Sarah Johnson's Mount Vernon: The Forgotten History of an American Shrine | 
 enlarge | Author: Scott E. Casper
Publisher: Hill and Wang
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
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Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 179729
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.4
ISBN: 0809084147
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.41092
EAN: 9780809084142
ASIN: 0809084147
Publication Date: January 22, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New. 100% money back guarantee. All books shipped from Strand Bookstore, New York City, USA.
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Product Description
New Stories from an Old American Shrine
The home of our first president has come to symbolize the ideals of our nation: freedom for all, national solidarity, and universal democracy. Mount Vernon is a place where the memories of George Washington and the era of America’s birth are carefully preserved and re-created for the nearly one million tourists who visit it every year. But behind the familiar stories lies a history that visitors never hear. Sarah Johnson’s Mount Vernon recounts the experience of the hundreds of African Americans who are forgotten in Mount Vernon’s narrative. Historian and archival sleuth Scott E. Casper recovers the remarkable history of former slave Sarah Johnson, who spent more than fifty years at Mount Vernon, before and after emancipation. Through her life and the lives of her family and friends, Casper provides an intimate picture of Mount Vernon’s operation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, years that are rarely part of its story. Working for the Washington heirs and then the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, these African Americans played an essential part in creating the legacy of Mount Vernon as an American shrine. Their lives and contributions have long been lost to history and erased from memory. Casper restores them both, and in so doing adds a new layer of significance to America’s most popular historical estate.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Sarah Johnson's Mount Vernon: Forgotten History of an American Shrine July 1, 2008
We found this book to very interesting and very detailed. Scott Casper's research was superb!
It wasn't until I finished this book that I realized how good it was May 18, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
This is a history of Mount Vernon following the death of George Washington. Because it is a story of the everyday life on and operation of the estate, it is a story of 200 years of African American history. There is a parallel history here too, about the pioneer days of the historic preservation movement.
Early vistors to Mount Vernon believed what they wanted to believe. Knowing Washington's will had freed his slaves (upon the death of Martha, who released them early) one could ignore reality and presume that those who labored in the field and encountered visitors were free. For 60 years it bubbles into public consciousness only every now and then that they are not.
In the first part of the book, Sarah is in the background as we learn about Washington's heirs, Martha's dower slaves, crops, the buying, selling and renting of people, and the precursors of the tourist trade yet to come. Sarah becomes the central vehicle for the story in the later half of the book. Sarah is a perfect vehicle for this history because her life illustrates her times.
Augustine Washington assumed control of this estate at age 21. From his mother, he received Sarah's mother Hannah, and noted her additions to his assets when she bore children. In 1844 he hired Hannah out to a cousin for $24 for the year. She returned from this forced labor pregnant and delivered a mulatto child naming her Sarah with her grandfather's last name, Parker. Later, when Mount Vernon was sold to a preservation society, which in part preserved it from the raveges of the Civil War, Sarah was also sold. In freedom she returned to her home, Mount Vernon, and became an employee of the new society.
The saga of Sarah's family, a metaphor for the contemporaneous sagas of thousands of African Americans, is told against the growth of Mount Vernon as a national shrine and tourist destination. While Mount Vernon is buffered, it cannot help but be effected by the successionist fervor, the civil war, the war's unsettling aftermath, Jim Crow, and World Wars I and II. Scott Casper takes the reader through all this, up to the present nascent awareness of the role of African Americans in history. On p. 219 there is a eloquent piece on Sarah who we know she was and who she may have been.
This is a short book, but its ideas will stay with you a long time.
 Sarah Johnson's Mount Vernon March 29, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book is hard to get into. There's a little too much background. Getting right into Sarah Johnson's story would have been much more interesting.
Sarah Johnson Mount Vernon Review March 26, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Its a very interesting book-we had no problems in receiving the book and it arrived in great condition.
A window into another world February 12, 2008
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
Casper artfully unravels the layers of mythology and reality at Mount Vernon. Sarah Johnson's Mount Vernon is accessible to lay readers and driven by the compelling stories of the black and white residents of a national shrine.
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