In the July 1833 issue of _The North American Magazine_ an unknown contributor gives a bit of important information about the birth home: “The old house of his [Washington’s] birth has long since mouldered. The cellar over which it stood, now mostly filled up, is about fifty feet in length from east to west, having what seems to be a wine vault in the corner. An orchard of apple trees of modern growth interspersed with other fruit trees, surrounds the old cellar; westerly of which are scattered some apple trees of a very ancient growth, with fruit of a delicious flavour. These trees are monuments of olden times; contemporaries probably with the childhood of the Great Statesman.” As the years passed during the 19th century, others who visited Washington’s birthplace commented on the neglected condition of the site. James K. Paulding of New York, a friend of Washington Irving and author of _A Life of Washington_, described Wakefield in 1835 as a place where “A few scanty relics alone remain to mark the spot.... A clump of old decayed fig trees, probably coeval with the mansion, yet exists; a number of vines, and shrubs, and flowers still reproduce themselves every year as if to mark the spot.” In 1851 the Richmond _Whig and Public Advertiser_ observed: “The birthplace of George Washington is ... marked only by an old brick chimney, a mammoth fig tree, and a freestone slab.... The slab is broken in two.... The neglected condition of the spot bears shame against his country for neglecting to lift up a monument there, to his memory.” Five years later, in 1856, Bishop William Meade visited Wakefield and found Custis’ freestone slab broken into fragments. The Bishop wrote: “I recently paid a visit to the old family seat of the Washingtons.... The brick chimney is all that remains of the Washington mansion ... except the broken bricks which are scattered about over the spot where it was built. The grandson of Mrs. General Washington, Mr. Custis, of Arlington, some years since placed a slab with a brief inscription on the spot, but it is now in fragments.” The same year Bishop Meade visited Wakefield, Lewis W. Washington offered to the State of Virginia “sixty feet square of ground on which the house stood in which General Washington was born” together with the family burying ground, provided “that the State shall cause the premises to be permanently enclosed by an iron fence, based on a stone foundation, and shall mark the same by suitable, and modest, though substantial tablets, to commemorate for the rising generation these notable spots.” [Illustration: _The old kitchen chimney at Wakefield in 1872, the last surviving structure. It fell the next year._ From a painting made by Sarah Pierrpont Barnard in 1872.]