3-000-247 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Mount Vernon, the residence of Washington, visited by the Prince of Wales on the 5th of October, 1860. The house ' ...is, according to the Times' correspondent, in shocking plight, and fast going to ruin...In the centre of the lawn is a long, straggling, oldfashioned, wooden country-house, three stories high, with very tall, square wooden pillars, supporting a broad balcony, which shades the whole front...Above the balcony, with its wooden lattice balustrade, ruined and broken like torn lace, is a sloping irregular tiled roof, green with the moss and damp of many years. Four pointed little gable windows peep timidly from under the eaves...in the centre of the ridge rises a little glass lantern, like a belfry, with a huge rusty weather-cock, and an iron lightning-conductor of great thickness...The old, faded green blinds are closed over the sitting-room, as if the house was mourning...The gaunt white columns are riven with unseemly gaps and crumbling to decay...The stacks of chimneys stand in sharp outline against a cold October sky, dumb and smokeless, breathing no signs of hospitality or token of life within those mute, white walls...even the vane above the lantern is rusted into quiet, never broken here save by the falling leaves or wind'. From "Illustrated London News", 1860.