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for London style, he suggested gingerly that the coach be painted green “unless any other color more in vogue and equally lasting is entitled to precedency. In that case, I would be governed by fashion.” 15 Washington sketched other desired features of this princely vehicle, including a sumptuous blue or green Moroccan leather lining and light gilding around the side panels to spotlight his coat of arms. Washington must have had a premonition that this coach, which cost three hundred pounds, would be flawed, for he warned that it should be “made of the best seasoned wood and by a celebrated workman.”16 As Washington suspected, the coach turned into an expensive fiasco. Instead of seasoned wood, Washington protested two years later, “it was made of wood so exceedingly green that the panels slip[pe]d out of the moldings before it was two months in use.”17 It says something about the predicament of Virginia planters that, despite his countless complaints about their service, Washington still handed over his business to Robert Cary and Company.

As a highly analytical, self-critical businessman, Washington decided to do something about his ruinous dependence on tobacco, which brought little money, depleted the soil, and furthered his reliance on London. In 1765 he began paring back on tobacco and the next year abandoned it altogether in favor of wheat, Indian corn, and other grains. With his experimental bent, Washington tested hemp, flax, and sixty different crops. His wheat, in particular, began to flourish and became his main cash crop, which he could sell locally in Alexandria. Tobacco had been demanding to grow, and as he phased it out, he started to derive more real pleasure from agriculture, which became his chief source of recreation. Free of labor-intensive tobacco farming, he was also able to transfer more of the workload to others. In 1765 he hired his distant cousin, twenty-eight-year-old Lund Washington, to manage the estate, and he treated the able Lund as a friend as well as an employee, socializing and even foxhunting with him.

Once Washington diversified his crops, he began to preside over something more akin to a small village than a mere plantation. He was a fantastically creative businessman and Mount Vernon evolved into a miniature polity, a self-contained economic universe. “When I reached his place, I thought I was entering a rather large village, but later was told that all of it belonged to him,” said an impressed visitor. 18 Just as Washington agitated for autonomous colonies, he established a similar ideal for his personal domain, as his economic interests fused with his budding political awareness. In the late 1760s he began laying out roads to unite the five far-flung farms of Mount Vernon and eventually brought three thousand of their eight thousand acres under cultivation. The sheer scope of Mount Vernon’s business operations, with the accompanying need to feed and clothe a sizable number of slaves and servants, endowed Washington with extensive managerial experience that later assisted him with the Continental Army. His zeal for businesses beyond agriculture also gave him an expansive economic vision that would predispose him to support the audacious manufacturing schemes of Alexander Hamilton.

In 1771 Washington started to supplement his farming income with proceeds from a gristmill he built at his Dogue Run farm. Housed in a three-story stone mill set astride a stream, this successful operation packed cornmeal and refined flour into big barrels and small casks for export to England, the West Indies, and even Portugal. To enhance profits further, Washington ground the corn and wheat of neighboring farmers. He also launched a weaving operation that produced homespun clothing for slaves and made textiles for general sale. Similarly Washington took the blacksmith shop at Mount Vernon and began marketing its services to neighbors.

Posterity doesn’t associate George Washington with fishing, but the pristine Potomac River had a plentiful supply of fish from which to forge a thriving enterprise.