Published Articles
Docent Dispatch - December 2016
A visit to northwestern New Jersey would not be complete without touring the Ford Mansion, George Washington’s military headquarters during the winter wartime years of 1779-80. The Mansion is one of the earliest house museums in the country. A highlight of the tour is a discussion about the colonial concept of physical privacy, a practice reserved for the gentry only.
Carlyle Connection - Fall 2016
For more than two and a half centuries, Carlyle House has been an Alexandria landmark. Despite the estate’s historic significance as Major General Edward Braddock’s headquarters, over the one hundred and sixty years following Carlyle’s death in 1780, his once grand Georgian Aquia sandstone mansion fell into disrepair. By 1940, John Carlyle’s home was in danger of being demolished. Lloyd Diehl Schaeffer, a Northern Virginia businessman, purchased the property and saved it from the wrecking ball. Schaeffer had a love of history and recognized the historic importance of the site and operated Carlyle’s home as a museum into the 1960s, before selling it to the Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority.
Carlyle Connection - Winter 2016
On a December evening in 1775, Enoch Hawksworth, a 42-year old dry goods merchant, hastily packed a few chosen belongings and quietly left his home in Alexandria, Virginia. Moving quickly through the shadows and along back alleys to a nearby livery stable to retrieve his horse, he hoped to avoid all contact with his neighbors. What his future would hold from this night forward, he did not know. His immediate goal was to escape from this rebellious town where his refusal to join the local Patriot militia resulted in his neighbors calling him a Tory and threatening him with bodily harm.
Carlyle Connection - Spring 2016
Michele Lee is a Special Collections Librarian at the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon. The following article was first published in the Winter 2015 issue of the Mount Vernon News. According to the Library staff, Washington wrote this letter while staying at John Carlyle’s house:
Carlyle Connection - Summer 2016
“1 Large, neat, and easy Couch for the Passage” George Washington to Robert Cary, London
“In The Parlour”
The study of surviving estate inventories, diaries and letters reveals that furniture in the parlors of eighteenth century houses did not vary that much between “middling” and “elite” (wealthiest) households. Nearly all parlors contained a standard set of mahogany or walnut furnishings, frequently a mix: half a dozen or more side chairs; a pair of card tables; one or two tables of different sizes; a tea table, rectangular or round; a large framed looking glass, mounted either above the fire place mantel or on the pier between the windows; a woven carpet; and a pair of andirons with tongs and shovel. The parlor could be enhanced further by ceramic images and/or other types of garniture on the mantel, sets of prints or maps on the walls, and occasionally a family portrait, depending
upon the individual owner’s taste.
