Tudor Place – Historic House & Garden

On the heights of Georgetown, overlooking the bustling Potomac River port and, beyond it, a vastly expanding nation, Martha Parke Custis Peter and Thomas Peter envisioned a family home to reflect their family’s accomplishments and the aspirations of a new republic. To the east, a new capital city would take shape, but for now, Georgetown was the region’s center for society and politics. It was 1805, and on 8½ acres they had just purchased with a bequest from Martha’s step-grandfather, George Washington, the Peters planned what would become Tudor Place Historic House & Garden, a home for five generations of their descendants now an extraordinary museum.

As architect, they hired Dr. William Thornton, designer of the first U.S. Capitol and friend of the late President Washington. Thornton’s neoclassical plan with its rare, full-round portico looking down to the river, remains intact today – a design that reflected the young nation’s ideals and met the entertaining needs of a socially prominent family. They filled the house with fine furnishings of American and foreign manufacture as well as numerous items acquired from the Washingtons. Over six generations and nearly 200 years, they and their descendants filled the house with art and collections.

Outdoors, they planned and planted kitchen gardens, pasture and orchards that gradually gave way to five and a half acres of ornamental gardens that today forms an oasis of open green space in a bustling city. The site’s lovely garden “rooms” include summer houses, arbors, and other features, all sheltered by the branches of old-growth trees that witnessed the nation’s early decades. The 1919 Pierce-Arrow motor car sits steps away from the 1794 smokehouse, one of Washington’s oldest original outbuildings.

Tudor Place was named a National Historic Landmark in 1960 and opened to the public in 1988. Today, it welcomes visitors six days a week for guided house tours, self-guided garden walks, and an enticing variety of education programs for all ages and interests. Its world class archive and art and artifact collection span three centuries, and its collection of Washington family artifacts is the largest on public display outside Mount Vernon. Visitors enter rooms where the nation’s early leaders gathered, slaves and servants labored, and six generations of one family recorded their piece of America’s story.

As the nation grew, the Peters supported the Federalist politics of George Washington. They entertained Georgetown society and visiting luminaries like the Marquis de Lafayette and, their cousin by marriage, Robert E. Lee. Their descendants, through peacetime and war, fiercely protected and preserved their legacy. From their windows, they watched as the War of 1812 consumed the city. In the Civil War, the elegant mansion become a boarding house, and its 20^th-century owners served in two world wars, bringing home equipment, art, and artifacts acquired through their experiences.

“You can practically hear the swish of skirts on the stairs!” one visitor wrote. “It’s as if the family just left the room.”

From the grand Saloon with its vistas across the Temple Portico and rolling South Lawn, tours begin in the mansion’s elegant public rooms and pass through the dining room, its table laid with silver and porcelain from the collection, before entering the home office, servants’ hall, and 1914 kitchen, showing what lay behind the public and social façade of a prominent family. The tour illuminates the lives of servants and the changing nature of domestic labor, while the bedrooms upstairs, with furnishings from Mount Vernon to the Victorian era and mid-20th century,

The Peters could not have maintained their property without the assistance and labor of generations of servants – bondsmen at first and, later, succeeding waves of paid laborers. Their personal histories reflect broader national waves of immigration, labor, and economic change.

Today, this “estate of the nation” abounds with stories about the people, places, objects and even plants and trees that left their marks on a family, a city, and a nation. As research continues through a vigorous program of archeological, archival and object research, public visitors can experience the grandeur of an early American vision and intimate glimpses into the lives of people for whom “national history” was a personal matter.

Check out the Tudor Place – Historic House & Garden at http://www.tudorplace.org/