12/22/2025
The birth of historic preservation in our country. Women over and over have been the face of preservation. Mount Vernon, Schuyler-Hamilton House, Grang Central Station, the list goes on and on
George Washington's home was crumbling. Virginia couldn't afford to save it. Congress said preserving history wasn't their job. So women—who couldn't even vote—bought it themselves. They still own it today.
Mount Vernon, Virginia. 1853.
John Augustine Washington III stood on the portico of his famous great-granduncle's estate and faced an impossible situation.
He'd inherited Mount Vernon—George Washington's beloved plantation home, the place where the first president had lived, worked, and died. It should have been an honor. Instead, it was a financial disaster.
The magnificent house was deteriorating. The 8,000-acre estate was unprofitable. And tourists kept showing up uninvited, tramping through the property, taking "souvenirs," making it nearly impossible to operate the farm or maintain the home.
Washington tried everything. He improved the property as best he could. He attempted to make the farm profitable. But the costs were overwhelming, and the uninvited tourism made normal operations impossible.
Finally, reluctantly, he made a decision: Mount Vernon had to be sold.
But not to just anyone. This was George Washington's home. It belonged to the nation, to history, to posterity. It should be preserved as a monument to the man who'd led America to independence and served as its first president.
In 1853, John Augustine Washington III offered to sell Mount Vernon to the state of Virginia.
Virginia's response: We can't afford it.
So Washington went to the federal government. Surely Congress would recognize the importance of preserving the home of the nation's founding father?
Congress's response: Preserving historic properties is not a proper function of the federal government.
The sale was blocked by congressmen who genuinely believed the government shouldn't be in the business of historic preservation. Let private owners maintain it, they argued. The federal government has no role in protecting old buildings, even if one of those buildings was George Washington's home.
Mount Vernon continued to decay. The once-magnificent mansion showed visible signs of neglect. Paint peeled. Wood rotted. The estate that had been meticulously maintained during Washington's lifetime was falling apart fifty years after his death.
The future of America's most historically significant home was in serious doubt.
Then, in 1853, a woman traveling down the Potomac River on a steamboat saw something that broke her heart.
Louisa Bird Cunningham was passing Mount Vernon when she noticed the condition of the house. From the river, she could see the deterioration—the visible decay of a building that should have been a national shrine.
She was horrified. Saddened. Angry.
When she returned home to South Carolina, Louisa wrote a letter to her daughter, Ann Pamela Cunningham:
"I was painfully distressed at the ruin and desolation of the home of Washington, and the thought passed through my mind: Why was it that the women of his country did not try to keep it in repair, if the men could not do it? It does seem such a blot on our country!"
Ann Pamela Cunningham read her mother's letter and had a realization: If the government won't save Mount Vernon, we will.
This was an audacious idea in 1853.
Women couldn't vote. In most states, married women couldn't own property in their own names. Women had no formal political power, limited legal rights, and were expected to confine themselves to domestic spheres rather than public affairs.
And Ann Pamela Cunningham was chronically ill—she'd suffered a spinal injury in her youth that left her in constant pain, often bedridden, dependent on laudanum for relief.
But she had something more powerful than health, legal rights, or political power: she had determination and a network of women who were tired of watching men fail to preserve what mattered.
In 1853, Cunningham founded the Mount Vernon Ladies Association—the first historic preservation organization in the United States.
Her mission was simple: raise enough money to buy Mount Vernon from John Augustine Washington III and preserve it for the nation.
The amount needed: $200,000. An enormous sum in the 1850s—equivalent to millions today.
Cunningham had no institutional support, no government funding, no legal authority. She had a network of women, a pen, and an unshakable belief that if men wouldn't save George Washington's home, women would do it themselves.
She started writing. Letters to newspapers. Appeals to women's organizations. Requests for donations. She used emerging women's networks—literary societies, charitable organizations, church groups—to spread the word.
Her message was direct: The men have failed. Virginia passed. Congress refused. George Washington's home is crumbling. If we don't save it, no one will.
Women responded.
Small donations came from schoolteachers, housewives, seamstresses—women who had little money but wanted to contribute. Larger donations came from wealthy women who wrote checks in their own names or convinced their husbands to donate.
Cunningham appointed "vice regents" in different states—women who would organize fundraising efforts in their regions. These women held fairs, organized benefits, published appeals, and collected donations penny by penny, dollar by dollar.
It was slow work. Frustrating work. Many people dismissed the effort as a woman's fancy, impossible to achieve. John Augustine Washington III himself was initially skeptical—he wanted the government to buy Mount Vernon, not a women's organization.
But Cunningham persisted. And the money kept coming in.
By 1858, the Mount Vernon Ladies Association had raised enough money to make Washington an offer he couldn't refuse. With encouragement from the state of Virginia (which, remember, had declined to purchase the property itself but was happy to support the women's efforts), Washington agreed to sell.
The price: $200,000. Payment in installments.
On February 22, 1860—George Washington's birthday—the final payment was made.
The Mount Vernon Ladies Association took possession of George Washington's home.
Think about what this meant: Women who couldn't vote, who had limited legal rights, who were expected to stay out of public affairs, had just purchased the most historically significant property in America.
They succeeded where state and federal governments had failed.
They proved that private citizens could preserve national treasures when government wouldn't.
They created the first historic preservation organization in American history.
And they did it all before women had the right to vote.
The Mount Vernon Ladies Association didn't just buy the property—they restored it, maintained it, and opened it to the public as a properly managed historic site rather than the chaotic tourist attraction it had been under private ownership.
They hired a superintendent. They began restoration work. They researched Washington's life to ensure the property reflected his era. They turned Mount Vernon into what it should have been all along: a carefully preserved monument to George Washington's life and legacy.
And here's the remarkable part: The Mount Vernon Ladies Association still owns and operates Mount Vernon today.
Not the National Park Service. Not the state of Virginia. Not the federal government that refused to buy it in 1853.
The women's organization that Ann Pamela Cunningham founded in 1853 still operates George Washington's home 172 years later.
It's the oldest women's patriotic society in the United States. It remains an all-volunteer organization with vice regents from different states, maintaining the structure Cunningham established in the 1850s.
Mount Vernon is now the most popular historic estate in America, hosting approximately one million visitors per year. Those visitors pay admission fees that fund the property's preservation and operation—making Mount Vernon financially self-sustaining, just as Cunningham intended.
The estate that was crumbling in 1853, that Virginia couldn't afford and Congress wouldn't protect, is now one of the best-preserved historic sites in the country. Because women refused to let it fall into ruin.
Ann Pamela Cunningham died in 1875, fifteen years after the purchase was completed. She spent those final years watching the organization she'd created transform Mount Vernon from a decaying plantation into a national treasure.
She never had the right to vote. She never held political office. She spent much of her life in chronic pain, often bedridden.
But she saved George Washington's home when the entire United States government said it wasn't their job to do so.
Louisa Bird Cunningham—the mother who wrote the letter that started it all—lived to see her daughter's success. She witnessed Mount Vernon's transformation from deteriorating estate to preserved monument.
The letter she wrote from that steamboat in 1853—"Why was it that the women of his country did not try to keep it in repair, if the men could not do it?"—became a challenge her daughter spent the rest of her life answering.
Today, when you visit Mount Vernon, you're visiting property owned by the Mount Vernon Ladies Association. Every tour, every exhibit, every carefully preserved room exists because women in the 1850s decided that if the government wouldn't preserve history, they would.
The story of Mount Vernon's preservation is more than just a feel-good tale about women stepping up. It's a case study in what happens when government fails and citizens succeed.
Congress said historic preservation wasn't a federal responsibility. That decision could have resulted in Mount Vernon's complete destruction—the house sold to developers, subdivided, demolished, lost forever.
Instead, it created space for private preservation efforts that established a model still used today. The Mount Vernon Ladies Association proved that private organizations could preserve historic sites, that women could accomplish what seemed impossible, that citizen action could succeed where government action failed.
Their success inspired similar efforts across the country. Women's preservation organizations saved countless other historic properties throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s. The historic preservation movement in America traces its roots directly to Ann Pamela Cunningham and the Mount Vernon Ladies Association.
It would be another sixty years after Mount Vernon's purchase before women gained the right to vote in 1920. By that time, the Mount Vernon Ladies Association had been successfully operating America's most important historic site for six decades.
They didn't need the vote to make history. They just needed determination, organization, and the willingness to do what needed doing when men said it couldn't be done.
The story also reveals something uncomfortable about how we remember history. Most Americans know George Washington lived at Mount Vernon. Very few know that women saved it from destruction when the government refused.
Ann Pamela Cunningham should be as famous as the suffragettes, as celebrated as the women who fought for voting rights. She accomplished something extraordinary—preserving the nation's most important historic home—at a time when women had almost no formal power.
But she's largely forgotten outside historic preservation circles. The Mount Vernon Ladies Association continues its work quietly, efficiently, without seeking credit or attention, just as it has for 172 years.
Maybe that's fitting. Cunningham didn't do it for fame. She did it because it needed doing and because the men who should have done it refused.
So here's to Louisa Bird Cunningham, who saw a crumbling house from a steamboat and wrote a letter that changed history.
Here's to Ann Pamela Cunningham, who turned her mother's letter into a movement that saved George Washington's home.
Here's to the Mount Vernon Ladies Association—founded in 1853, still operating today, still preserving America's most visited historic estate.
They proved that when government fails, citizens can succeed.
That women without votes, without legal rights, without political power can accomplish what seems impossible.
That sometimes the most important work is done not by those with authority, but by those with determination who refuse to accept that important things can't be saved.
George Washington's home stands today because women who couldn't vote bought it when the government wouldn't.
They still own it. They still preserve it. They still welcome a million visitors a year to see what they saved.
And every time someone walks through Mount Vernon's doors, they're walking through a monument not just to George Washington, but to the women who refused to let his legacy crumble.
In honor of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association—founded 1853, still operating 2025, proving every single day that some of history's most important work is done by people who simply refuse to accept that vital things can't be saved.
The government said no. The women said yes. Mount Vernon still stands because they did.
