“George Washington wasn’t anyone’s father,” Douglas Bradburn, the president and C.E.O. of the Mount Vernon estate, said. The descendants of West Ford aim to prove otherwise.
Still, the most politically active members of Gum Springs are Black, and they are dedicated to preserving their town. Chase is a member of the New Gum Springs Civic Association, which is run by Queenie Cox, Mildred’s sixty-nine-year-old daughter. Chase and Cox, along with two dozen other residents, have been protesting the state-highway “improvement” plan, which initially called for more than doubling the number of lanes where the road crossed Gum Springs, from six to thirteen.
Even after establishing Gum Springs, Ford lived at Mount Vernon, where he worked for Bushrod Washington’s two successors, John Augustine II and John Augustine III. Ford greeted visitors, guarded the First Couple’s tomb, and managed dozens of people who were still enslaved by the Washington family. In 1858, Ford was interviewed by Benson Lossing, from, who made a drawing to accompany his article.
Since then, no expense has been spared. Mount Vernon has a yearly budget of fifty-five million dollars. Roughly seventy per cent of the revenue comes from ticket sales and retail, the rest from philanthropists. An easement granted in the nineteen-fifties by Congress, the National Park Service, and Maryland landowners guarantees that the mansion’s spectacular river view will remain unobstructed.
In 2014, as part of a national effort to find and restore Black cemeteries, Mount Vernon employed a group of archeologists to excavate the slave cemetery. The project is still under way, with the help of volunteers. Eighty-six likely burial sites have been identified and outlined in string. The Ladies’ Association points to this work as an example of how Mount Vernon has come to honor the people who were enslaved there.
Other Presidential estates have had their own difficulties with the subject of slavery. With two notable exceptions—John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams—at least twelve early Presidents were slaveholders at some point in their life. Annette Gordon-Reed, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard, prompted a national reckoning when, in 1997, she published “Thomas Jefferson & Sally Hemings.” She followed it up, in 2008, with “The Hemingses of Monticello.
Ford’s descendants often point out the specificity of their oral histories: members of the extended family talked about George Washington taking Ford riding and attending church with him, and about Ford’s children being educated alongside children in the Washington family.
But, he concluded, “the stories that George Washington took West Ford riding and to church are plausible, but only if Ford washis son.” He pointed out that “Washington would not have paraded evidence of an indiscretion around the county,” arguing that, if any Washington fathered West Ford, the “evidence points to the sons of John Augustine or to John Augustine himself.
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