A new litter of Ossabaw Island hogs is always a crowd-pleaser at Mount Vernon. And with a gestation period of three weeks, three months and three days, new litters are not an uncommon sight on the estate.
Hannah, one of Mount Vernon’s five Ossabaw Island hogs, gave birth to nine piglets on September 16. They’re growing fast, but they will soon be joined by a litter from Genesis, another of the estate’s three sows, who will give birth any day now.
Before the days of pumpkin spice lattes and ghost-shaped Peeps, people were still consuming seasonal autumn foods, if perhaps in a less commercial form.
Mount Vernon reflects the changing of the season by placing appropriate food and accoutrements throughout George Washington’s house. Fall was a great time for hunting, so game such as hare and duck would have abounded on the Mount Vernon table. It’s also the correct season to take the mosquito netting off of beds and replace them with heat-trapping canopy covers. Check out all the seasonal changes going on chez Washington in GW Wired’s newest installment in its online video series.
George Washington accepts surrender by the British at Yorktown.
On Sept. 28, 1781 George Washington commenced the siege at Yorktown, which would end the war by mid-October. Washington’s 17,000 French and Continental Army troops fought Lord Cornwallis’s 9,000 British Regulars. The British troops became completely surrounded when 5,000 troops led by the Marquis de Lafayette blocked the city by land and a French fleet led by Francois-Joseph, Count de Grasse, sealed off any hope of escape by sea.
The inside of George Washington’s house is a pretty dusty place. So dusty in fact, that the collections department here at Mount Vernon launched a dust study, placing 12 petri dishes around the mansion to better understand the microscopic specs that rapidly accumulate here.
“In order to clean, we’re trying to figure out what kind of dirt we’re dealing with. [Depending on] whether it’s from people or outside you could use different products to clean,” said collections manager Elizabeth Chambers, who helped lead the study.
Despite a daily cleaning, a notable coating of dust accumulates by the next day’s dusting.
Dust in the mansion is thought to come from dirt tracked in on people’s feet, dead skin cells from staff and visitors, lint from clothes, carpet fibers, pollen, insects and pollutants from the outside air. Stay tuned as Mount Vernon gets to the bottom of its elusive dust mystery.
The National Archives has recently set the bar for bringing primary sources into the classroom in the digital age with the launch of its new website DocsTeach.org. Educators can search more than 3,000 primary documents (obviously we recommend those connected with George Washington!) and use activity prototypes to incorporate the documents into interactive Internet activities for students.
The seven prototypes that teachers can customize to their curriculum needs include puzzles, scales, maps and flow charts to name a few. The potential to incorporate this tool in your lesson plans is huge; we recommend that you check it out, play around and bring it into a classroom near you!
Mount Vernon recently invited K-12 schools nationwide to request framed portraits of George Washington to display in a respectful, prominent place.
The response was overwhelming: thousands of schools submitted letters! Along with the portrait, schools received curriculum materials to help explore our first president’s contributions.
