George, C. 1760s - After 1831

George was an enslaved gardener. He first came to Mount Vernon in the 1770s and was owned by Washington’s mother, Mary Ball Washington, who lived in Fredericksburg, Virginia. For a decade, Washington rented him, paying his mother for the use of the young man’s labor. While living at Mount Vernon, George married Sall Twine, a field-worker who worked Dogue Run Farm. She was owned by the estate of Martha Washington's first husband. By 1786 the couple had three children together.

George Washington used enslaved labor to make his vision for Mount Vernon’s landscape a reality. George worked as a ditcher and later a gardener on Mansion House Farm. In the 1780s he was likely among those whom Washington directed to create paths, move and level earth, build walls, sow and cut grass, crush gravel, and transplant groves of trees to realize his plans for an elegant country estate. By the 1790s George was consistently working in Mount Vernon’s gardens.

Alongside Harry and Joseph, two other enslaved gardeners, the the three men worked under William Spence, an English hired gardener who had arrived at Mount Vernon in 1797. The three men toiled in the heat, weeding and planting strawberries in the vineyard enclosure, sowing seeds for spinach and other greens in the kitchen garden, and pruning plantings, harvesting cabbage, and transplanting orange trees in the ornamental upper garden. George experimented with different plant varieties in both the pleasure and kitchen gardens.

He stood five feet four and a half inches tall, “the little finger on his right hand crooked.” His wife Sall Twine and their children lived at Dogue Run Farm.

Learn more about George on his Faces of Mount Vernon’s Enslaved Community webpage.