Pohick Bay: Gunston Hall

Sunday, 10 April 2011 — Part I

That all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural Rights…
among which are the Enjoyment of Life and Liberty, with the Means of acquiring and possessing
Property, and pursuing and obtaining Happiness and Safety.”

George Mason, Virginia Declaration of Rights, May 1776

The forecasters had said that we’d have a beautiful Sunday with temps reaching 75F (24C) and plenty of sunshine. They were right, but their timing was off — the sun didn’t peek out from behind the overcast that filled the sky until we were getting ready to leave Pohick Bay Regional Park (PBRP) around 3:00p. Oh well; that didn’t stop us from going out and having fun anyway.

Just down the road from PBRP is Gunston Hall, the home of one of the architects of our nation’s Bill of Rights — George Mason (1725-1792). After a leisurely morning relaxing in the coach, we decided to take the trail from the campground to Gunston Hall. Heavily mulched, the .5-mile (.8 km) trail was in good condition and we managed to get to the paved road leading to the estate without muddying our shoes.

Although there were a number of cars in the parking lot, there was no one inside the visitors center. After paying the admission ($8/person with a $1/person coupon from the website), we watched a brief video that gave us background information on George Mason and his role in the creation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

[scanned from brochure received at the visitors center]

Next, we briefly explored the small museum and headed over the house for the 10:00a tour. It turns out that we were the only ones there as well. A fact that we appreciated as it allowed us to spend a considerable amount of time with the docent on duty. She talked about how devastated Mason was when his beloved wife Ann died in 1773; how he reluctantly took George Washington’s seat in the Virginia legislature; how he was asked to draft a Declaration of Bill of Rights for Virginia; how he was chosen to attend the 1776 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia; how he refused to sign the Constitution because (1) he felt that it gave too much power to the federal government, and (2) the Convention was unwilling to abolish slavery; and how Madison later introduced a federal Bill of Rights that was based on Mason’s Declaration of Rights. (For more information, you can click Mason’s portrait above for a short biography.)

from L to R: Bust of George Mason in front of the visitors center; Draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights (May 20-26, 1776); items on display in the museum.

The tour continued with the four rooms on the ground floor of the Georgian-style mansion. Mason wanted the latest styles to be used in decorating and furnishing his house. To that end, he had two craftsmen, Buckland and Sears, brought from England. No photos were allowed inside the house, so I have no images to share with you. (You can, however, take a virtual tour here.) Suffice to say that the four rooms — two public, and two private — were eclectic in style.

A gravel path lined with magnolia trees leads to Gunston Hall.

The central passage was done in a style that I can only describe as “Greek Temple.” It had Doric style mock-columns (pilasters, I later learned) and a very temple-ish wallpaper that was a conjecture on what might have covered the walls in Mason’s time. Everything inside (for that matter, outside as well) seemed to be balanced – same number of doors, same number of windows, etc. The docent explained that this was a key element of Georgian architecture.

note the balance of architectural features on either side of the entrance.

The two public rooms, though relatively small (as were all the rooms), were designed to impress visitors to the mansion. The “Palladian Room” featured highly intricate wood carvings on the walls and around the doors. The elaborately-carved fireplace was flanked by open beaufats that were designed to display the best of what the family owned. The “Chinese Room” had bright mustard-yellow walls, big-print wallpaper, and pagoda-like scalloped moldings. It’s said that there was no other room like it anywhere in Colonial America. I believe it! Though neither room was to my taste, I have to say that the intended “wow” factor was quite apparent.

A model of the estate on display in the museum.

The two private rooms on the other side of the central passage were simpler, though the décor was far from plain. The “Little Parlor” was where the family gathered. Mason used the room as a study, and in fact, one of the few Mason family furnishings still in the house — a small desk — was in this room. Although no one can really say for sure, it’s possible that he drafted the Declaration on this desk. The color on the walls was an eye-soothing gray, and the beaufats had doors, making it obvious that they were intended for storage rather than display. The second room, depicted as the “Chamber,” or the main bedroom, had intense green walls. The woodwork, not nearly as elaborately carved as in the public rooms, was painted the same color. One of the closets flanking the fireplace was used to store the “expensive kitchen goods” (such as coffee, tea, salt, sugar), which were doled out to the kitchen staff as needed.

A closer look at the mansion and the kitchen yard portion of the model.
The text is a description of Gunston Hall by George Mason’s son, john.
[click the image on the right for a larger, legible version]

After the guided tour of the first floor rooms, we used the narrow and steep servants’ stairs to go upstairs where we toured at our own pace. Each room was set up as a bed chamber with period furnishings … none of which belonged to the Mason family. Though wealth was apparent in the architectural features upstairs (the triple-arch with fluted pillars at the top of the main stairs comes to mind), the overall feeling was much more to my taste.

Returning to the ground floor by way of the main staircase, we then went onto explore the grounds, starting with the kitchen yard where we peeked into the kitchen, dairy, and laundry. The latter two were open, but the kitchen was locked and I had to be satisfied with taking a photo or two through the grimy windows.

Scenes from the Kitchen Yard.

Then we visited the site of the former slave quarters … no building; just the outline of a foundation. In the 1780s, Mason had nearly 100 slaves. They worked on the four farms nearby and in the house. Some were descendants of the 32 slaves that Mason inherited; others came into the household as his wife’s dowry. Though he intensely disapproved of slavery, and in fact, described it as “slow poison,” he remained a slave-owner to the end of his life.

Collection of photos from the marker on the slave quarters site.
[click the image for a larger, more legible version]

The gardens were a bit of a disappointment as there wasn’t much to see. The simple, four-quadrant set-up with gravel paths in between was probably, as the docent put it, “similar to what the gardens looked like back then.” It was interesting to note that the gnarled boxwoods planted in Mason’s time have survived over the centuries.

The brochure describes this area as the "regular garden."

These boxwoods, we were told, were planted in George Mason's time.

Next we peeked into the schoolhouse. “No snow days for the Mason children,” the docent had told us during our tour of the house. Why? Because not only was the schoolhouse next door to the mansion, but the teacher lived in a chamber above the schoolroom.

The schoolhouse is a reconstruction of the one that was here in the 18th century.

In his old age, General John Mason wrote … “There being but a few public schools in the …”
(you can read the rest above).

Our last stop was at the “Burying Grounds,” the final resting place of George and Ann Mason. The docent told us that there were as many graves outside the low wall as there were inside. However, all but a few of the headstones have disappeared over the years and no one knows for sure who’s buried in those plots. The cemetery was apparently a favored spot for Mason after his wife died in 1776; he visited her grave frequently.

George and Ann Mason are buried side-by-side.

George Mason departed this life on the 7th day of October 1792
in the 67th year of his age
principal author of the first constitution of virginia
and the Virginia declaration of rights
~ basis of the federal bill of rights ~

And thus our visit to Gunston Hall ended. (For detailed information, click here.) Following the gravel path lined with magnolia trees, we made our way to the paved road coming into the estate, and from there to the mulched trail back to the campground.