February 27, 2012
by Becca Milfeld
Feb. 24 was an exciting day of piglet beginnings at Mount Vernon. Annabeth, a first-time mother, gave birth to a litter of 5 black piglets very early in the morning. A few hours later Genesis gave birth to a litter of 7 spotted piglets. Both mothers and their litters are now on-view and are located in the exhibition pig pen next to our orchard. Mount Vernon’s pigs are members of a historic breed called Ossabaw Island Hogs, which existed in George Washington’s day.
Category: Mount Vernon Animals, Photo of the Day
February 3, 2012
by Becca Milfeld
Counting pretend sheep hopping over fences will put you to sleep, but one of Mount Vernon’s real-life sheep did just that today and had the opposite effect, careening past visitors and trying to escape out the main gate of the estate. Ok, we don’t know that he actually hopped over the fence … he could have shimmied through it. Either way, this member of one of our flocks of Hog Island Sheep, a historic breed that dates back 200 years to Virginia’s Eastern Shore, was on its way out the door. Luckily Joe, one of our animal caretakers, recuperated the rogue mammal and reunited it with its wooly cohorts back in the sheep pen.
Category: Mount Vernon Animals
January 18, 2012
by Becca Milfeld
Mount Vernon is not known to have been a particularly feline-friendly place. The absence of any mention of pet cats chez Washington may not have had so much to do with an aversion to hairballs as it did the family’s plethora of pet dogs and birds. Fido and feathered friends were more of the General and his wife’s style: Terriers, lapdogs, hunting hounds, plus a cockatoo, peacock and green parrot were only a few of the nonhuman inhabitants who called the Mansion and its grounds home. There were no doubt barn cats that kept the rodent population down as well as cats who belonged to slaves, the feline bones of which have been found in the layers of earth that constituted the cellar of a slave cabin. While the General may have seemed to have had nine lives throughout his battle-prone life, he likely didn’t have any cats.
Information courtesy of Mount Vernon historian Mary Thompson.
Photo compilation by Becca Milfeld; Cat photo courtesy of Flickr creative commons/dustin.askins.
Category: Mount Vernon Animals
December 9, 2011
by Becca Milfeld
What do Aladdin the Mount Vernon Christmas camel and Justin Bieber have in common? The ability to draw throngs of adoring teenagers, arms outstretched, with an almost mystical allure. As about 50 middle school students descended on the dromedary this afternoon, Aladdin the camel — a species one would not expect to be overly fond of noisy, racing crowds — lovingly nuzzled their faces and not only endured but seemingly basked in the barrage of hands casting about for his face and neck. For an animal, Aladdin is about as friendly as it gets.
Category: Mount Vernon Animals, Photo of the Day
December 2, 2011
by Becca Milfeld
Approximately three months after his marriage to Martha, George Washington brought his new bride and her children to Mount Vernon. As they made their way from Southeast Virginia, where Martha’s plantation was located, the party made a purchase. In his ledger on April 15, 1759, Washington records paying four shillings and six pence for a peacock.
As everyone settled in at Mount Vernon in twos — the newlywed couple and Martha’s two children — one lonely bird established residence somewhere in a tree or coop. The ledger entry, much like a similarly cryptic mention of a camel that once stopped by, is the only record of the animal’s existence, so little is known of its fate.
Not many peacocks, whose natural habitats range from India to Burma, were known to have existed in the colonies at that time, even if they were relatively easy to care for. In the mid-1780s Washington received several Chinese golden and silver pheasants and two red partridges from the royal aviary in France, as a gift from the Marquis de LaFayette. By 1787 Washington was writing that one of the pheasants had died while the others were drooping, and he didn’t want to let them wander free about the estate for fear of hawks taking them.
Whether Washington’s peacock lived out its long and glorious days as a lawn ornament, survived for a while as a family pet and curiosity, or quickly succumbed to unfavorable weather or hawks, is a mystery that will likely continue strutting throughout the ages.
Background peacock photo courtesy of Flickr/Paul Friel.
Category: Mount Vernon Animals
