Visiting Mount Vernon

Scott Staiti is a tour consultant for Smithsonian Student Travel.  Scott enjoys writing, traveling, history, and any opportunity he can get to merge the three.  Here he talks about his experience visiting Mount Vernon during a recent tour to Washington, D.C.    

Many of us can recite from the same book of universally accepted George Washington facts:  He led the Colonial forces in the Revolution.  He was a native Virginian.  He was our first president.  His vice president was John Adams.  He had bad teeth.  None of these facts amounted to much for me personally until I had an opportunity to tour the grounds of Mount Vernon where he lived, worked, and took his respite from years spent fighting for and governing over a country that would still be taking baby steps for years after he left the office of presidency.    

Walking through the rooms where George and his wife Martha lived and entertained guests and travelers created a sense of connectivity to our country’s first president that no amount of history books had ever managed to evoke.  I peeked inside every guest room, saw the smithy where bellows were still being worked and the forge kept hot.  And all of that was brought home by a visit to the incredibly informative and comprehensive Reynolds Education Center, where you can see everything from a pair of Washington’s infamous dentures to videos that provided an exciting overview of the general’s successes during the Revolutionary War – complete with snow!    

It’s a common act, especially among children, to scratch one’s name upon a wooden surface with the message, “I was here.”  I think that, subconsciously, we do this as an act of marking our presence in history – a message to the future, that once we roamed the same halls that they do.  As I walked through the rooms of Mount Vernon, I could not help but think that every chair, every floorboard, every painting hung upon the walls were screaming out, “George Washington was here,” as though etched in a flourish of brightly scratched words.  George Washington was here.

 

Comments

[JFK]

Who doesn't write the message “I was here." And it reminds me of the movie Sanctum, because that message was used twice in the movie.