Truly the estate is “pleasantly situated,” though even to-day it seems out of the world and out of the way.  One must go far to find so satisfying a view as that from the old Mansion House porch across the mile of shining water to the Maryland hills’ crowned with trees glorified by the Midas-touch of frost.  The land does lie “high” and “dry,” but we must take exception to the word “healthy.”  In the summer and fall the tidal marshes breed a variety of mosquito capable of biting through armor plate and of infecting the devil himself with malaria.  In the General’s day, when screens were unknown, a large part of the population, both white and black, suffered every August and September from chills and fever.  The master himself was not exempt and once we find him chronicling that he went a-hunting and caught a fox and the ague.

What he says as regards the fisheries is all quite true and in general they seem to have been very productive.  Herring and shad were the chief fish caught and when the run came the seine was carried well out into the river in a boat and then hauled up on the shelving beach either by hand or with a windlass operated by horse-power.  There were warehouses and vats for curing the fish, a cooper shop and buildings for sheltering the men.  The fish were salted down for the use of the family and the slaves, and what surplus remained was sold.  Now and then the landing and outfit was rented out for a money consideration, but this usually happened only when the owner was away from home.

At the old Posey fishery on Union Farm the industry is still carried on, though gasoline engines have been substituted for the horse-operated winch used in drawing the seines.  Lately the industry has ceased to be very productive, and an old man in charge told me that it is because fishermen down the river and in Chesapeake Bay are so active that comparatively few fish manage to get up so far.

The Mount Vernon estate in the old days lacked only one quality necessary to make it extremely productive, namely, rich soil!  Only ignorance of what good land really is, or an owner’s blind pride in his own estate, can justify the phrase “a good loam.”  On most of the estate the soil is thin, varying in color from a light gray to a yellow red, with below a red clay hardpan almost impervious to water.  To an observer brought up on a farm of the rich Middle West, Mount Vernon, except for a few scattered fields, seems extremely poor land.  For farming purposes most of it would be high at thirty dollars an acre.  Much of it is so broken by steep hills and deep ravines as scarcely to be tillable at all.  Those tracts which are cultivated are very susceptible to erosion.  Deep gullies are quickly worn on the hillsides and slopes.  At one time such a gully on Union Farm extended almost completely across a large field and was deep enough to hide a horse, but Washington filled it up with trees, stumps, stones, old rails, brush and dirt, so that scarcely a trace of it was left.  In places one comes upon old fields that have been allowed to revert to broom sedge, scrub oak and scrub pine.  One is astonished at the amount that has never been cleared at all.  Only by the most careful husbandry could such an estate be kept productive.  It never could be made to yield bumper crops.