Metro Weekly

Living in History: 5 Great House Museums in Washington

Washington's most fascinating house museums allow visitors to relive history by roaming through rooms

Woodlawn Plantation

Woodlawn Plantation Photo by Todd Franson
Woodlawn Plantation
Photography by Todd Franson

One of the area’s first and most famous house museums is Mount Vernon, President George Washington’s plantation home near Alexandria. But there are two other notable historic homes on what used to be the same tract of land. Not quite a year before Washington died, he carved off 2,000 acres of his estate and gave the property as a wedding gift to Eleanor ‘Nelly’ Parke Custis, his step-granddaughter who he fostered as a daughter, and his nephew Lawrence Lewis. The lucky Lewises renamed the tract of land Woodlawn and built a stately Georgian/Federal plantation home designed by William Thornton, architect of the U.S. Capitol, at the request of Washington.

On a recent visit to the house, tour guide Daniel Schwarz pointed out the amusing linens in one bedroom, with a repeated stenciled image depicting Washington being crowned as if a deity. “They thought very highly of George Washington,” Schwarz said. No doubt if your relative was the first American President and had given you 2,000 acres of verdant, rolling hills plus designs for a mansion — and who knows what else? — you’d hold the man in particularly high esteem too. Alas, in this ever-evolving detective game known as historic house preservation, it’s not clear that this was the Lewises’ original fabric. In fact, Woodlawn is a particularly complicated case to solve all around, since the property changed hands eight times in the century before it became a museum in 1949. But at least the top cops are on it: The National Trust for Historic Preservation, which bought Woodlawn as its first-ever property in 1951.

Woodlawn Plantation Photo by Todd Franson
Photography by Todd Franson

 

Woodlawn House Photo by Todd Franson
Photography by Todd Franson

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