[Illustration:  One of the Artificial Mounds.  The Tree upon It was Set out by Mrs. Grover Cleveland.]

From that time onward he bought occasional tracts of lands in various parts of the country or acquired them in discharge of debts.  By the death of his mother he acquired her land on Accokeek Creek in Stafford County, near where his father had operated an iron furnace.

Washington’s landed estate as listed in his will amounted to about sixty thousand two hundred two acres, besides lots in Washington, Alexandria, Winchester, Bath, Manchester, Edinburgh and Richmond.  Nine thousand two hundred twenty-seven acres, including Mount Vernon and a tract on Four Mile Run, he specifically bequeathed to individuals, as he did some of the lots.  The remaining lots and fifty thousand nine hundred seventy-five acres (some of which land was already conditionally sold) he directed to be disposed of, together with his live stock, government bonds and shares held by him in the Potomac Company, the Dismal Swamp Company, the James River Company and the banks of Columbia and Alexandria—­the whole value of which he conservatively estimated at five hundred and thirty thousand dollars.  The value of the property he specifically bequeathed, with his slaves, which he directed should be freed, can only be guessed at, but can hardly have been short of two hundred and twenty thousand dollars more.  In other words, he died possessed of property worth three-quarters of a million and was the richest man in America.

Not all of the land that he listed in his will proved of benefit to his heirs.  The title to three thousand fifty-one acres lying on the Little Miami River in what is now Ohio and valued by him at fifteen thousand two hundred fifty-five dollars proved defective.  In 1790 a law, signed by himself, had passed Congress requiring the recording of such locations with the federal Secretary of State.  Washington’s locations and surveys of this Ohio land had already been recorded in the Virginia land office, and with a carelessness unusual in him he neglected to comply with the statute.  After his death certain persons took advantage of the defect and seized the lands, and his executors failed to embrace another opportunity given them to perfect the title, with the result that the lands were lost.

The matter rested until a few years ago when some descendants of the heirs set their heads together and one of them, Robert E. Lee, Jr., procured his appointment in 1907 by the court of Fairfax County as administrator de bonis non of Washington’s estate.  It was, of course, impossible to regain the lands—­which lie not far from Cincinnati and are worth vast sums—­so the movers in the matter had recourse to that last resort of such claimants—­Congress—­and, with the modesty usually shown by claimants, asked that body to reimburse the heirs in the sum of three hundred and five thousand one hundred dollars—­that is, one hundred dollars per acre—­with interest from the date of petition.