Biography | George Washington — He Died in This Second-Floor Bedchamber at Mount Vernon

People treat Mount Vernon as the house of a long retirement.

The last useful room is upstairs, in the bedchamber George and Martha Washington shared on the river side of the mansion.

On 12 December 1799 he rode his farms for hours in rain, hail, and snow. He came in late to dinner still in wet clothes.

By the night of the 13th his voice was hoarse. Between two and three in the morning on Saturday the 14th he woke Martha. He could barely speak.

He would not let her leave the warm room to fetch help. At daybreak the enslaved housemaid Caroline Branham came to light the fire. Martha then sent for Tobias Lear, his secretary.

Lear found him in bed, struggling for air. At Washington's request the overseer George Rawlins bled him. Dr. James Craik, who had treated him for four decades, arrived later that morning.

Two more physicians, Dr. Gustavus Brown and Dr. Elisha Dick, joined Craik. The three bled him again, blistered his throat, and gave emetics and a vinegar-and-sage gargle.

Modern clinicians reading Lear's narrative usually name acute bacterial epiglottitis. The 1799 treatment followed the practice of the day. It took about thirty-two ounces of blood.

In the afternoon he sat up, dressed, and walked to a chair, then returned to bed. Lear recorded that he asked for his papers to be arranged and his accounts settled.

Martha brought two wills from his desk downstairs. He had her burn the superseded one and keep the later will.

He asked to be buried decently, and not placed in the family vault in fewer than three days. Lear wrote that the last words he heard were an assent that the instruction had been understood.

Washington died between ten and eleven at night on 14 December 1799. He was sixty-seven.

Martha sat at the foot of the bed. Lear and Craik were at the bedside. The enslaved valet Christopher Sheels stood in the room, with the housemaids Caroline, Molly, and Charlotte.

The body was brought downstairs the next day and laid in the New Room. Burial followed on 18 December in the old family vault on the slope toward the Potomac.

The mansion is now a museum at 3200 Mount Vernon Memorial Highway, operated by the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association. The bedchamber is shown on the house tour.

The pin is the house. The death was in that upstairs room, not in a hospital and not at the later tomb.

Photo: Ahoerstemeier, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons