Truly a rather singular gift for a child, we would think in these days.  Let us see how it turned out.  The next May Washington wrote to Lear, then in Europe on business for the Potomac Navigation Company, of which he had become president:  “Often, through the medium of Mr. Langdon, we hear of your son Lincoln, and with pleasure, that he continues to be the healthy and sprightly child he formerly was.  He declared if his ticket should turn up a prize, he would go and live in the Federal City.  He did not consider, poor little fellow, that some of the prizes would hardly build him a baby house nor foresee that one of these small tickets would be his lot, having drawn no more than ten dollars.”

Lear’s first wife had died the year before of yellow fever at the President’s house in Philadelphia, and for his second he took the widow of George A. Washington—­Fanny—­who was a niece of Martha Washington, being a daughter of Anna Dandridge Bassett and Colonel Burwell Bassett.  This alliance tended to strengthen the friendly relations between Lear and the General.  In Washington’s last moments Lear held his dying hand and later penned a noble description of the final scene that reveals a man of high and tender sentiments with a true appreciation of his benefactor’s greatness.  Washington willed him the use of three hundred sixty acres east of Hunting Creek during life.  When Fanny Lear died, Lear married Frances Dandridge Henley, another niece of Mrs. Washington.  Lear’s descendants still own a quilt made by Martha Washington and given to this niece.

During part at least of Washington’s absence in the French war his younger brother John Augustine, described in the General’s will as “the intimate friend of my ripened age,” had charge of his business affairs and resided at Mount Vernon.  The relations with this brother were unusually close and Washington took great interest in John’s eldest son Bushrod, who studied law and became an associate justice of the Federal Supreme Court.  To Bushrod the General gave his papers, library, the Mansion House Farm and other land and a residuary share in the estate.

I am inclined to believe that during 1757-58 John Augustine did not have charge, as Mount Vernon seems to have been under the oversight of a certain Humphrey Knight, who worked the farm on shares.  He was evidently a good farmer, for in 1758 William Fairfax, who kept a friendly eye upon his absent neighbor’s affairs, wrote:  “You have some of the finest Tobacco & Corn I have seen this year,” The summer was, however, exceedingly dry and the crop was good in a relative sense only.  Knight tried to keep affairs in good running order and the men hard at work, reporting “as to ye Carpentrs I have minded em all I posably could, and has whipt em when I could see a fault.”  Knight died September 9, 1758, a few months before Washington’s marriage.