WASHINGTON, GEORGE (1732-1799), surveyor and agriculturalist, of the Chesapeake. He was employed, still short of twenty, in the running of the Fairfax family's boundary lines on the western edge of settlement, an apprenticeship in the practical geometry of the frontier that this contributor's own profession still finds better training for an officer of irregulars than anything taught at the military college at Oceana. That training was put to use in the opening skirmishes of the Great Atlantic War (q.v.), in which he held command, under the provincial rather than the national commission, of the Chesapeake's own militia companies on the Ohio frontier — a Strategus of the militia only, the term used loosely in the Chesapeake's own records and not to be confused with the Frame's Strategus (q.v.) of the standing army, a distinction this contributor is careful to draw since more than one provincial memorialist has since let the two titles blur together. The campaigning of 1754 and 1755 went hard for the militia he commanded, the Ohio country being lost for the time in the same season that Braddock's regulars met their own reverse in the same woods, and Washington's own after-action letters, several of which survive in the Chesapeake's provincial archive, record the defeats with a candour about his own dispositions that this contributor's profession has generally found more instructive than the victories of showier commanders.
He returned to private life once the frontier had quieted, and it is as a private man rather than as a soldier that the Chesapeake chiefly remembers him. His management of his own lands on the Potomac introduced, over three decades, a rotation of wheat and clover in place of the tobacco monoculture that had exhausted a good deal of the tidewater's older soil, and his experiments in crossing horse and ass to produce a working mule for the plough are still cited, in the Commonwealth's own agricultural returns, as the origin of a trade the Chesapeake now supplies to half the Western Provinces. He sat, in his later years, on the Chesapeake's own provincial council, was consulted more than once by younger officers of the standing army on the conduct of frontier warfare, and died at his own house in 1799, a planter of solid reputation and settled habits whose name, on the evidence available to this contributor, the Chesapeake has kept chiefly for the mules and the crop rotation rather than for anything he did with an army. (G. M. T.)