Letter from George Mason with George Washington's notes shown at Club

On June 10, guests at a National Press Club Headliners Coffee and Conversation glimpsed history through a window when they saw a rare letter marked with the penmanship of no less than two Founding Fathers—George Mason and George Washington.

“This is truly a rare moment in historical discovery—the unveiling of a rare newly found letter from George Mason with a reply from none other than George Washington,” Jen Judson, former NPC President and NPC Headliners Team Leader, told the guests at the event.

Mason wrote the letter to Washington, his Virginia neighbor, on April 6, 1768—and Washington scribbled a note on it over 20 years later in 1789, no doubt with a world of altered memories by then. The original letter had concerned a dispute over land boundaries and ownership which proved the source of a private squabble between the two in addition to their well-documented differences over the Constitution. 

The letter also documented some personal oddities and matters concerning everyday life that captivated the interest of Nick Gentry, a graduate student at the University of Maryland and Digital Archives Fellow at Gunston Hall, who came across it while transcribing and digitizing Mason’s papers. 

Gentry and Kate Steir, Gunston Hall’s Senior Curator and Head of Collections, discussed the significance of the rare letter’s discovery. 

“When I came across the letter, I didn’t realize initially that it was something unusual. I figured that someone before me had taken a look at it and published it,” Gentry recalled. “As I looked more into it, I found that wasn’t the case and it became really exciting.” 

The letter came into the Gunston Hall collection in the 1990s, Steir said. She took painstaking measures to verify its provenance and authenticity. It slipped under the radar over the years and has been both largely forgotten and digitally inaccessible. 

“One of the things that I do think is really interesting about the Founders is there are these incredible exchanges of ideas and there are these ways in which so many of them presented different perspectives and felt very strongly about their different perspectives,” Steir said. 

The letter, which was available to Headliners guests for viewing at the event, contained insights into the two Georges’ gentlemanly kerfuffle about their land boundary as well as some discussions of a potential schoolteacher for Washington’s stepchildren. 

Despite their disagreements, Mason was good enough to warn Washington that a certain teacher had sloppy personal habits that might rub off on his stepson—and that the young John Parke Custis might do well to avoid the teacher’s company outside a classroom setting.

These and other details make letters like this worth studying, the two scholars said, as the personal exchanges may have had some influence on the two leaders’ interactions in political life. 

Gentry was thrilled to find new material created by Washington. “There are a million biographies about him, practically. But there’s still always more to discover,” he said. 

The letter will not be on permanent display at Gunston Hall but will be digitized and transcribed, as well as made available from the University of Virginia’s digital editions of the Washington Papers, which offer carefully researched annotations.