One oddity about George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate is that it is owned not by the public but by a private charitable group called the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, formed in the 1850s to buy the decaying property from the Washington great-nephew who owned it and couldn’t maintain it. The Association raised funds to buy and restore the property. In the last 15 years the Association mounted a major fundraising campaign to build a visitors’ center (the front of which appears in my previous post) and make other improvements to the property. During part of that time the head of the Association, titled as "Regent," was Mabel Livingstone Bishop, of Portland. The visitors’ center includes a 2003 photograph of Mrs. Bishop as part of a committee receiving a presidential award on behalf of the association.
Mrs. Bishop, who died in March of last year, didn’t receive much notice in Portland for her service to Mount Vernon (though a careful eye will notice some other Portland names on the contributors’ list incised into the stones of the visitors center), but the rest of the country, and visitors from other nations, can see the results at Mount Vernon, where the Association has preserved a part of our nation’s history that wasn’t important enough, at the time, for the government to keep intact.