native-made shields they earlier had lashed onto their boat.7
Despite this rough welcome, the Englishmen managed to take one of the Hasinninga bowmen captive. Through an interpreter, this man gave voice to a Native understanding of the river and the area around Ferry Farm.
The Falls area, he revealed, was a juncture in a vast landscape continuum. It began far to the west where the sun resided beyond the mountains. As one traveled downriver, south and eastward, one went lower and lower in altitude until at some unknown distance, a traveler would find himself finally going beneath the earth. To Native eyes, this underground alien place was where the English had themselves come. The informer was able to name the peoples along that continuum; the Monacan and Massawomeks lived high up, closer to the sun, while the Powhatan, the Ra...

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0312641869
• ISBN 13: 9780312641863
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272