Augustine Washington selected a fine site on the banks of the Rappahannock opposite Fredericksburg, and near "Sting Ray Island," where the very fishes of the stream had resented the coming of Captain John Smith. The name of this home was Pine Grove. "The situation was commanding[5] and the garden and orchard in better cultivation than those they had left. The house was like that at Wakefield, broad and low with the same number of rooms upon the ground floor, one of them in the shed-like extension at the back; and the spacious attic was over the main building. It had its name from a noble body of trees near it, but was also known by the old neighbors as 'Ferry Farm.' There was no bridge over the Rappahannock and communication was had with the town by the neighboring ferry." "Those who wish to associate Washington," says another writer, "with the grandeurs of stately living in his youth, would find all their theories dispelled by a glimpse of the modest dwelling where he spent his boyhood years. But nature was bountiful in its beauties in the lovely landscape that stretched before it. In Overwharton parish, where it was situated, the family had many excellent neighbors, and there came forth from this little home a race of men whose fame could gather no splendor had the roofs which sheltered their childhood been fretted with gold and blazoned with diamonds. The heroic principle in our people does not depend for perpetuity on family trees and ancestral dignities, still less on baronial mansions." [5] "Story of Mary Washington," Marion Harland. Augustine Washington died in 1743, at the age of forty-nine, at Pine Grove, leaving two sons of his first wife, and four sons and one daughter our Mary had borne to him, little Mildred having died in infancy. We know then the history of those thirteen years, the birth of six children, the death of one, finally the widowhood and desolation of the mother. At the time of his father's death, George Washington was only ten years of age. He had been heard to say that he knew little of his father except the remembrance of his person and of his parental fondness. To his mother's forming care he himself ascribed the origin of his fortune and his fame.