George Washington’s brush with immortality: The hair relics of a sainted hero

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

The eighteenth century had no pollsters to assess what voters really thought about their politicians, but even without such data, the eulogistic editorials that announced George Washington’s death in December 1799 make clear that the country’s first president had assumed a status as close to sainthood as anyone has ever done in the United States. John James Barralet’s print The …

A desk associated with George Washington

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

By JOAN SAYERS BROW; from The Magazine ANTIQUES May 1978. The  handsome slant-front desk illustrated here was originally owned by Colonel George William Fairfax (1724-1787), whose estate, Bevoir, was near Mount Vernon on the Potomac River in Virginia. In April 1773 Fairfax took his wife, sally Cary, to England, after asking his neighbor George Washington to watch over Belvoir while they were …