THE PRESIDENTS’ GARDENS 
133 
ton, elder half-brother of George. By Lawrence it 
was named for his friend and commander, Admiral 
Vernon, under whom and General Wentworth, he held 
the commission of a Captain in their expedition against 
Cartagena. So as boy and lad, George Washington 
had lived in the simple two-story farmhouse—which 
contained only eight rooms, four below and four above, 
with the wide hall setting them apart—although he 
was not born there, but at his grandfather’s home 
farther up the Potomac in Westmoreland. 
And it was not until long after he in turn had in¬ 
herited it from Lawrence, who died in 1751, that he 
actually set to work to develop his own ideas—long, 
long after, indeed. For it was the necessity for a 
larger house, wherein the crowds who came to see him, 
by now the greatest of Americans, might be enter¬ 
tained, that at last moved him to action. This was 
of course at the time that war was over, victory was 
won and he had resigned his commission, in 1783, and 
retired—for the rest of his life, he ardently hoped— 
to the plantation and its management, which he de¬ 
lighted in. 
Here Brissot, who made the pilgrimage to Mount- 
Vernon-on-the-Potomac five years later, finds him: 
“This celebrated general . . . nothing more at 
present than a good farmer, constantly occupied in the 
care of his farm and the improvement of cultivation. 
