It has been a favorite fashion with historians to picture the Wakefield house as an humble four-roomed dwelling. Americans love to think that their great men were cradled in poverty, but excavations have been recently made which develop the foundations of a large residence. One is inclined to wonder when and by whom the pictures were made of the birthplace of Washington, which was destroyed by fire before there was a newspaper to print a description or picture in Virginia. That the sketch of any visitor or member of the family should have been preserved nearly two hundred years is impossible. Why should it have been made at all? Nobody living in the unpretending house had then interested the world. Every such picture is from the imagination, pure and simple, of Mr. Prudhomme, who made the first for a New York publishing house. He was probably as accurate as he could be, but the house faced the road, not the river, and the latter flowed at the bottom of a hill in the rear of the mansion.
In the town of Quincy, in Massachusetts, the old home of John and Abigail Adams still stands, built in 1716, according to "a truthful brick found in the quaint old chimney." Pious hands have preserved this house, restored it, filled it with just such furniture and draperies and garments as were preserved by those who lived in the year 1750. There the house stands--an object lesson to all who care for truth about the old colonial farm-houses. Beauty, genius, and patriotism dwelt in this house. From it the master went forth to the courts of France and England and to become the President of the United States; and on the little table in the front room Abigail, the accomplished lady of beauty and talent, wrote, "This little Cottage has more comfort and satisfaction for you than the courts of Royalty."
The colonial houses of Virginia were larger, but yet were modest dwellings. They became more ambitious in 1730, but Augustine Washington's home had made a history of happiness and sorrow, birth and death, before our Mary entered it.
The universal plan of the Virginia house of 1740 included four rooms, divided by a central "passage" (never called a "hall") running from front to rear and used as the summer sitting room of the family. From this a short staircase ascended to dormer-windowed rooms above. As the family increased in numbers one-story rooms and "sheds" were tacked on wherever they were needed, without regard to architectural effect, growing around a good chimney and even enclosing a tree valued for its shade. The old house rambled about, as the land lay, so rooms were often ascended by one or more steps. I fancy this was the case with the Wakefield house--Mary Washington, her fast-coming babies, and her very large family connection demanding more room than did Jane with her two little boys.