Washington’s accounts of the region so interested his brothers that they finally moved there, acquired large tracts of land, and built homes.  Charles Town, indeed, was laid out on the land of Charles Washington, and was named for him, and there is evidence that George Washington, who certainly gave the lines for the roads about the place, also laid out the town.

Another brother, John Augustine, left a large family, while Samuel, the oldest, described as “a rollicking country squire,” was several years short of fifty when he died, but for all that had managed to marry five times and to find, nevertheless, spare moments in which to lay out the historic estate of Harewood, not far from Charles Town.  It is said that George Washington was his brother’s partner in this enterprise, but excepting in its interior, which is very beautiful, there is no sign, about the building, of his graceful architectural touch.

George Washington spent much time at Harewood, Lafayette and his son visited there, and there the sprightly widow, Dolly Todd, married James Madison.  This wedding was attended by President Washington and his wife and by many other national figures; the bride made the journey to Harewood in Jefferson’s coach, escorted by Madison and a group of his friends on horseback, and history makes mention of a very large and very gay company.

This is all very well until you see Harewood; for, substantial though the house is, with its two-foot stone walls, it has but five rooms:  two downstairs and three up.

Where did they all sleep?

The question was put by the practical young lady whom I accompanied to Harewood, but the wife of the farmer to whom the place is rented could only smile and shake her head.

The bedroom now occupied by this farmer and his wife has doubtless been occupied also by the first President of the United States and his wife, the fourth President and his wife, by Lafayette, and by a King of France—­for Louis-Philippe, and his brothers, the Duc de Montpensier and the Comte de Beaujolais, spent some time at Harewood during their period of exile.

Having read in an extract from the Baltimore “Sun” that Harewood, which is still owned in the Washington family, was a place in which all Washingtons took great and proper pride, that it was “the lodestone which draws the wandering Washingtons back to the old haunts,” I was greatly shocked on visiting the house to see the shameful state of dilapidation into which it has been allowed to pass.  The porches and steps have fallen down, the garden is a disreputable tangle, and the graves in the yard are heaped with tumble-down stones about which the cattle graze.  The only parts of the building in good repair are those parts which time has not yet succeeded in destroying.  The drawing-room, containing a mantelpiece given to Washington by Lafayette, and the finest wood paneling I have seen in any American house, has held its own fairly well, as has also the old stairway, imported by Washington from England.  But that these things are not in ruins, like the porches, is no credit to the Washingtons who own the property to-day, and who, having rented the place, actually leave family portraits hanging on the walls to crack and rot through the cold winter.