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Having successfully orchestrated several ambitious building campaigns at Mount Vernon over the course of nearly forty years, George Washington carefully drafted this architectural plan for refurbishing one of the rooms on Mount Vernon’s third floor garret. Dated September 15, 1797, the outline bears Washington’s signature and shows his detailed attention to furnishing the mansion. From this drawing and the few others that survive, it’s evident that Washington understood architecture and building construction.

This plan was evidently prompted by the conversion of a first-floor bedchamber to a parlor, creating a need for improved sleeping quarters on the third floor. Washington had asked Philadelphia merchant Clement Biddle to purchase an open stove for him. He then sent this drawing to Biddle, saying he was “transmitting the exact form of the Room, shewing the angle in which the stove is to be fixed; the manner of fixing it and the exact size and proportion of the same with its relative situation to the Chimney (wall) and partition …”

From the research conducted by Mount Vernon’s restoration department it appears that Washington later modified this plan and shifted the stove to the room that came to be occupied by Martha Washington after George Washington’s death.

This manuscript will remain on view in the Gilder Lehrman Gallery in the Donald W. Reynolds Museum until February 10, 2011.

Object Spotlight is a regular feature on George Washington Wired that highlights some of the household belongings that Washington came into contact with in his daily life. Check out Mount Vernon’s eMuseum to find more of his belongings.

Gift: Jess and Grace Pavey Fund, 2006 [RM-1122, MS-5806]

It’s August 22 and that can only mean one thing: Six more months until George Washington’s REAL birthday. In the meantime, allow these birthday facts, courtesy of the University of Virginia’s The Papers of George Washington website, to hold you over until that joyous day in February.

“The first public celebration [of Washington’s birthday], of which there is record, was at Valley Forge, February 22, 1778, when Proctor’s Continental Artillery band serenaded Washington. The first public celebration as a holiday was by order of Comte Rochambeau, February 12, 1781, when the French Army in Rhode Island was granted a holiday on that day, Monday. February 11th, 1781, Washington’s birthday by the Julian Calendar, happened to fall on Sunday.”

Mount Vernon’s upper garden (you know the one, it’s to the left as you face the house) has been filled with flowers for years, but visitors who look at it today might think it was just George Washington’s dirt repository. That’s because all flowers and plants have been uprooted to make way for a new garden more accurate to Washington’s original plan than ever before.

Mount Vernon’s horticultural department will be busy at work planting this fall and will unveil the final garden in all its floral greenery in April 2011.

In responding to Seixas in a letter written the same day, Washington assures him that the nascent country was one “which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance” and also a nation where “all possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.”

Although Judaism was not abundantly common in colonial America, fifteen Sephardic Jewish families had arrived in Newport in 1658, after being tossed about various international locales after Spain’s King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella kicked them out of the country for refusing to convert to Catholicism.

By the time of Washington’s visit in Newport, the Jewish community there had flourished, and the Touro Synagogue, which was dedicated in 1763 and still stands today, had already been established.

A commemorative, annual reading of Washington’s letter will be held there Saturday, July 22. To check out Washington’s actual correspondence and that of Seixas, see the University of Virginia’s The Papers of George Washington.