George Washington born in Virginia
On this day · 22 February 1732
The future commander and first president was born on a tobacco plantation in colonial Virginia—on a date that itself shifted with the calendar.
On February 22, 1732, George Washington was born at Popes Creek, a tobacco plantation in Westmoreland County, Virginia, on the colony’s Northern Neck. He was the first child of Augustine Washington and his second wife, Mary Ball Washington.
There is a wrinkle in that date. Britain and its colonies still used the old Julian calendar at his birth, which recorded the day as February 11. When the empire adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752, the date shifted forward to the February 22 we mark today.
A planter and surveyor by training, he would become the indispensable figure of a new republic.
Washington went on to command the Continental Army through the Revolutionary War, preside over the Constitutional Convention, and serve as the first president of the United States from 1789 to 1797. He died at Mount Vernon in 1799, having declined the trappings of a king and set precedents that shaped the office ever after.
Sources & references
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