Visiting Mount Vernon, Virginia, part 5 of 5: The Education Center

 I ended my visit at the Education Center. And it wasn't until I finished that I realized that I didn't even visit the Museum which was housed on the other side of structure. The Education Center was so full of interesting exhibitions, models, artifacts and spanned in a chronological order the life of George Washington.

 The sculpture in concave and the image appears to follow you as you move from left to right...

 The Grant Wood painting a satire to the myth of young George's "honesty". On the way to Mount Vernon, I was quizzing my young seat mate on the bus, David Sanchez, about what he knew about George Washington. He thought with a serious expression of his face and answered, "He was very honest."

 "There is no saying to what length an enterprising young man will push his good fortune" ~ George Washington. As a young man he was an obsessive diarist. I love the mix of effort and largess this quote expresses. To understand the privileges of life without neglecting the power of a work ethic.

A vision of the young George out in the wilderness surveying the land he would one day become the "father" of...mythic in such a populace way.

The young Martha's wardrobe.

The exhibits covered his war efforts from Fort Necessity to Valley Forge. Watching a video of his reviewing the troops through an open window of the officer's cabin was a very novel way to experiencing history.

There was much made of his farming and inventive genius. But I felt that the role of the enslaved African was down played too much in the information.

The first and ONLY image of a black person in the entire center--that I encountered. I didn't go into the theater and watch the video presentation.

There were these amazing miniature dioramas. This one illustrating his engineering prowess in the construction of the lower locks of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal around the Potomac Falls. There was another one earlier depicting the apex of the battle at Fort Necessity, Pennsylvania--it was a gory blood bath with dead people, horses and even a herd of slaughtered cattle! On of the students looks up at me and asked, "Are they all dead?" I said, "Yup." "Oh gross," was his comeback.

A presentation about the design of DC under the Black architect Pierre L'Enfant. But the images are of present day DC. In Washington's day, much of the area where the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument stand were wetland swamps under water and not considered arable or buildable land surfaces.

And we end with his death mask.