Buried: Mount Vernon Estate, Mount Vernon, Virginia
First President - 1789-1797
Born: February 22, 1732, in Westmoreland County, Virginia
Died: 10:20 p.m. on December 14, 1799, at Mount Vernon, Virginia
Age at death: 67
Cause of death: Sore throat
Final words: “ ‘Tis well”
Admission to Mount Vernon: $15.00
George Washington’s election to the presidency was really more of a coronation. Every one of the sixty-nine electors voted for the leader whose resume read like a timeline for the new republic. Thus the commander in chief of the revolutionary army and president of the Constitutional Convention became the first president of the fledgling United States of America.
Washington served two precedent-setting terms in New York and Philadelphia, the new nation’s first two capital cities. In 1797, Washington, a country squire at heart, happily retired with his wife Martha to their beloved Virginia estate, Mount Vernon. Having become an icon, he learned to cope with the constant stream of sightseers to his home. He lived to enjoy only three more years at his refuge on the Potomac.
A wintry mix of snow, sleet and rain pelted Mount Vernon on December 12, 1799. Washington made his daily inspection tour of the estate but came down with a sore throat the next morning. His condition worsened and by December 14 the general’s throat began to close. Doctors were summoned.
Sign marking George Washington’s first tomb. The bodies of George and Martha Washington were moved to a new tomb in 1831.
The dying Washington was in control to the end: afraid of being buried alive, he ordered his secretary, Tobias Lear, not to allow his body to be interred less than three days after his death. As he was taking his own pulse, George Washington died. He was sixty-seven years old.
Washington’s final instructions were nearly ignored in the grief surrounding his death. A legacy-minded group sought to have his remains interred beneath the Capitol rotunda. To aid the cause, then Representative John Marshall secretly obtained congressional permission to have Martha Washington buried beside her husband. Ultimately, Washington’s wish to rest forever at Mount Vernon was respected.
His hopes for a simple funeral were not as successful. The service included a long procession of mourners, a contingent from Washington’s Masonic lodge, a band, and a military honor guard. Martha was given a quieter farewell when she died and was buried next to him in 1802.
Washington’s will stipulated the construction of a new tomb to replace the deteriorating old family structure on the property. When that new vault was completed in 1831, the bodies of George and Martha Washington, along with those of other family members, were moved to their current location.
Touring George Washington’s Tomb at Mount Vernon
Mount Vernon, owned and operated by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, is located sixteen miles south of Washington, D.C. It is open 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Hours are 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. April through August; 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., March, September, and October; and 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., November through February. Admission is $15.00 for adults, $14.00 for senior citizens, and $7.00 for children ages six to eleven. Children under six are admitted free. Special rates are available for groups.
From Washington: Take the George Washington Parkway south to Alexandria/Mount Vernon. Follow the parkway past Ronald Reagan National Airport, through Old Town Alexandria. Mount Vernon is eight miles south of Old Town, located at a traffic circle at the end of the parkway.
Mount Vernon is also accessible by bus and, in the summer months, by boat. Several sightseeing services also include Mount Vernon on their tours.
To find Washington’s grave from the west side of the museum, follow the road (marked as “Tomb Road”) directly to the grave.
For additional information
Mount Vernon
P.O. Box 110
Mount Vernon, VA 22121
Phone: (703) 780-2000
www.mountvernon.org
George and Martha Washington’s final resting place
“‘I die hard, but I am not afraid to go,’ Washington informed his doctors.”
—Richard Norton Smith
Millions of tourists pay their respects before the red brick tomb whose construction George Washington had decreed in his will. Few making the trip to Mount Vernon have any idea of the theatrical scene enacted there in December 1799, by one of history’s consummate actors. Taking charge of his treatment for a fatally sore throat, Washington held out his arm to be bled. “Don’t be afraid,” he assured his overseer. Over the next twenty-four hours or so, physicians would drain much of the old hero’s blood supply. Around his neck, they placed flannel soaked in ammonium carbonate, a treatment no more effective than blisters of Spanish fly or vapors of vinegar. Heavy doses of calomel and emetick tartar emptied the patient’s system of everything but the true source of his complaint.
Late on the afternoon of December 14, Washington asked his wife to go to his study and retrieve two wills from a desk there. One document was to be burned, the other preserved in her closet. As twilight fell, the ex-president seemed already to be wearing his death mask. “I find I am going,” he told his secretary, Tobias Lear, adding that he faced the end “with perfect resignation.” As thoughtful as he was organized, several times Washington apologized for the trouble he was causing. Lear, fighting back tears, said he only hoped to alleviate his friend’s suffering.
“Well,” replied Washington, “it is a debt we must pay to each other, and I hope when you want aid of this kind you will find it.”
“I die hard, but I am not afraid to go,” Washington informed his doctors. He felt his own fading pulse. The bedroom clock chimed ten as the dying man summoned his last reserves of strength. “I am just going,” he whispered to Lear. “Have me decently buried, and do not let my body be put into the vault in less than three days after I am dead.” (Washington wasn’t alone in his dread of being buried alive; in her will Eleanor Roosevelt stipulated that her veins be cut as a precaution against the same fate.) The next morning saw the arrival of William Thornton, a family friend, amateur doctor and self-trained architect who had secretly designed the Capitol in the nearby Federal City as a final resting place for America’s first president.
Never at a loss for ideas, Thornton proposed to resurrect the body laid out in Mount Vernon’s handsome green banquet hall “in the following manner. First to thaw him in cold water, then to lay him in blankets, and by degrees and by friction to give him warmth, and to put into activity the minute blood vessels, at the same time to open a passage to the lungs by the trachea, and to inflate them with air, to produce an artificial respiration, and transfuse blood into him from a lamb.” Other friends intervened to permit Washington a peaceful departure.
On Wednesday, December 18, Martha remained inside Mansion House as a little procession, led by the dead man’s horse with its empty saddle, moved to the old family vault. A schooner anchored in the Potomac fired its minute guns and a Masonic band from Alexandria played a dirge. Local militia joined a handful of relations and friends in a brief service of committal. Later Martha consented to the removal of her husband’s lead-lined mahogany coffin to Thornton’s Capitol vault, on condition that she be allowed to share the space. Fortunately, the transfer was never made, thereby sparing the Father of his Country two centuries’ exposure to lobbyists and boodlers.
In 1831 Washington’s remains were moved a few hundred feet to the brick tomb that overlooks the Potomac. Having been embalmed while still living by a revolutionary generation in desperate need of a unifying icon, Washington of all people would understand why a million people a year are drawn to this place, hoping for inspiration with which to meet tests unimaginable to the Founders.
—RNS