Biography | George Washington — He Was Born on This Popes Creek Lot on a Date the Calendar Later Moved

People who only read the holiday calendar think George Washington was born on 22 February 1732.

The Washington family Bible records the hour and the older date.

It says George, son of Augustine and Mary Ball Washington, was born about ten in the morning on 11 February 1731/32, and baptized on 30 April following.

That was the Julian calendar still used in Britain and its colonies. New Year's Day then fell on 25 March, which is why the year is written as a double date.

When Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752, eleven days dropped out of September. Washington treated 22 February 1732 as the date that corresponded to his birth.

The house stood on this Popes Creek plantation in Westmoreland County, Virginia, a few hundred feet from the tidal creek that still meets the Potomac.

Augustine Washington's brick dwelling burned in 1779. Nothing of the original walls survives above grade.

What a visitor sees today is a Memorial House built in 1931 as a conjectural reconstruction, plus an outline of excavated foundations marking the birth site.

The National Park Service established George Washington Birthplace National Monument here on 23 January 1930. The address is 1732 Popes Creek Road, Colonial Beach.

Washington lived at Popes Creek only until about age three, when the family moved upriver to what later became Mount Vernon.

He returned as a teenager and surveyed the surrounding lands. One of his earliest surviving maps covers this neck.

The park also holds the Washington family burial ground along Bridges Creek, where his father, grandparents, and great-grandfather on that side were buried.

The useful correction is simple. The pin is the right plantation. The standing house is not the birth house.

Photo: JGHowes, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons