From today’s Washington Post, a most fortuitous story:
… Washington’s revealing copy of the first Acts of Congress is one of the jewels in the elegant, new George Washington library that opens Friday at his historic homestead, Mount Vernon.
The Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon is a $106 million project designed to be the international center for Washington scholarship, with a trove of his personal books and manuscripts at its core.
The enterprise aims to elevate Mount Vernon from a popular tourist stop among the region’s pantheon of historic sites to a place of rigorous Washington research as well….
[Washington’s] floor-to-ceiling bookcase — his “book press,” he called it — held many of the 900 or so bound volumes and hundreds of maps, newspapers and pamphlets he owned.By 1797, he seems to have run out of room. He wrote a friend that he wanted to build one more thing: a structure to house “my Military, Civil & private Papers, which are voluminous and may be interesting.”
But Washington died short of that goal in 1799.
Now, more than 200 years later,“we are building his dream,” said Ann H. Bookout, head of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, which owns and operates Mount Vernon…
Which reminded me — as of this writing, with only four days left, Anthony Clark is still some fifteen hundred dollars short on his Kickstarter project:
As I said on Monday, I’d really like the chance to read “The Last Campaign”!
Never Too Late for A Presidential Library…Post + Comments (31)