Book Description

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill EDUCATION The father of Washington received his education at Appleby School in England, and, true to his alma mater, he sent his two elder sons to the same school. His death when George was eleven prevented this son from having the same advantage, and such education as he had was obtained in Virginia. His old friend, and later enemy, Rev. Jonathan Boucher, said that George, like most people thereabouts at that time, had no education than reading, writing and accounts which he was taught by a convict servant whom his father bought for a schoolmaster; but Boucher managed to include so many inaccuracies in his account of Washington, that even if this statement were not certainly untruthful in several respects, it could be dismissed as valueless. Born at Wakefield, in Washington parish, Westmoreland, which had been the home of the Wash- ingtons from their earliest arrival in Virginia, George was too young while the family continued there to attend the school which had been founded in that parish by the gift of four hundred and forty acres from some early patron of knowledge. When the boy was about three years old, the family removed to Washington, as Mount Vernon was called before it was renamed, and dwelt there from 1735till 1739, when, owing to the burning of the homestead, another remove was made to an estate on the Rappahannock, nearly opposite Fredericksburg. Here it was that the earliest education of George was received, for in an old volume of the Bishop of Exeter's Sermons his name is written, and on a flyleaf a note in the handwriting of a relative who inherited the library states that this autograph of George Washington's name is believed to be the earliest specimen of his handwriting, when he was probably not more than eight or nine years old. During t...