Kenmore Plantation

The ceilings take your breath. Fielding Lewis finished the house in 1776 for his wife Betty Washington Lewis — George Washington's sister. The first-floor rooms are known for intricate plasterwork — floral medallions and curling vines shaped in plaster. Nineteenth-century owners restored the ceilings.

Lewis was a planter and merchant who ran a 1,300-acre plantation growing tobacco, wheat, and corn. More than eighty enslaved people worked the land and lived on the property, including domestic slaves inside the house. The rear of the building faced the Rappahannock River for direct water access.

Betty's mother, Mary Ball Washington, was buried on the grounds she had liked to visit. A memorial went up at her grave in 1894. The Lewis descendants sold the property in 1797, a year after Betty died. The Gordon family bought it in 1819 and named it Kenmore after their ancestral home in Scotland.

After the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864, Union forces turned the house and outbuildings into a makeshift hospital. They used it again near war's end as troops moved toward Richmond. The Kenmore Foundation acquired the property in 1922, reconstructed two flanking dependencies, and hired landscape architect Charles F. Gillette to restore the grounds in 1924. The National Register listed it in 1969. It became a National Historic Landmark in 1970.

What remains is the house and the reconstructed dependencies on three acres at 1201 Washington Avenue. The George Washington Foundation runs daily guided tours. You go because the plasterwork is worth seeing, and because eighty people lived here in bondage.