WASHINGTON'S PROBLEM "No estate in United America," wrote Washington to Arthur Young in 1793, "is more pleasantly situated than this.

It lies in a high, dry, and healthy country, 300 miles by water from the sea, and, as you will see by the plan, on one of the finest rivers in the world.

Its margin is washed by more than ten miles of tide water; from the beds of which and the innumerable coves, inlets, and small marshes, with which it abounds, an inexhaustible fund of mud may be drawn as a manure, either to be used separately or in a compost....
"The soil of the tract of which I am speaking is a good loam, more inclined, however, to clay than sand.

From use, and I might add, abuse, it is become more and more consolidated, and of course heavier to work....
"This river, which encompasses the land the distance above mentioned, is well supplied with various kinds of fish at all seasons of the year; and, in the spring, with great profusion of shad, herring, bass, carp, perch, sturgeon, etc.

Several fisheries appertain to the estate; the whole shore, in short, is one entire fishery." The Mount Vernon estate, amounting in the end to over eight thousand acres, was, with the exception of a few outlying tracts, subdivided into five farms, namely, the Mansion House Farm, the Union Farm, the Dogue Run Farm, Muddy Hole Farm and the River Farm.
On the Mansion House Farm stood the owner's residence, quarters for the negroes and other servants engaged upon that particular estate, and other buildings.