George and Martha's menagerie at Mount Vernon

I love animals and I love history.  So, it’s only fitting that I reached out to historian and friend Mary Thompson to find out more about animals who graced the lives of George and Martha Washington.

Mary has worked at Mount Vernon for almost 40 years and she was once kind enough to host a tour of the estate—with a special animal focus—for me and a group of donors to an animal shelter where I once worked in the city named after our first president.

In her role as historian, Mary answers questions from the public and staff, helps scholars and authors with research inquiries, reviews others’ manuscripts, and accepts publishers’ requests for reviews of upcoming books.  Right now, for example, she is assisting an undergraduate student from Pennsylvania who secured a grant to research eighteenth-century horsemanship.

Mary also is engaged in her own long-term research projects, writes articles and lectures on Washington.  She has written three books. 

In addition, Mary has framed photos of her own dogs and cats on her office bookshelf.  I knew she was a big animal lover so I figured she took a special interest in the animals of Mount Vernon—past and present.  And I was right.

“Mount Vernon was teeming with animals,” she said.  So, I knew she’d have lots of stories to tell.

In the Fairfax County, Virginia nonprofit’s efforts to be highly authentic and to interpret George Washington’s life as accurately as possible, the estate—which is not run by the federal government, but, rather, without any public funds by a private organization known as the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association—features a number of farm animals similar to those our first president would have had on his plantation.  It is, indeed, a living museum.  Very alive, in fact, when it comes to animals.

Washington kept extensive records of his agricultural pursuits and the estate does its best to have exact matches of farm animals on display for the public.  They are often known as “heritage breeds,” since they are rare, specially bred descendants of early American farm breeds and unlikely to be seen on many farms today. 

For example, Red Devon cattle, who are reddish brown, graze and rest on the estate’s vast fields today.  They are similar to cattle Washington would have owned, although records show that he had cattle of different sizes and colors.  Cattle then were smaller than most cows today and in the eighteenth century would have produced only a fraction of the milk that cows now produce.

In his journals, Washington wrote about hawks, foxes, chickens and geese.  He kept draft horses, donkeys and mules on his estate.  One donkey, appropriately named Royal Gift, was sent to him by the King of Spain and was used as a stud with female donkeys and horses.  Washington believed the matings with horses resulted in mules extremely suitable for farm labor.  Washington promoted mules to other farmers by pointing out they were more cost-efficient since they would work harder than horses and required lower-quality, less-expensive food.

The estate also exhibits Hogg Island sheep, whose wool is shorn and spun by volunteers experienced with old-fashioned spinning techniques, sometimes as part of displays at Mount Vernon craft fairs.  There are also Ossabaw hogs, allegedly descended from pigs brought here by Spanish explorers of the New World.  The estate boasts a newly built livestock facility and demonstrates how horses were used for Washington’s innovative wheat-treading operation.

Washington trained his own horses.  He didn’t trust others to effectively do the job.  His favorite horses were Nelson and Blueskin, who accompanied him during the war against Britain, and they were apparently quite friendly.  When in the paddock, they would often come over to greet visiting humans, especially if Washington was with the visitors.

But George and Martha focused on more than just farm animals.  They loved pets, too.

Vulcan is one of their more well-known pooches.  The hound, sent to them by the Marquis de Lafayette, is mentioned in a journal as giving a ride to Martha’s grandson, who would have been George’s step-grandson.  The couple never had children but he adopted Martha’s children from a prior marriage; Martha was a young widow when they exchanged vows.

One of the famous stories about Vulcan, a tall hound, is the dog stealing a ham from the kitchen and upsetting Martha.  Despite people chasing after him, Vulcan managed to escape with the meat and devour it for himself.  When Washington sat down to dinner and asked about the ham, the man of the house apparently had a good laugh over the tale of the stolen meal.

Sweetlips was another family favorite.  She was a red-spotted hound who is an example of Mount Vernon dogs named according to their unique voices.  Since many of the canines accompanied hunting efforts and ran well ahead of the humans involved, they were often identified by the sounds they would make at a distance from the hunting party.  In addition to Sweetlips, there were Music, Droner and Singer.

Other dogs on the estate include Dalmatians who guarded carriages of the elite, as well as foxhounds and greyhounds for hunting.  There are references in records to mastiffs and a Newfoundland named Gunner, who worked with the enslaved worker Tom Davis to bring home ducks and other waterfowl.  Gunner was known for his skill in neatly retrieving birds from the Potomac River, which Mount Vernon overlooks in a grand, stately fashion.

A small spaniel is the only one of the Washingtons’ dogs to end up in family portraits.  Believed to be the same dog, a Cavalier King Charles spaniel appears in two works. 

Baron von Steuben, a Prussian military officer who later became a Major General of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War and a close comrade to Washington, wrote a will bequeathing an Italian greyhound to Martha but no one knows if this was a small dog, as we know the Italian greyhound breed today, or a larger greyhound who just happened to be imported from Italy.

Thomas Jefferson once wrote to one of his Monticello employees about sending sheepdog puppies to his fellow founding father, but there is no record if the gift of baby canines occurred.  Mount Vernon certainly would have needed sheepdogs since there were 500 to 700 sheep on the estate.

Mary mentioned that cookbooks and newspapers of the day sometimes featured recipes to prevent rabies, which, of course, is almost always fatal once it is contracted.  Martha’s cookbook, which was the most popular English recipe book of the time, featured two such formulas for remedies.

Christopher, an enslaved valet to Washington, was once sent to a specialist doctor in Pennsylvania after he was bitten by a dog thought to be rabid.  He recovered and the doctor was held in high esteem.  Dogs who foamed at the mouth were considered rabid and it seems likely that Christopher was bitten by a pooch who was foaming at the mouth due to some other malady.  In 1769, records mention that Washington himself shot a dog suspected of being afflicted with rabies.

Mary once wrote a magazine article for Bird Talk magazine about Martha Washington’s strong interest in birds.  Records show that not long after she married Washington, she purchased canary seed.  The couple owned parrots and once bought a peacock while traveling in the early months of their marriage. 

“We don’t know if this was a romantic gesture from a new husband to his bride, or because of the peacock’s abilities as a ‘watchdog.’  We also don’t know if there were other peacocks on the estate,” said Mary.

Martha also had a favorite cockatoo, with whom she was quite close.  But the bird was not by her side while she was bedridden in the two weeks before her death.  Apparently, when a female visitor arrived during this period, the cockatoo, who must have felt neglected, flew off his perch and over to the woman for company.

Cats did not figure as much in the lives of the Washingtons, Mary explained; they are not mentioned in estate records or Washington’s writings.  They were more likely barn animals, rather than companions kept inside the home.  Or, perhaps, alongside the home to catch mice and other rodents. 

A painting exists, however, of the first president’s nieces and nephews—the children of his brother Samuel Washington—playing with kittens.  Recently, an archeological dig in the cellar of what was a slave dwelling found a cat skeleton in the eighteenth-century layer of earth.

I asked Mary if there was ever evidence of Washington speaking out on behalf of humane treatment of animals or opposing cruelty.  She pointed to a story from just before his death when he became furious over the poor conditions of pens and barns on one of Mount Vernon’s outlying farms.  They were filthy and he demanded they be cleaned.

At the same time, the history shows he had puppies drowned—a standard method in the eighteenth century for killing unwanted animals.  He also ordered dogs who caused problems on the estate to be hung, as he did for dogs accompanying colonial soldiers during the French and Indian War.  His goal was to avoid barking dogs giving away the expedition’s presence to surrounding French troops.

If you’ve visited Mount Vernon at Christmastime in the last several years, you’ve probably come across Aladdin the affable camel who can be petted by visitors.  A friend of mine even sheared the animal once.  People always want to know what the camel is doing on the estate and why he is featured so prominently.

It turns out that Washington’s financial ledgers from 1787 show that he paid 18 shillings (approximately $70 in today’s money, according to Mary) to a camel’s owner who brought the animal to Mount Vernon sometime near the Christmas holiday.  In an era before zoos and, of course, television, men would travel from city to city with caged exotic animals and charge people to see the animals as their method of making a living.  Mary explained they were often sailors who’d visited far-off lands and she believes the camel who visited Mount Vernon was probably one of only a handful of camels to set foot in North America at the time.

One species that was considered for life at Mount Vernon since it became open to the public, but has never made it, is buffalo.  Management’s concern is that the big animals would be too difficult to handle and could escape just about any enclosure by simply knocking it down.

Washington apparently tried for decades to transfer buffalo from frontier areas that we now know as West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio.  His goal was to use the creatures as working draft animals, since they are so large and strong.  He may have read a newspaper article about buffaloes trained to pull a plow.  In addition, buffalo wool was a valuable fabric, especially for winter garments.

The only record of the species being on the estate is an inventory listing of two buffaloes sold ten months after Washington’s 1799 death.  Once her husband passed away, Martha downsized the plantation considerably, selling off many of the animals who lived at Mount Vernon during the first president’s lifetime. 

On one of my visits to Mount Vernon a number of years ago, a sow and the piglets to whom she’d given birth had their own enclosure on the grounds not all that far from the mansion itself.  Adorable piglets, like puppies, are a joy to watch and one more reason to venture to the founding father’s home that has been around for approximately two and a half centuries.  The animal side of history—given prominent and historically influenced interpretation at the estate today—is just one more reason to visit.