Why Visiting Mount Vernon Still Matters — Especially at Thanksgiving
A holiday visit to the Mount Vernon Inn reminded me that facing our difficult history honors the people who lived it — including here in Alexandria.
ALEXANDRIA, VA – Every so often, and it happened again yesterday in a text, someone tells me they won’t visit Mount Vernon because “it was a slave plantation.” I understand that instinct. Living in a city as old as Alexandria, where every street corner seems to hold both beauty and pain, we are constantly wrestling with the truth of our past.
Just a couple of nights ago, I had Thanksgiving dinner with friends at the Mount Vernon Inn, where the candlelight, the warmth, and the centuries-old traditions felt meaningful. It brought to mind the little-known fact that George Washington himself helped shape early national observances of Thanksgiving. His 1789 proclamation urged the young nation to pause, give thanks, and reflect — even as enslaved men, women, and children lived and labored on the estate that made such celebrations possible. That contradiction is not something to turn away from. It’s something to face.
Because the truth is, Mount Vernon was a slave plantation. More than 300 human beings were enslaved there. Their names, their stories, their families, their suffering — all of it matters.
But avoiding Mount Vernon doesn’t erase that history. It erases the opportunity to learn it.
And if any community understands the need to face its past honestly, it is Alexandria.
Only a few miles from Mount Vernon, our own Market Square — now home to more than 70 colorful, joyful vendors every Saturday — once served as a slave market. Ships came in just two blocks away at what is now our beautiful, green Waterfront Park. Enslaved people were sold on or near this very ground, steps from where visitors now buy pastries, coffee, flowers, and fresh produce. Thousands enjoy the Old Town Farmers’ Market every year, often unaware of the painful history beneath their feet.
Yet the square’s modern purpose — community, connection, locally grown food, small-business joy — stands in powerful contrast to what happened there centuries ago. It reminds us that places can hold both trauma and transformation. They can be reclaimed, reinterpreted, and retold truthfully.
Mount Vernon is doing the same work.
Over the past two decades, the estate has invested deeply in uncovering and presenting the lives of the enslaved people who lived there. The Slave Memorial and Cemetery, reconstructed quarters, archaeological discoveries, documented family histories, and ongoing research all help restore dignity to individuals whose lives were once overshadowed by the mansion’s grandeur.
Choosing not to visit means missing their stories.
Here in Alexandria, we know how essential those stories are. We see it at the newly restored Freedom House Museum — once the headquarters of the largest domestic slave-trading operation in the United States — where the city has committed to telling the truth thoroughly and compassionately. We see it at Fort Ward, in the markers across Old Town, and in the Contrabands & Freedmen Cemetery, where those who escaped bondage found their first moments of freedom.
We do not look away.
And we shouldn’t look away from Mount Vernon either. Visiting is not a celebration of the plantation. It is an act of witnessing. Of acknowledging complexity. Of honoring lives too often reduced to footnotes. Of recognizing that George Washington’s brilliance and his failures coexisted — and that our understanding of him, and of our country, must hold both truths at once.
Thanksgiving itself sits at that intersection — ideals and contradictions side by side.
So if you’ve hesitated to go to Mount Vernon because of its history with slavery, I understand. But I hope you’ll reconsider. Not to enjoy the mansion tour or the gardens — though they are beautiful — but to honor the people whose names now stand at the Slave Memorial. To learn their stories. To look their history in the eye, the way we do here in Alexandria every day.
History is rarely comfortable. But avoiding the places where painful truths live does not make us better. Facing them does.
If you go, go not as a tourist, but as a witness. And you may come away with a deeper understanding of our shared American story — one that still shapes us, challenges us, and calls us to do better.
George Washington has done more for this country than anyone, however, I will never go back to Mount Vernon due to their agenda of diminishing Washington’s accomplishments in favor of perpetuating their slavery agenda. Shameful!