George Washington: Farmer: Being an Account of His Home Life and Agricultural ActivitiesHaworth, Paul Leland
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George Washington: Farmer: Being an Account of His Home Life and Agricultural Activities
Haworth, Paul Leland
Mount Vernon (Va. : Estate); Washington, George, 1732-1799 -- Homes and haunts -- Virginia -- Mount Vernon (Estate)
The same may also be said of lotteries, in which Washington now and then
took a flier. Many of the churches of that day, even in New England,
were built partly or wholly with money raised in that way. January 5,
1773, Washington states that he has received sixty tickets in the
Delaware lottery from his friend Lord Stirling and that he has "put 12
of the above Sixty into the Hands of the Revd. Mr. Magowan to sell." And
"the Revd." sold them too!
In his journal of the trip to Barbadoes taken with his brother Lawrence
we find that on his way home he attended "a Great Main of cks [cocks]
fought in Yorktown between Gloucester & York for 5 pistoles each battle
& 10 ye. odd." Occasionally he seems to have witnessed other mains, but
I have found no evidence that he made the practice in any sense a habit.
As a counterweight to his interest in so brutal a sport I must state
that he was exceedingly fond of afternoon teas and of the social
enjoyments connected with tea drinking. Tea was regularly served at his
army headquarters and in summer afternoons on the Mount Vernon veranda.
There is abundant evidence that he also enjoyed horse racing. In
September, 1768, he mentions going "to a Purse race at Accotinck," a
hamlet a few miles below Mount Vernon where a race track was maintained.
In 1772 he attended the Annapolis races, being a guest of the Governor
of Maryland, and he repeated the trip in 1773. In the following May he
went to a race and barbecue at Johnson's Ferry. George Washington Custis
tells us that the Farmer kept blooded horses and that his colt
"Magnolia" once ran for a purse, presumably losing, as if the event had
been otherwise we should probably have been informed of the fact. In
1786 Washington went to Alexandria "to see the Jockey Club purse run
for," and I have noticed a few other references to races, but I conclude
that he went less often than some writers would have us believe.
Washington was decidedly an outdoor man. Being six feet two inches tall,
and slender rather than heavily made, he was well fitted for athletic
sports. Tradition says that he once threw a stone across the
Rappahannock at a spot where no other man could do it, and that he could
outjump any one in Virginia. He also excelled in the game of putting the
bar, as a story related by the artist Peale bears witness.
Of outdoor sports he seems to have enjoyed hunting most. He probably had
many unrecorded experiences with deer and turkeys when a surveyor and
when in command upon the western border, but his main hunting adventure
after big game took place on his trip to the Ohio in 1770. Though the
party was on the move most of the time and was looking for rich land
rather than for wild animals, they nevertheless took some hunts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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