Virginia State Route 3—known locally as “Kings Highway”—takes its name from King George County, through which it winds west from Fredericksburg into the commonwealth’s Northern Neck, peeling back layers of urban sprawl as it does. The rolling fields and quaint country homes that remain give this place its famous charm. But this unassuming stretch of road also weaves together a remarkable spate of famous lives. Crossing into Westmoreland County, Route 3 leads travelers past the plantation where President James Monroe was born in 1758. Richard Henry Lee, whose accomplishments included several stints in the Virginia House of Burgesses,...

The history of commemoration at Washington’s birthplace properly begins with a flamboyant character named George Washington Parke Custis. George and Martha adopted Custis after the boy’s father, John Parke Custis—Martha’s son by her first marriage—died in 1781. Custis was only six months old when he moved to Mount Vernon, where for nearly two decades he enjoyed George and Martha’s deep affections and even deeper pockets. Correspondence between the two Georges reveals the younger’s taste for aristocratic leisure during his school years at the College of New Jersey (Princeton University since 1896). Frequently admonished to devote more time to...

Despite all efforts by the National Park Service to perpetuate the myth of a “place untouched by time,” the most distinguishing feature of Washington’s birthplace today is its unwitting preservation of decade upon decade of commemorative recalibration—and each layer invokes the ideological exigencies of its time. Custis’s marker, the first and most important layer, did not last very long. Local farmers more interested in cultivating crops than memories reportedly moved the marker from time to time. And as the years passed, relic seekers carried away pieces of Custis’s stone, further testifying to the longstanding allure of historical objects. Various...

The excitement generated by Washington’s 1932 bicentennial spread everywhere, even into the funny pages. That year, cartoonist Frank King’s nationally syndicated Gasoline Alley followed Uncle Walt and Skeezix on their tour of famous places associated with the life of George Washington. Their first stop was Wakefield. King introduced the series with a tri-panel comic strip picturing Walt and Skeezix in front of the Memorial House. The first caption indicates that “this, the bicentennial of his birth, makes a visit to Wakefield, Virginia, the birthplace of George Washington, particularly appropriate.” The Memorial Association’s public relations campaign clearly hit its mark. King’s...

When used today by scholars and pundits, the word “contest” usually refers to a struggle among cultural rivals to establish their beliefs as normative. The nightly news routinely covers contests of faith, politics, and values. Historians write about contests of cultures stemming from colonization, exploration, or globalization. In all of these cases, the word “contest” implies a struggle to redefine or, at least, reorganize what most people accept as true. That meaning sometimes shifts, however, when it comes to contests of memory. In many cases, contestants in memory debates do not necessarily disagree about historical truth so much as how...

Superintendent Russell Gibbs and his staff had a rough go of it during the spring and early summer of 1959. The Potomac River oyster wars—an ongoing and very violent turf war between Maryland and Virginia oyster tongers dating all the way back to Washington’s day—erupted anew in April, killing at least one local man in the crossfire.¹ Less dramatic, though equally troubling, were the demands placed on park resources in May and June as visitors crowded the monument’s Potomac River beachfront and filled its picnic area beyond capacity. On one occasion, vandals flooded the picnic area by disconnecting...

Although living history achieved a remarkable victory in the contest of relics at Washington’s birthplace by the early 1970s, the Memorial House slowly but surely crept back into the spotlight during subsequent decades and remains to this day the park’s most prominent feature. Explaining why and how that happened, however, is a difficult task because the explanation owes in large part to decisions made well beyond the monument’s boundaries. On the one hand, the National Park Service has endured a bevy of organizational reconfigurations since the late 1960s that, to varying degrees, have trickled down into the park’s own management...

Our story, and consequently my role in it, began on a summer morning in 2003 inside the park’s Log House with historians and rangers wrangling over the historical significance of George Washington’s birthplace. It is fitting, then, and perhaps even a shade ironic that we end in the same place and with the same questions of significance. In its ongoing effort to formulate a general master plan, the park hosted what the Park Service calls a “scholars roundtable” in late May 2006. The idea was to gather together agency planners, park staff, and interested community representatives in one place so...