People think of George Washington as a solemn general. Actually, he was a whiskey baron. By 1799, his Mount Vernon operation ran one of the largest distilleries in the young United States, producing nearly 11,000 gallons of rye, corn, and barley spirits in a single year. His Scottish farm manager, James Anderson, convinced him to build it. Washington hesitated at first. But the profit margins quickly won him over, prompting him to construct a massive stone building housing five copper stills that bubbled constantly with pungent rye mash. Enslaved laborers did the grueling work. They hauled heavy bags of grain, stoked the roaring fires, and cleaned the muck from the boiling tubs.
Right next door stood his gristmill, which was anything but a sleepy country operation. Washington rebuilt the structure in 1771. Later, he installed a cutting-edge automated system designed by inventor Oliver Evans. It used bucket elevators and wooden Archimedean screws. This gear moved grain through the grinding and drying process without any manual lifting. Pure efficiency. The merchant mill ground wheat into superfine flour, which Washington packed into branded barrels and shipped to European and Caribbean markets. He was exporting global commodities.
Everything fell apart after Washington died in late 1799. The distillery burned to the ground in 1814. The mill rotted. For over a century, the site remained nothing but a memory buried under Virginia soil. Archaeologists eventually excavated the dirt in the late twentieth century. They found original stone foundations, vessel fragments, and even the traces of the old race paths. They rebuilt both structures. Now, water turns the massive wheel again, and copper stills drip high-proof spirit. The guy was an aggressive, forward-looking businessman who built a massive agro-industrial complex.
What Makes Washington's, George, Distillery and Gristmill Special:
