The result was that in 1757 he wrote, “I am so little acquainted with the business relative to my private affairs that I can scarce give you any information concerning it,” and this was hardly less true of the whole period of his absences.  In 1775 he engaged overseers to manage his various estates in his absence “upon shares,” but during the whole war the plantations barely supported themselves, even with depletion of stock and fertility, and he was able to draw nothing from them.  One overseer, and a confederate, he wrote, “I believe, divided the profits of my Estate on the York River, tolerably betwn. them, for the devil of any thing do I get.”  Well might he advise knowingly that “I have no doubt myself but that middling land under a man’s own eyes, is more profitable than rich land at a distance.”  “No Virginia Estate (except a very few under the best of management) can stand simple Interest,” he declared, and went even further when he wrote, “the nature of a Virginia Estate being such, that without close application, it never fails bringing the proprietors in Debt annually.”  “To speak within bounds,” he said, “ten thousand pounds will not compensate the losses I might have avoided by being at home, & attending a little to my own concerns” during the Revolution.

Fortunately for the farmer, the Mount Vernon estate was but a small part of his property.  His father had left him a plantation of two hundred and eighty acres on the Rappahannock, “one Moiety of my Land lying on Deep Run,” three lots in Frederick “with all the houses and Appurtenances thereto belonging,” and one quarter of the residuary estate.  While surveying for Lord Fairfax in 1748, as part of his compensation Washington patented a tract of five hundred and fifty acres in Frederick County, which he always spoke of as “My Bull-skin plantation.”

As a military bounty in the French and Indian War the governor of Virginia issued a proclamation granting Western lands to the soldiers, and under this Washington not merely secured fifteen thousand acres in his own right, but by buying the claims of some of his fellow officers doubled that quantity.  A further tract was also obtained under the kindred proclamation of 1763, “5000 Acres of Land in my own right, & by purchase from Captn.  Roots, Posey, & some other officers, I obtained rights to several thousand more.”  In 1786, after sales, he had over thirty thousand acres, which he then offered to sell at thirty thousand guineas, and in 1799, when still more had been sold, his inventory valued the holdings at nearly three hundred thousand dollars.

In addition, Washington was a partner in several great land speculations,—­the Ohio Company, the Walpole Grant, the Mississippi Company, the Military Company of Adventures, and the Dismal Swamp Company; but all these ventures except the last collapsed at the beginning of the Revolution and proved valueless.  His interest in the Dismal Swamp Company he held at the time of his death, and it was valued in the inventory at twenty thousand dollars.