Time to take George out of Washington?
County comp plan, town markers profess unlikely historical link to nation’s first president
As our local government works fervently to modify an amended comprehensive plan for Rappahannock County, perhaps the time has come to set the record straight.
As in claims, originating with one local man in the 1930s, that the town of Washington was laid out by George Washington, the father of our country. The
Library of Congress, National Archives and several modern historians say that just ain’t so.
“Washington is the County seat,” observes the latest draft of the county’s updated comp plan, which has yet to be finalized. “Fondly called ‘the first Washington,’ and somewhat less politely referred to as ‘little Washington’ to distinguish it from its larger cousin, it was surveyed and plotted by George Washington in 1749 and was established as a town in 1796.”
In other words, Rappahannock County leaders are sticking with the story professed on monuments and highway markers, into tourist guides and deep cyberspace, that young George lugged his heavy surveyor’s chains up and down Gay Sreet — supposedly named for a woman he was smitten with.
Except that there was no woman named Gay in George’s closet.
“The legend of George Washington in Rappahannock County should be permitted to die in peace,” Rappahannock historian Maureen Harris, author of the 2019 book “Washington, Virginia, History: 17352018,” admonished this newspaper earlier this month.
Apart from her own research, Harris drew attention to the conclusion of the National Archives, which houses “George Washington’s Professional Surveys, 22 July 1749-25 October 1752”:
“There is no evidence to support the local tradition that on 24 July 1749 GW laid off the town of Washington, Va., the site of which was then in Culpeper County, but he did draw a plat of the new town of Alexandria sometime apparently during the summer or fall (DLC: Geography and Map Division). From the fall of 1749 through the spring of 1752 GW spent the best weeks of the year for surveying west of the Blue Ridge, and there is no evidence that he returned to Culpeper County [portions later becoming Rappahannock County] during that time, except possibly for a brief visit in late May 1750.”
How it started
So how then was the legend born that George Washington surveyed and drew a plan of the Rappahannock County Seat?
In her exhaustively researched book on the history of the town, founded in 1796, Harris said it arose on May 6, 1932 “when Franklin Clyde Baggarly presented to the Town Council of Washington his report titled, ‘History of the Town of Washington, Virginia.’”
The council was quite impressed with Baggarly’s previously unheard of discovery that George himself surveyed the town and quickly resolved that his findings be recorded in the meeting minutes and forwarded for printing in the Rappahannock County Court Clerk’s office deed book.
“The report is quite lengthy and is written in an erudite style that is very persuasive,” Harris observed. “However, only two small parts of the report are directly pertinent to Baggarly’s theory that Washington surveyed and prepared a plan for the town.”
It is a fact that Washington at the ripe young age of 17 was appointed as the first official surveyor of newlyformed Culpeper County, from which Rappahannock County was later carved. However, historical records reveal he did very little surveying in the county after assuming the post on July 20, 1749.
Landon and Kennerly
In his report to the town’s council, Baggarly quoted an unknown man named “Landon” and his reference to a journal entry supposedly in Washington’s handwriting, dated July 22, 1749: “[A]ccompanied by John Lonem and Edward Corder, I journeyed one half day in a northwest direction from Fairfax [then the name of the town of Culpeper] and in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Culpeper County I laid off a town.”
Which if true definitely would have put Washington in this neighborhood.
However, Harris said nobody named “Landon” could ever be identified by historians. Asked later for proof of his claim, Baggarly declared that the specific paper from which he quoted Landon had burned in a fire in his law office.
“Thus, there is no tangible evidence that the statement about laying of a town had ever been made by Washington,” wrote Harris, who’s not the first historian during the last century to question the validity of the town’s claim to fame.
Others include eminent historian and cartographer Eugene M. Scheel, who made a thorough investigation of Baggarly’s assertion.
Scheel, who has authored nine books on Virginia history, was said to be “puzzled” when in 1962 he stumbled across a stone monument at the east end of Jett Street, which to this day states as fact that Washington surveyed the town. (It should be pointed out that Baggarly, who was the town attorney from 191018, promoted his Washington theory by funding construction of the monument).
Scheel realized that “1749 was a very early date for a town in the backwoods of Virginia,” said Harris, and furthermore “in 1749 the area that is now the town was simply farmland owned by Thomas Kennerly.”
Enter the Library of Congress, which houses “The Papers of George Washington.”
“Nowhere in the papers of George Washington is the name Thomas Kennerly found,” the Library states, which would be unusual given young George kept meticulous notes of his 190plus Virginia land surveys, identifying by name each property landowner: Hogan, Hamilton, Denton, McBride, Dunbar among his 16 confirmed surveys in 1749.
When he appeared before the council, Baggarly also called attention to “a preserved plan of the town that was found in 1847… which purports, and from every appearance is, the original made by George Washington. This plan, which is in a fairly good state of preservation, contains not only the original boundaries, but the lot numbers are easily discernible and the names of the streets are clearly legible.”
According to Harris, Baggarly’s wife discovered the plan in her husband’s papers after she had him declared legally incompetent in 1959, and took it to the Rappahannock County Court Clerk, where it is kept to this day with the additionally typed words: “Copied from the Original as made by George Washington, August 4, 1749.”
Yet this plan, Harris said, “is virtually identical to the town plan submitted in 1797” to the Virginia General Assembly by Messrs. Calvert, Jett, Wheeler and Porter, original landowners of the town site who had streets named in their honor.
For one, she stated: “If
Washington had surveyed the town, particularly by bringing the chainmen Lonem and Corder with him, a proper survey plat would have been prepared by him, not the simple plan that Baggarly presented.”
Furthermore, Harris questioned the names of four streets on the supposed Washington plan: Calvert, Jett, Wheeler and Porter.
“However, none of these men were living or they were only children in 1749, the date Baggarly asserted Washington drew his plan,” she pointed out. “Thus, it seems impossible that Washington could have selected street names that were identical to the names of the four men involved in laying out the town forty-seven years later in 1796-97.”
Washington’s hand?
Which in and of itself might dispel Baggarly’s story. Except, one cannot ignore Scheel’s interview with Library of Congress scholar Edward J. Redmond, who was provided with a copy of the Baggarly map purportedly drawn by George Washington in 1749.
An expert on maps and surveys, Redmond in 2002 was quoted as saying that “the lot numbers appear to be in Washington’s hand, but the title and street names were not drawn by Washington.”
In other words, could the street names have been additions to an original Washington map — perhaps added in 1797 by Calvert, Jett, Wheeler and Porter?
“With regard to the numbers on the plan of the town being possibly in George Washington's handwriting,” Harris tells the News this week, “Scheel believes that the plan was removed by Baggarly [with a razor blade] from Plat Book 1 of the Culpeper County Court Clerk's office. This plan would have been drawn into Plat Book 1 by the Court Clerk when the town lots were first being sold by the town trustees, which was in 1798.
“I could surmise that in the 1700s people were taught cursive handwriting in a standard fashion, such that both Washington and the Court Clerk had similar handwriting.”
Otherwise, Harris says: “With regard to the ‘town officials; (actually, the four men who owned the land on which the town was founded — Calvert, Jett, Wheeler, and Porter) adding the street names in 1797: Washington was a very precise surveyor, and he would not have omitted street names on his town plan. I would refer you to his plan of the town of Alexandria, drawn in 1749, in which he drew in each of the eleven street names, as well as the numbers on the 84 lots.”
Gay Street mystery
Harris cited another questionable point made by Baggarly.
“Baggarly also proposed that Gay Street was named after Gay
Fairfax, whom Baggarly states was romantically involved with George Washington,” she wrote in her book. “However, nowhere in the many papers of George Washington is the name Gay Fairfax mentioned.”
(Washington was passionate about Sally Cary Fairfax, wife of his best friend George William Fairfax, but no woman named Gay has ever been identified).
Even the famed Inn at Little Washington has questioned the validity of the street’s name in its description of the town. “Curiously, although one of the main streets is named Gay Street, there is no Gay family and it is romantically rumored that young George Washington named this street after the beautiful Gay Fairfax.”
As Harris explained it, “Franklin Clyde Baggarly was an imposing person in the town of Washington,” and the people wanted to believe him. He had, after all, accomplished great things for the town, including in 1931 moving the old Washington Academy to a hill east of town, enlarging the building, adding a two-story portico with full height columns, and renaming it “Avon Hall.”
One town official in particular took up Baggarly’s cause.
“Baggarly’s legend of George Washington was promulgated extensively by Dorothy Cox Davis, who was elected mayor of the town in 1950 and was an amateur George Washington scholar,” said Harris. “In an interview in that year, she stated: ‘There is no doubt in my mind that George Washington surveyed this town.’...
“She also stated that ‘We intend to put this town on the map,’ and perhaps the legend of George Washington was one means she undertook to do this during her 20-year reign as mayor of the town.”
Legend it is
When the town of Washington updated its comprehensive plan in September 2017, it made clear starting with its very first word that any ties between George Washington and the county seat were solely “legend.”
Which isn’t to say today’s Washington Mayor Fred Catlin isn’t keeping an open mind on the subject.
“There is no irrefutable evidence I know of that George Washington did or did not survey and lay out the town of Washington,” he tells this newspaper. “As I understand it, he was the surveyor for Culpeper County and the northwestern frontier of Virginia during the right time period, but did he come here?
“Who knows! Without the irrefutable evidence, we may never know for sure one way or the other, but it is a wonderful story and will likely continue to be the basis for friendly discussions.”
All said and done, as the Rappahannock County Planning Commission continues to take red ink to its comprehensive plan, adding and deleting sentences as they see fit, it will be interesting to see whether they clarify what is now stated as fact in the plan — that the county seat indeed “was surveyed and plotted by George Washington in 1749.”
Editor’s note: “Washington, Virginia, History: 1735-2018,” by Maureen Harris, can be purchased on Amazon. com for $10.
Historian Harris: “The legend of George Washington in Rappahannock County should be permitted to die in peace.”