George Washington's Mount Vernon: At Home in Revolutionary America

Excellent book in explaining who were his neighbors, how his property was taken care of, etc. Since my Husbands ancestors were some of his neighbors it is a really interesting read. I love history anyway. I really like finding out how our early leaders were really just like us. It makes history come alive

Knowing Professor Dalzell and Mrs. Dalzell personally, I was incredibly curious to see how they blended the two seemingly connected but perhaps contrasting topics of George Washington and his home. Essentially, they were connected very successfully. The entire history of the home itself is told vividly with photographs, anecdotes, and objective descriptions of its development. Following, Washington's own personal, military, and political history is told in light of the times, and in the book's shining ability, in relation to the home itself. The Dalzell's cleverly-melded arguments and discussions leads the reader to a full knowledge of Mt. Vernon and its inspiring owner.

I openned this book expecting to read a story about a house and how it was built. I was surprised, and impressed, to discover that what went on as Mt. Vernon took form was far more interesting than I had expected. This is not so much a book about a house as it is the story of how George Washington related to the slaves on whom he relied to execute his architecture. In other words, the story here reverberates far beyond the boundaries of the plantation. It went to the heart of the republic, and it goes to the heart of this nation. Slavery is encoded in our national DNA (sorry, Jefferson). The Dalzells make it clear that it is also mortared in the wood and plaster (cut and painted to look like stone) of our national edifice. Are you tormented, or at least intrigued, that a slaveowner could style himself father of a republic dedicated to freedom? Maybe Washington was, too. Find out. Visit Mt. Vernon, and do it by reading this book.

Mount Vernon was both architecturally innovative and a true mirror of Washington's feelings and mind. He never wrote an autobiography and his diaries consist largely of farm accounts, but in Mount Vernon, the authors write, "he produced a text from which it is possible to coax a remarkably full sense of his political convictions and of how, over time, they changed." The book, George Washington's Mount Vernon, combines the public and the private sides of his life and uses the combination to enrich our understanding of both.

For an Architect practicing in any era since Monticello was built, it has always been easy to enter into Jefferson's process--to commune with the models and the methods he sat down with as he designed (time and again) the house that he built as a monument to his ideas and his place in history. In part, this has been because he planned and drew much as we do today. We have the drawings. We know (and can quickly avert our eyes from) the form of labor. We can hold these two-dimensional maps up to the brilliant artifact, and be satisfied, with ourselves, that we have made a connection to the past. Mount Vernon, however, has had to wait for the Dalzells to read, for us, the full and fully three-dimensional process of its becoming. This beautifully written book brings to George Washington's home, a context of meaning and National symbolism that time and distance had almost obliterated. The book is a restoration project: and as such, it is a key compliment to the preservation work so ably executed over the years by the Mount Vernon Ladies Association. I heartily recommend this book to architects (amateur and professional), their clients (who may find comfort in learning that building has always been a trial), architectural historians, or anyone at all who is curious about the faithfulness of our democracy to the designs of one of its primary draftsmen.