Weems-Botts Museum
3944 Cameron Street, Dumfries, VA, USA
Virginia, USA
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MUSEUM
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HOME
EST. 1798
EST. 1798
1795
Weems, Mason Locke
HISTORIC PEOPLE WHO WERE HERE
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HISTORIC PRESERVATION at Weems-Botts Museum.
The surviving eighteenth-century house operates as a local museum in Dumfries. Restored rooms, furnishings, collections, architectural fabric, gardens, and grounds interpret the town and occupants including bookseller Mason Locke Weems and attorney Benjamin Botts, with access generally provided through tours and programs.
About Weems-Botts Museum
The house was purchased by Parson Weems, a native Marylander, in 1798. Weems was a clergyman who became an author and purveyor of books, which he would sell from the back of his jersey wagon. While traveling through Dumfries during one of his book-selling tours, Weems met Fanny Ewell, the daughter of Colonel Jesse Ewell, a wealthy tobacco planter with a warehouse business in Dumfries. They married in 1795.
HISTORY HAPPENED HERE at Weems-Botts Museum
During his ownership of the house, Weems wrote an 80-page booklet that would influence the thoughts of Americans to this day entitled A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits of General George Washington. Weems published the first biography on George Washington and was the creator of the famous cherry tree story ("I cannot tell a lie, I did it with my little hatchet"). Weems also created the fable that Washington threw a silver dollar more than 300 feet across the Rappahannock River. He also wrote biographies on Benjamin Franklin, Francis Marion, and William Penn. Sometime after the death of his father-in-law in 1805, Weems moved his family into the Ewell family estate, Bel Air.
HISTORIC PLACES NEARBY
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