Before he led a revolution, George Washington measured land for a living
The first American president never got the English schooling his older half-brothers enjoyed. Instead the teenage Washington learned mathematics and surveying, drew maps with real skill, and at 17 was sworn in as a county surveyor. That practical start fed into land holdings, frontier missions and eventually command of an army.
Washington was the first of six children born to Augustine and Mary Ball Washington, arriving in February 1732 at Popes Creek in Virginia. He rarely spoke of his father, clashed with his mother, and grew closest to his half-brother Lawrence. When Augustine died in 1743, George inherited Ferry Farm and ten enslaved people, while Lawrence took the estate he renamed Mount Vernon. As a teenager George copied out more than a hundred Rules of Civility, drawn from a translated French etiquette manual.
William Fairfax, Lawrence's father-in-law, became a patron and something like a second father. In 1748 George spent a month surveying Fairfax land in the Shenandoah Valley, earned a licence from the College of William and Mary the next year, and in July 1749 became surveyor of Culpeper County without the usual apprenticeship. By 1752 he held 2,315 acres. His only voyage beyond mainland North America came in 1751, to Barbados with the ailing Lawrence; George caught smallpox there, which left light scars and lifelong immunity. After Lawrence's widow died in 1761, Mount Vernon became his.
Soldiering came next. Virginia's lieutenant governor made him a militia major, and in late 1753 sent him to order French troops off land Britain claimed in the Ohio Valley. The French commander politely refused, even supplying food and winter clothes for the return, and Washington's published report made his name in Virginia and London. Two decades later he took command of the Continental Army, crossed the Delaware to win at Trenton, and with French allies forced the decisive surrender at Yorktown in 1781.
Elected unanimously in 1788 and again in 1792, he stayed above the feud between Jefferson and Hamilton and set habits the office still follows, from the plain title Mr. President to stepping down after two terms. His farewell address warned against faction and foreign meddling. He also owned many slaves at Mount Vernon, a contradiction historians continue to weigh.
Source: George Washington
