Back When? George Washington: A Founding Farmer?

John Hunter, an Englishman who kept a detailed diary of his visit to Mount Vernon in 1785, wrote that George Washington “is one of the most regular men in the world,” always going to bed “at nine and waking up with the sun.” After taking a tour of the estate’s large acreage and observing Washington strip off his coat to work “like a common man,” Hunter wrote, “his greatest pride now is to be thought the first farmer in America. He is quite a Cincinnatus.” Hunter was not the first person to compare the Virginian general to the famous Roman. Cincinnatus left his plow to take up the sword and then returned to his farm after saving the republic. Washington fully embodied his reputation as the “American Cincinnatus,” making Mount Vernon a world unto itself, and even outdoing his ancient predecessor with his innovative ideas on agriculture. A Scientific Approach to Farming Following his military service in the French and Indian War, Washington returned to Mount Vernon in 1759. The war hero had little experience in agriculture and sought to make up for this by purchasing books on farming methods. At first, he devoted his energy to growing tobacco. A labor-intensive and fickle crop, it proved unsuited to Mount Vernon’s clay-heavy soil. Problems with weather and topography yielded tobacco leaves that were mediocre in quality, fetching poor prices and causing mounting debt. Beginning in the 1760s, Washington phased out tobacco and experimented with rotating different crops. His scientific observations in this field rivaled those of Thomas Jefferson, who was conducting his own experiments at Monticello. Washington carried around a pocketsized notebook, keeping a daily diary where he meticulously noted the outcomes. By the end of his life, these observations totaled more than 700 pages. He eventually tested 60 different crops. In his diary entriesfrom 1785 to 1786, he lists many of these varieties, ranging from barley, clover, and flax to pumpkins, potatoes, and turnips. One crop, he discovered, flourished above all the others. “The harvests of wheat have been remarkably good, the demand for that article from abroad is great,” he wrote in a letter from 1790. But which type of wheat was best? Here, too, he applied his careful observations, testing everything from summer wheat and double-headed wheat to yellow-bearded wheat, eventually deciding on white wheat as his main cash crop. He also grew Indian corn to feed livestock, and legumes for rejuvenating the soil. George Washington, Inventor In the many years spent away from Mount Vernon in service of his country, Washington was constantly writing letters back home, seeking reports and giving instructions for managing production. He came up with some of his best ideas during this time. In 1792, during his first term as president, Washington took a break from duties of state to ponder a way to maximize wheat production. He thought of a breakthrough invention: a two-story wheat threshing barn with 16 sides. The design combined several different processes. Horses walked on a circular floor on the upper level, treading the wheat to separate the grains from the stalk. The small wheat berries then fell through gaps in the floorboards, where they could be more easily gathered up. Washington’s idea was put into action back home, allowing him to process a much larger volume of wheat than traditional methods. The Plow Over the Crown Washington reluctantly accepted his nomination to a second term as president in 1793. He soon regretted the decision, as critics questioned his integrity and satirists lampooned him for seeking a crown. During a cabinet meeting where Washington was shown a cartoon of his head in a guillotine, Thomas Jefferson recorded him yelling in an explosive outburst, he “would rather be on his farm than to be made emperor of the world.” Washington retiried from public life in 1797, returned to Mount Vernon, and continued to experiment. He built a distillery that became one of the largest in the country and was the most profitable business venture on the estate. Among Washington’s innumerable contributions to his nation, his pioneering role as a farmer remains an often overlooked, aspect of his enduring legacy.