George Washington’s mansion gets first major rehab in more than 150 years

The $30 million project is the most complicated preservation effort since the house was saved from decay in 1860 by the private, nonprofit Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union, which still owns it, said Douglas Bradburn, president of George Washington’s Mount Vernon.

“We’re shutting down a big chunk of it for the next eight months or so,” he said. “I would say that’s two-thirds of the house.”

Other parts of the house, along with the extensive grounds, Washington’s tomb, the quarters for enslaved people and other outbuildings will remain open, Bradburn said in a recent interview.

Mount Vernon gets about 1 million visitors a year, and millions more check out the historic estate online, he said.

The historic structure had become loosened from its foundation over time, and the work will resecure it, Bradburn said. There also will be restoration work done in the basement and on flooring, among other things. He said the goal is to complete the project in 2026.

“It’s some of the most important work that’s ever been done at Mount Vernon,” Bradburn said. Earlier repair projects have been piecemeal. At one point, ship masts were used to help support the roof of the crumbling piazza that overlooks the Potomac River.

“They’re dealing with problems as they come,” he said. This is a chance for a more complete approach.

The project made headlines in the spring when archaeologists digging in the basement found six storage pits containing more than two dozen bottles filled with cherries and other fruit that had been buried about 250 years ago and forgotten.

It was “an out-of-the-box, next-level, spectacular find,” a Mount Vernon archaeologist said at the time.

The rehabilitation project began last year after officials realized that over time the big oak “sills” that connected the mansion to the foundation had been devoured by termites and the house was no longer being held firmly in place.

“Essentially, the mansion was sitting on termite shields, or just sitting directly on brick,” Bradburn said. “Lateral winds could knock it off its foundation.”

“It’s stable and safe for up and down pressures,” he said. “It’s just sitting there and it’s heavy enough. But that stiffness, if you were hit with a lateral, would be a real problem.”

Huge steel I-beams are now being used to help support sections of the house while it’s being reattached to the foundation with new sills. Crumbling stone walls in the basement are being replaced with the same kind of Aquia sandstone used in the original.

The new sills are being made with oak from trees grown at Mount Vernon and from salvaged 18th-century oak acquired in Ohio, said Amy McAuley, Mount Vernon’s restoration manager.

Floorboards are coming up to be cleaned and replaced if needed. The basement pillars are being removed. Ductwork has been taken out, and the basement will be restored to look like the quarters of the enslaved Lee family that once lived there.

“It’s pretty amazing, especially when you go into the cellar and you see it as it would have been in Washington’s time,” McAuley said.

Mount Vernon is about 20 miles south of Washington. The original house was a modest structure built for Washington’s father in 1734.

George Washington inherited it in 1761 and expanded it dramatically over the decades — most of the work being done by people enslaved at Mount Vernon, officials said. By the time of Washington’s death in 1799, more than 300 were enslaved across the plantation there.

Washington, who led American forces during the Revolutionary War and became the nation’s first president in 1789, was often away from Mount Vernon but loved the site and died there on Dec. 14, 1799.

But by the 1850s, the mansion was in poor condition.

“The main house and the buildings were all falling apart,” Bradburn said. “And the family just needed to get rid of it.”

The owner, John Augustine Washington III, the great-grand nephew of George Washington, had been unable to make the site sufficiently profitable through farming and tourism, according to Mount Vernon’s website. (Graffiti penciled by some of the visitors inside the mansion’s cupola appears to date back to 1823.)

John Augustine Washington tried unsuccessfully to sell the mansion to the federal government and the state of Virginia.

In 1853, Ann Pamela Cunningham, a well-to-do woman from South Carolina who was shocked by accounts of the dilapidated state of the home, founded the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union to save it, according to the website.

At the time, tensions that would eventually lead to the Civil War were already on the rise.

But the association had members from the South and the North, Bradburn said.

“That ‘of the Union’ part was like, ‘If we save the house of Washington, maybe we can save the Union,’” he said.

The association began a nationwide fund drive to raise $200,000 — about $8 million today — to buy the house. Donations came in from school students, fire companies and the crew of a ship.

The sum was easily raised, and in 1860 the association acquired the house, outbuildings, 200 acres and the Washington family tomb.

John Augustine left Mount Vernon that year. He later joined the Confederate Army and was killed in action at the Battle of Cheat Mountain in September 1861. He is buried in Charles Town, W.Va.

Meanwhile, donations and repair projects continued at Mount Vernon. More land around the house was purchased and given to the association. No federal or state money has ever been accepted, the Mount Vernon website says.

One day earlier this month, workers in white hard hats bustled around the I-beams supporting the house and ducked under basement rafters that had been in place for almost 300 years.

The air was filled with the sound of hammers, drills and the beeping of construction equipment.

A stone in a basement wall still bore the initials “JHA” that Bradburn said were etched by a visitor during the period of the Civil War. A basement hearth was stained with soot from the 1700s.

“I’ve worked on a lot of different places,” said McAuley, the restoration manager. “This is my favorite place in America to work on. It’s been a real honor to work here, the culmination of a lot of years on historic sites.”