By October 4 Washington had completed his 680-mile trip, which proved his last visit to the Ohio Country. While the dispiriting journey had failed to satisfy his economic objectives, it sharpened his views of policies needed to develop the region. He saw how fickle were the loyalties of the western settlers and how easily they might be lured someday by a designing foreign power. Since Spain had obstructed American commerce on the Mississippi River, Washington thought the United States could cement its grip on these inhabitants by offering them navigable waterways to the eastern seaboard, preferably through Virginia, creating “a smooth way for the produce of that country to pass to our markets before the trade may get into another channel.”¹⁹ He believed that “commercial connections, of all others, are most difficult to dissolve,” which foreshadowed his faith as president in enduring commercial rather than political ties with other countries .²⁰ He also feared that thirteen squabbling states would be powerless to act in a timely fashion as the world was being swiftly reshaped on the western frontier.

FAR MORE GRATIFYING TO WASHINGTON than bullying hardscrabble farmers was his attempt to modernize postwar agriculture at Mount Vernon. He found farming congenial to his temperament and talked about it with undisguised relish, but he sometimes sounded more like a yeoman farmer, toiling by the sweat of his brow, than the master of a vast slave plantation. In 1788 he wrote that “the life of a husbandman, of all others, is the most delectable . . . To see plants rise from the earth and flourish by the superior skill and bounty of the laborer fills a contemplative mind with ideas which are more easy to be conceived than expressed.”²¹ Many dinner guests noted that Washington’s flagging attention perked up whenever agriculture was discussed. Farming was a safe topic for him, deflecting conversation from political controversy, but it also ranked as a genuine passion. “Indeed, I am told that he feels more animation and throws off more of his natural phlegm when conversing on that topic than on any other,” a young British diplomat later noted.²²

Washington liked to affect a patrician tone about farming, as if it were merely an amusing pastime, but his livelihood depended upon it. His fascination with scientific agriculture was spurred initially by an urgent practical need: to figure out what to do with soil depleted by tobacco cultivation. He believed devoutly that American agriculture had to change and looked toward England as the model to emulate. “It may not in this place be amiss to observe to you that I still decline the growth of tobacco,” he wrote to George William Fairfax in 1785, “and to add that it is my intention to raise as little Indian corn as may be. In a word, that I am desirous of entering upon a compleat course of husbandry as practiced in the best farming counties of England.”²³ A curious boast coming from George Washington. With a genuine yearning for agricultural reform, he experimented with different seeds, grafted fruit trees, tested grapes for a homegrown Virginia wine, and collected cuttings from friends. Not to be outdone by Jefferson, he also devised a new agricultural plow that could seed and harrow fields at the same time. This was the golden age of amateur gentlemen scientists, and when Washington wanted to learn whether spermaceti candles or tallow candles were cheaper, he set up an experiment, recorded how long it took each type to burn, then computed that spermaceti candles were more than twice as expensive as tallow.

During the 1780s, with agricultural prices depressed, Washington found it hard to make any headway as a farmer. In November 1785 he told George William Fairfax that he never viewed his plantations “without seeing something which makes me regret having [continued] so long in the ruinous mode of farming which we are in.”²⁴ The following year, perplexed by what to do, he launched an important correspondence with a renowned English agronomist, Arthur Young, who sent him his four-volume Annals of Agriculture. Candid about his own inadequacies as a farmer, Washington asked for advice about more than just the ruinous practices and backward farm implements at Mount Vernon. Rather, he saw the agricultural system of the whole country as bogged down in outdated methods and was especially critical of Virginia planters who exhausted their soil with endless rounds of tobacco, Indian corn, and wheat. Deciding to conserve his soil through crop rotation, Washington ordered a variety of new seeds from Young—including cabbage, turnips, rye, and hop clover—and under Young’s tutelage eventually planted sixty different crops at Mount Vernon. A severe drought and a boll weevil infestation drastically cut his wheat yield in 1787. Nonetheless, determined to rotate his crops, he had by 1789 planted wheat, barley, oats, rye, clover, timothy, buckwheat, Indian corn, pumpkins, potatoes, turnips, peas, and flax. As president, he lent the prestige of his office to espousing a national board of agriculture that could diffuse scientific information to farmers.

In 1788 Washington commenced work on a two-story brick and timber barn, a hundred feet long, which would be “the largest and most convenient one in this country,” as he bragged.²⁵ This massive construction project taxed the resources of Mount Vernon, where all 40,000 bricks were made; more than 35,000 board feet of pine planks and 100,000 juniper shingles were bought ready-made. Washington intended to store his grain and other crops in this commodious structure. “The barn is so well planned that a man can fill the racks with hay or potatoes easily and without any danger,” noted Brissot de Warville, who appreciated the novelty of both barn and barnyard, which “were innovations in Virginia, where they have no barns and do not store fodder for cattle.”²⁶ Starting in 1792, Washington also erected a specialized sixteen-sided barn for threshing wheat. As horses circled around the barn at a trot, trampling the wheat, the grain fell cleanly between gaps in the wooden floorboards to a granary on the lower level.

Always musing about the future of American agriculture, Washington introduced ingenious innovations at a merchant gristmill that he had first installed at his Dogue Run farm in the early 1770s. He recruited a Delaware inventor, Oliver Evans, who had figured out a way to automate all the mill elements through gears and conveyor belts. Powered by a sixteen-foot waterwheel, the mill hoisted the grain by buckets, ground it, then spread the high-quality flour to cool before it was poured into barrels for export. The sheer variety of business activities at Mount Vernon would make President Washington as receptive to the manufacturing visions of an Alexander Hamilton as to the agrarian dreams of a Thomas Jefferson.

Perhaps nothing better illustrated Washington’s pioneering farm work than his development of the American mule, a hardy animal representing a cross between a male donkey (also called a jack) and a female horse. Mules were less fragile than horses but more docile than donkeys and cheap to maintain. Before Washington championed these creatures, they had hardly existed in the country. He started breeding them when he received a gray jack from the king of Spain called Royal Gift and a black jack called Knight of Malta from Lafayette. Royal Gift was big and lumbering but lacking in animal spark, whereas Knight of Malta was small but lusty. Washington cunningly bred the two animals and ended up with a jack known as Compound that merged the size of Royal Gift with the feisty nature of Knight of Malta. After some early difficulties, the resulting donkeys settled down and performed their duties, producing fifty-seven mules at Mount Vernon by century’s end and enabling Washington to realize his hope to “secure a race of extraordinary goodness that will stock the country.”²⁷ In addition to his better-known title of Father of His Country, Washington is also revered in certain circles as the Father of the American Mule.