Have you ever seen ads for museums inviting you to “be part of the story”?  Well, at George Washington’s Ferry Farm and Historic Kenmore, many people are part of the story and have been for a long time.  Those who have played an integral part in the ownership, history, preservation, and work of the properties have long had a spot for these two places in their hearts.   Collecting and processing the oral stories of those people is an important part of understanding the historical scope of The George Washington Foundation’s properties.  In fact, oral history programs and collections have become an important component of many museums around the world.

Our Foundation’s own oral history project officially began in 2007.  My requirement was to interview someone for a Historic Preservation Department course I was taking at The University of Mary Washington.  I was to record recollections of a person describing the layout of a house he or she previously lived in and detail how the rooms and landscape around the person’s home were used by its occupants.  Since I worked in the Archaeology Lab at Ferry Farm, I decided to ask David Muraca, director of archaeology, if he knew of someone I could interview associated with the property or who had lived at Ferry Farm during the 20th century.   He suggested Charles Linton, Jr, a local gentleman who had lived in the 1914 two-story frame house on the property as a boy with his large family from 1942 to 1956.

In our oral history session, Mr. Linton and his wife, Pat recounted many specific remembrances of the Linton family’s time living on the very same river bank where George Washington grew up He told of the aftermath of the historic 1942 Fredericksburg Flood, rationing during World War II, and his parents’ efforts to house soldiers and provide medical supplies for the troops.  There were many tourists who visited the property during the time that the Linton’s lived at Ferry Farm. So many, in fact, that they kept a guest book!  People traveling through wanted to visit the place where the nation’s first president had spent his boyhood.  They wanted to buy tiny jars of homemade cherry preserves from Charles’s mother, postcards from his sister Barbara, and get a tour of where young George had cut down the cherry tree.  The visitors were not disappointed either as Charles and his brother, Tayloe, sold wood pieces cut from the trunk of a cherry tree (with a hatchet, no doubt) for one dollar each…not a bad income for two industrious boys at that time!  Tiny cherry wood carvings of hearts and hatchets were whittled and sold, too.

The stump of a supposed scion of the cherry tree that Washington had barked was also on the property for visitors to see and was known as “The Shrine Tree.”  It was, no doubt, an important reminder to visitors of Washington’s honest character.    While those early 20th-century attractions no longer exist on the property at Ferry Farm, the Cherry Tree Story is still a subject that is inquired about by the visiting public just as it was in Linton’s day.

Some important revelations came to me as a result of doing this assignment for my class.    I began to really recognize the sacred nature of our presidential property and how deeply affected the public had become by that nature over time.  In the case of Ferry Farm, tourists and travelers have been fascinated by Washington’s boyhood home for 230 years mentioning it in diaries and letters over the centuries.  This realization spurred me on to research the publics’ fascination with Washington’s character via the Cherry Tree Story. Why do so many still ask about this tale?  Why do so many acknowledge that the story probably isn’t true but, in their heart of hearts, they want it to be?  To get the answers to these questions it would be necessary to ask more questions by collecting more oral histories and to begin a Foundation archive.  In doing so, it became clear that the recent past, brought to life by the personal stories of so many who have been involved with Ferry Farm, proved a new and fascinating way to look at our archaeologically-rich property and gain understanding of its social and cultural impact over the decades.  I got to work interviewing and, before I knew it, an archive of stories about Ferry Farm and Kenmore Plantation was created.  Not only did I discover more about the 20th century history of our Foundation properties, but documenting the preservation efforts associated with them proved critical to remembering the hard work of the many dedicated people who saved them.

By creating a formal database with the mission of gathering oral histories, I saw that we could document much personal and institutional memory about our museum sites and couple the insightful perceptions collected about the Washington and Lewis Family’s with our scientific and historical research findings.  Eight years later, the archive is well on its way.  Samplings of some of the amazing stories collected so far will make their way into future blog postings so you can view for yourself the peoples’ passion for Ferry Farm and Kenmore’s historical treasures.   Anyone wishing to participate in this project is encouraged to contact the Foundation at (540) 370-0732 extension 14 or healy-marquis@gwffoundation.org.

Melanie Marquis
Archaeology Lab Supervisor
Oral History Project Coordinator