George Washington: Land Surveyor

This story also appears in the January-February issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

George Washington was 11 when his father, a prominent landowner, died. The future founder of the country inherited several things – an imposing physical frame, a sense of civic duty, several parcels of land, 11 enslaved people and an endless, entrepreneurial interest in acquiring ever more land.

Augustine Washington also left behind some surveying tools, which proved to be as useful as anything else. By 15, young George was already surveying land and by 1749, when he was 17, he was working as a professional surveyor.

This employment largely through the connections of his patron, Lord Fairfax, on whose vast Northern Neck Proprietary (a sort of mini colony, controlled by the Fairfax family) the young Washington received most of his work, mapping out nearly 200 new claims. This was good money in the era and an even better opportunity.

By being one of the first settlers to walk through miles of territory in and around the Blue Ridge mountains, Washington could spot and purchase tracts of land for himself before most anyone else knew what was available. He bought his first property, 1,459 acres in Frederick County, in 1752. It also gave him working knowledge of the Native Americans who had been living for centuries on the land he was now delineating for purchase by white settlers. This was the backdrop for his military career which began a few years later.

Washington worked as a surveyor for three years. The Library preserves, along with the rest of his papers, his survey exercises, notes and orders, as well as his diaries from the period.  The mottled leather cover of his 1748 journal, “Journey Over the Mountains,” still bears his handwriting and part of the metal hasp that would have locked it.

It will be on the display in a new exhibit “The Two Georges,” opening in March, which examines the overlapping worlds of Washington and King George III.

Washington never formally worked as a surveyor again, but he surveyed and mapped many of his own vast holdings, including some of the more than 52,000 acres spread across five states left behind in his will. He was surveying land near Difficult Run, a tributary of the Potomac River in northern Fairfax County, a property he hoped to buy, just a few weeks before his death in 1799.

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