Kenmore Plantation

Fredericksburg
VA
Kenmore Plantation

Historic Kenmore

OTHER IMAGES

Betty (Washington) Lewis, c. 1746—56
Fielding Lewis, c. 1746—56
1792
Kenmore Plantation - Drawing Room
Kenmore Plantation - Dining Room

QUICK FACTS
  • Kenmore Plantation is not the original name of the Lewis property. When the family has to sell it just before the Civil War, it is given that name by the new owners.
  • In 1799 the Lewis’s son, Lawrence, marries Eleanor Parke Custis, who is the adopted daughter of George Washington and the granddaughter of Martha Washington.
  • Despite competition and changing tastes, the store started by Fielding Lewis’s father continues successfully in the same building for nearly 100 years.
  • Two miles from Kenmore is Ferry Farm, George and Betty Washington’s childhood home. Like Kenmore Plantation, it is also cared for by the George Washington Foundation, whose mission is to enhance the public understanding and appreciation of the lives, values, and legacies of George Washington, Fielding and Betty Washington Lewis, and their families.
  • The Mary Washington House is also nearby in Fredericksburg. This is the house that George Washington bought for his mother in 1772.
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Completed in 1775, Kenmore was the home of Fielding Lewis and his wife Betty, the sister of George Washington. Originally on 1,300 acres and with some 80 slaves, the estate abutted the Rapahannock River for easy access to waterway transportation.

Today the mansion is on three acres. It includes a separate museum, with changing exhibits, and gardens. With ornately detailed ceilings, the house is considered one of the finest surviving colonial mansions in America.

Guided-tours, of approximately 45-minutes, take visitors through the first floor and to the external kitchen. (Tours of the second floor are no longer available since foot-traffic will lead to deterioration of the plaster-ceiling artwork below.)

Betty Washington and Fielding Lewis

Betty Washington (1833 - 97), the younger sister of George Washington — and the only sister to live into adulthood — was born at the family plantation on Pope’s Creek in Westmoreland County, Virginia. In 1750, age 17, she married Fielding Lewis (1725 - 81), the son of a successful Fredericksburg merchant. This was Lewis’s second marriage. In 1746 he had married Catherine Washington (Betty’s cousin) and together they had three children before she fell ill and died in 1750.

Betty eventually had 11 children of her own, though only six survived into adulthood.

Lewis entered into business with his father, and at his death in 1754, he inherited not only his store, but also the fleet of ships that traded with Liverpool, England. While Lewis became wealthy enough to build a mansion (1769 – 75), the outbreak of the Revolutionary War was also a turn of fortune. He was unable to continue his trade with England; in addition, fully supporting the war, Lewis loaned the state of Virginia money to build a gun factory in Fredericksburg. At the time of his death in 1781 (just after the Battle of Yorktown), he was still owed £7000, which was never repaid.

It is difficult to recapture the intensity of excitement felt by Americans in 1776 over the prospect of forming new republican governments. It is a work, said Thomas Jefferson, of the most interesting nature and such as every individual would wish to have his voice in. Even the business of the Continental Congress was stifled because so many delegates — including Jefferson — left for home to take part in the paramount activity of erecting the new state governments. Constitutions, remarked Francis Lightfoot Lee, employ every pen. ... Nothing — not the creation of [the] confederacy, not the Continental Congress, not the war, not the French alliance — in the years surrounding the Declaration of Independence engaged the interests of Americans more that the framing of these governments.

— Gordon S. Wood
The Creation of the American Republic, 1776—1787 (1969)