THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, February 23, 1996 TAG: 9602230572
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GUY FRIDDELL
LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines
Wal-Mart looks to build a store on a tract the size of three football fields encroaching on the 15-acre Ferry Farm, the site of George Washington's boyhood home across the Rappahannock River from Fredericksburg.
Environmentalists and historians oppose the move. The farmhouse burned in the early 1800s, but the foundation remains. There is hope for a visitors' center.
There, as a child of 6, George is supposed to have chopped down his father's cherry tree. That fable persists despite historians' efforts to debunk it.
Mason Locke Weems, an ordained minister who published and peddled slim books, propagated the story of the cherry tree. Several years he lived near Mount Vernon, and he claimed to have heard the story from ``an aged lady, who was a distant relative, and when a girl spent much of her time in the family.''
Parson Weems wrote that Washington, hacking with his new hatchet at his mother's pea-sticks, slashed a young English cherry tree.
Finding the scarred tree, his father said he wouldn't take five guineas for it. As the boy, hatchet in hand, appeared, his father asked, ``George, do you know who killed that beautiful little cherry tree yonder in the garden?''
``I can't tell a lie, Pa; you know I can't tell a lie,'' said the boy. ``I did cut it with my hatchet.''
Many a Pa would've had his offspring cut a switch for spanking, which would call for a lengthy search to get the slightest possible reed that would pass as a switch.
Historians discredit Weems, but the tree took root in the national consciousness.
A bronze tablet, sunk in the ground, marks where the tree that never existed stood: ``Beside this stone stood the cherry tree, which, according to tradition, George Washington, when a boy cut down. The present tree was planted by the Fredericksburg Chamber of Commerce Feb. 22, 1935.''
This much is so: If he cut the tree and was asked about it, being George Washington, he would have owned up. When Parson Weems had the boy say I cannot tell a lie, people knew that much was true, and they don't forget.
The field overlooks the slate-green Rappahannock. Washington as a youth threw a silver dollar, or maybe a rock, across the river, more than 280 feet wide. Each February, near Washington's birthday, boys used to compete in flinging gilded washers across the river. In the 1930s the great pitcher, Walter Johnson, made a warm-up toss and then threw the washer 20 feet up the opposite bank.
Almost invariably, after visiting the site, boys can't rest until they try to peg a rock across the river to try to emulate the father of the country, surely a good start.
Most people think that Washington threw the dollar across the mile-wide Potomac, but that would have been beyond even Walter Johnson's arm. by CNB