OP-ED: “His Excellency” in Western Pennsylvania
A year, almost to the day, after the curtain rang down on the American Revolution, the army’s former commanding general set out from his Virginia estate on a tour of the lands he owned in “the howling wilderness” of Western Pennsylvania.
The date was Sept. 1, 1784. The general’s name was George Washington. (The treaty ending the war with Great Britain was signed at Paris in September 1783.)
Washington arrived at what was known as Washington’s Bottom – present-day Perryopolis – on Sept. 8, 1784. This Tuesday marks that day, 242 years ago.
Then, as now, Washington was a world-renowned figure. His former chief opponent, King George III of Great Britain, privately hailed him as the greatest man of the age, after Washington relinquished power and returned to civilian life at the conclusion of hostilities.
It was unprecedented. The appetite for power is usually contagious. Not so with Washington, as he would prove again, voluntarily quitting the presidency after two terms in office in 1796.
Through the vicissitudes of the war, Washington had retained a keen interest in the western lands managed for him by Gilbert Simpson. These lands consisted of some 1,660 acres in and around Perryopolis plus another 2,800 acres along Miller’s Run in today’s Mt. Pleasant Township, Washington County, about eight miles from Canonsburg.
At the latter place, Washington was plagued by squatters, as he saw it. In the former, by poor management of his lands by Simpson and others.
Both Washington and Simpson once had high hopes for his Fayette County properties. Simpson’s early letters pointed to “probeble signs of iron owr” and other natural resources and features. And though there were bound to be difficulties, Simpson looked to Washington to “Set Things on a Right Foot.” In a February 1775 letter, he urged Washington to pay a visit. He was not optimistic.
“I Expect your businis is Ergently upon others affairs Concernign the good of Amerecay,” Simpson wrote in his unconventional hand.
Washington was demanding. Expecting to be obeyed, he was forever unhappy with Simpson’s handling of his affairs. “I never hear of the Mill under the direction of Simpson without a degree of warmth and vexation at his extreme stupidity,” Washington wrote home from an army encampment in 1775.
After reading a letter of rebuke from Washington, Simpson replied, “I find that you were verey Much disturbed at the Cost of your Mill…. Could you possibly think Such a Mill was to Cost only Three or Four hundred pounds?”
Millwright Dennis Stiphens also came under Washington’s critical eye for tipping the bottle a little too frequently. Stiphens’ drinking accounted for the incomplete state of the mill and its failure to bring in much in the way of revenue, Washington felt.
The millwright denied everything. “I am Extremely Sorry that your pen Should be thus Enslaved or your Mind perplexed by malicious desighning persons,” he wrote his employer. Once the mill was working, “those Bablers will … be Silenced.”
This 1784 trip was meant to rid himself of such annoying characters, in part by auctioning off the Perryopolis property. Auction day was a fiasco. A good size crowd showed up, but most people came to gawk at Washington, the hero of the Revolution. Not one bid was offered for the mill. The farm land was rented to Simpson for a 10-year term.
“I told him explicitly that he must take it” on those terms, “or not at all; as I did not intend to go thro’ the same trouble every year by making an annual bargain for it.”
Washington did manage one thing. He hired Thomas Freeman of Brownsville “to superintend my business over the Mountains,” by which he meant his ownership of Great Meadows where he had fought as a tenderfoot colonel in 1754.
Fort Necessity, and the battle there, were forever on his mind.
The story of Washington and his Western Pennsylvania lands in the important juncture of September 1784 continues next week with the Washington County squatters.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.