George Washington Drank Here

On the banks of the Dogue Run Creek in Fairfax County, Virginia, one chilly October morning last year, two men in waistcoats turned their attention away from stirring a pasty sour mash in a hogshead—whose sweet, beery aroma attracted and then drowned multitudes of yellow jackets—to fanning flames out of the glowing embers inside a brick firebox. Anchored to the top of the firebox was a copper pot still, shaped like a dollop of shaving cream. A modern distillery can produce four times as much in a day as George Washington’s could in a year, but the process and technology of pot-still distillation are little changed, and Washington’s venture as a distiller reveals an industrial side of him that is associated with more modern sensibilities.

As a general, George Washington deemed spirits “essential” for the morale and physical well-being of his troops. He himself was a lifelong social drinker, and when he stepped down from the Presidency in 1797, James Anderson, Mount Vernon’s farm manager, persuaded him to build a distillery. Six slaves manipulated the huge amounts of grain (60 percent rye, 35 percent Indian corn, and 5 percent malted barley) and water needed for the mash. The men tended some 50 mash tubs and fed the furnaces that kept the boiler and stills converting the mash to whiskey. The distillery flourished. In 1799 alone Washington’s five pot stills, with a combined capacity of 616 gallons, produced 11,000 gallons of rye whiskey, which generated an impressive profit of $7,500. That output, and the fact that the distillery was the largest known of its kind, offer evidence of Washington’s serious approach. This was no retiree’s hobby. But after he died in 1799, the distillery passed to other owners, and by 1808 it had ceased to operate.

In 1940 federal agents confiscated a dingy copper pot still, bearing a 1787 date, from a house in rural Fairfax County. Because of its age and locale, the pot still was assumed to have been owned by the county’s most famous distiller, and it went to the Smithsonian. It probably did not belong to Washington; holding only 30 gallons, it is much too small. Even so, last year the still was photographed and measured by Rob Sherman, operations manager of Vendome Copper and Brass Works, Inc., in Louisville, Kentucky, which has manufactured distilling equipment for a century. The company crafted an exact replica. On October 21, 13 master blenders and distillers converged at Mount Vernon to use this copy to make a historically accurate version of Washington’s whiskey recipe.

Chris Morris, master distiller at Brown-Forman Corporation, said, “The fact that Washington’s recipe was 60 percent rye makes it a powerful counterpoint to the soft scotch whiskey grain profile. The rye gives the spirit a fruity, spicy character.” Several years from now Mount Vernon Whiskey will be bottled under a special label and delivered to the highest bidders following an auction to benefit Mount Vernon’s educational programs.

All that remains of George Washington’s distillery is a low stone rectangle, incompletely enclosing several rocky trenches and some patches of burned soil. Thanks to support from DISCUS (Distilled Spirits Council of the United States), plans are under way to reconstruct the distillery on its original foundation. The project, expected to cost upward of a million dollars, is slated for completion sometime in 2006.

—Jill Sim

To Learn More

To find the radios you like best, consult the works of Marty Bunis, an expert whose books are available from Internet vendors.

On the Web, www.etedeschi.ndirect.co.uk/howto2.htm has lists of the most collectible radios, organized by country of origin. Several first models produced by major manufacturers are on its American to-buy roster.

Happy Hour at the Shack Up Inn

Robert Johnson played his blues guitar so well that it was said he’d sold his soul to the devil. Maybe he had, but it’s just as likely he learned his chops listening to other blues greats as they played on the front porches of their sharecropper shacks. That’s how a lot of Southern culture was transmitted for many years. But with the introduction of the mechanized cotton picker in 1944, plantations gave way to agribusiness, and farm laborers started streaming North. The blues became an electrified international institution, as common in the clubs of London as on the front porches of the Delta.

On a warm evening in late September, as I sat on the steps of a sharecropper shack, nursing a Corona and watching the dusk settle over cotton fields on either side of Highway 49,1 could almost hear “Terraplane Blues” in the Delta breeze. Of course, I was paying for the experience, and not with hard labor. I was a guest at the South’s oldest B&B (bed-and-beer), the Shack Up Inn, on the former Hopson Plantation in Clarksdale.

In 1998 Bill Talbot and a group of friends, one of whom was part owner of Hopson, loaded two workers’ shacks that were slated to be demolished onto a flatbed truck and hauled them to Hopson, where they renovated them. The Shack Up Inn—now six shacks—has become an international blues destination. My “shack,” the Robert Clay, named after its former occupant, was spacious, with a back bedroom, kitchen, and living room—all air-conditioned—and made even more spacious by the fact that I wasn’t raising seven sons, as Mr. Clay did.

The shacks are crammed with artifacts from all over the Delta, such as old blues records, ancient postcards, an upright piano, a guitar. (Each shack contains at least one musical instrument.) And the guests keep coming. Talbot says the partners plan to expand by putting 10 rooms in the old cotton gin and adding a main lobby. The Shack Up was convenient for me and my traveling companions, who were touring the holy sites of Delta blues, but it is also a destination in itself. We gathered on the lawn, tossed sticks to a golden retriever, and talked about music. Eventually someone brought out a guitar.

Rooms range from $50 to $75 a night, and reservations can be made by calling 662-624-8329.

—Elizabeth Hoover

Why do we say that?

When, a little more than 30 years ago, the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci asked Henry Kissinger how he had attained “incredible superstar status,” becoming “almost more famous and popular” than President Richard M. Nixon, Dr. Kissinger, then the national security adviser to the President, immediately conjured up a vision of the Old West: “I’ve always acted alone. Americans admire that enormously. Americans admire the cowboy leading the caravan alone astride his horse, the cowboy entering a village or city alone on his horse.”

Lately the cowboy image has been much in the news, with the term frequently being applied in a disparaging sense to President George W. Bush. As Paul Burka, executive editor of Texas Monthly, put it, “Foreign critics see Mr. Bush as Billy the Kid—lawless, violent, solitary and prone to shoot first and ask questions later.”

Mr. Bush may have opened himself up to this sort of criticism with his talk of bringing back Osama bin Laden “dead or alive,” but the characterization predates September 11, 2001. For example, a headline in the Toronto Staroi April 5, 2001, announced: CANADIAN PRIME MINISTER LETS LOOSE ON “COWBOY” BUSH.

The first cowboys were simply that—boys (or men, regarded as boys) who looked after cows; the word is dated in this sense in The Oxford English Dictionary to 1725. The term was given a new twist in the New World, however. During the American Revolution, Westchester County, immediately to the northeast of New York City, was the scene of much guerrilla strife, with gangs of rebels and Loyalists conducting raids on one another. Rebels called Loyalist marauders “cowboys” or “skinners.” A century later Noah Brooks offered this explanation of the old meaning of cowboy in one of his popular books for boys, The Boys of Fairport (1898): “The cowboys were the worst kind of Tories; they went around in the bushes armed with guns and tinkling a cow-bell so as to beguile the patriots into the brush hunting for cows.”

Urban cowboys appeared not long after the Revolution. From the Middlebury, Vermont, National Standard of February 27, 1821: “At the same time the streets appeared thronged with another younger set, hooting and howling, savage like, and in imitation of the licentious cow-boys and sooty chimney sweeps in the suburbs of an ill-regulated city.”

Cowboy in the modern sense, meaning a man who works on a cattle ranch, has been dated to 1849. The earliest known example comes from a history of the Mexican War: “The Mexican rancheros … ventured across the Rio Grande … but they were immediately attacked by the Texan ‘cowboys.’” The quote marks around the word suggest that the usage was new at the time.

By the start of the twentieth century, the wild, woolly ways of Western cowboys had given the term its modern, negative connotations. Thus, following the assassination of William McKinley, a longtime backer of the President—the Ohio senator Mark Hanna, who had been against Theodore Roosevelt’s nomination for Vice President—memorably tagged TR with the term, combining both its Western and disparaging senses: “Now look, that damned cowboy is President of the United States.”

Backers of the current President prefer to interpret the term in a complimentary way, of course. As Vice President Dick Cheney told Tim Russert on “Meet the Press” last March, “The notion that the President is a cowboy—I don’t know, is a Westerner—I think that’s not necessarily a bad idea. I think the fact of the matter is he cuts to the chase.”

The meaning of this particular icon, it seems, is in the eye of the beholder.

—Hugh Rawson

On Exhibit

The vitality of American culture rests on its blending of influences, and nowhere is this more true than in the hybrid field of design, as is shown by a group of current museum exhibits. From March 12 to August 8 the St. Louis Art Museum (www.slam. org) will present Art of the Osage, showing how these Indian artists assimilated into their traditional forms the work of white artists, new motifs, like the American flag, and new materials, including rayon, brass, and silk. Meanwhile, at New York City’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Shock of the Old: Christopher Dresser will be on view from March 5 to July 29. Industrial design has achieved its greatest flowering in the United States, yet its founder was British. Dresser was an industrial designer before that profession existed, creating strikingly modern-looking teapots, bowls, toast racks, and furniture as early as the 1870s. To top it all off, our great nation now has three separate Pez-dispenser museums with the opening of the newest one in Easton, Pennsylvania (“Just paces away from the Crayola factory!”; www.eastonmuseumofpez. com). Like its fellow Fez institutions in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina (“Inside Alma & Annie’s; next to ‘Adventure Falls’ mini golf”), and Burlingame, California (“ten minutes south from the San Francisco International Airport”; www.burlingamepezmuseum.com), the Easton museum packs more than half a century’s worth of design, engineering, and culture into a space about the size of a studio apartment.