Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 9, 1990 TAG: 9007090094
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: LORTON LENGTH: Short
Unlike his fellow Virginians, Mason never became president and no national monument was ever raised to his memory.
Mason fans are working to redress what they say is a nearly 200-year-old wrong by erecting a memorial to him near the Mall in Washington.
It seems Mason's refusal to sign the Constitution he helped create vexed his contemporaries enough that he was nearly written out of the history books.
"George Mason has been the forgotten patriot all along," said Donald R. Taylor, director of Gunston Hall, Mason's meticulously restored plantation on the Potomac River, near Washington's Mount Vernon home.
"It seems that although Mason played a very central role in creating what resulted in our federal form of government, he has gotten bad press because he refused to sign the completed document," Taylor said.
Mason's main beef with the Constitution? It contained no bill of rights. Mason believed a rib of the new nation's government must be protection for its citizens should that government turn hostile, Taylor said.
Mason died in 1792, one year after the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution. The 10 amendments closely resemble a bill of rights for Virginia that Mason drafted in 1776.
Taylor would like to install the modest sculpture honoring Mason next year, the bicentennial of the Bill of Rights.
Perhaps fittingly, Taylor's group selected a site in the shadow of the Jefferson Memorial.
by CNB