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George Washington never went to college. His father Augustine died when George was 11, and the money for English boarding school died with him. His two older half-brothers had already been polished at Appleby Grammar School across the Atlantic. George got Virginia, a demanding mother named Mary, and whatever books he could find at home.
At 14 he tried to escape it all by joining the British Royal Navy. His mother shut it down. So he did the next best thing: he taught himself surveying from his late father's instruments, and at 16 he rode west into the Shenandoah wilderness on a commission from Lord Fairfax, who owned over five million acres of Virginia and needed them mapped.
His teenage journal survives. It is brutal, funny, and absolutely not the voice of a marble statue. On his first night at a frontier inn, he stripped down and climbed into what passed for a bed, only to find "nothing but a Little Straw Matted together without Sheets or any thing else but only one Thread Bear blanket with double its Weight of Vermin such as Lice Fleas etc." After that he preferred sleeping outside by the fire, even when it rained, even when his clothes froze stiff on him by morning.
One journal entry, almost in passing: thirty Native warriors walked into camp carrying a fresh scalp from battle. The teenage surveying party shared their liquor with them and watched them perform a war dance by firelight. George wrote it down the way a modern teenager logs a weird night out.
He swam horses across swollen rivers. He ate roasted meat off forked sticks because "our Spits was Forked Sticks our Plates was a Large Chip as for Dishes we had none." He met German settlers and noted in frustration that they "would never speak English but when spoken to they speak all Dutch." He measured timber in country where almost no English speaker had ever walked.
By 17 he was the commissioned surveyor of Culpeper County, the youngest official surveyor in the colony of Virginia. By 18 he had parlayed the earnings into nearly 1,500 acres of Shenandoah Valley land in his own name, bought outright, while boys his age back east were still reciting Latin in heated parlors.
The man who would one day command the Continental Army, defeat the largest empire on earth, and then voluntarily refuse a crown, did not learn leadership in a lecture hall. He learned it at 16, in a tent, in the dark, hundreds of miles from anyone who could save him.
You can read more in the book: https://www.peterstarkauthor.com/young-washington
At 14 he tried to escape it all by joining the British Royal Navy. His mother shut it down. So he did the next best thing: he taught himself surveying from his late father's instruments, and at 16 he rode west into the Shenandoah wilderness on a commission from Lord Fairfax, who owned over five million acres of Virginia and needed them mapped.
His teenage journal survives. It is brutal, funny, and absolutely not the voice of a marble statue. On his first night at a frontier inn, he stripped down and climbed into what passed for a bed, only to find "nothing but a Little Straw Matted together without Sheets or any thing else but only one Thread Bear blanket with double its Weight of Vermin such as Lice Fleas etc." After that he preferred sleeping outside by the fire, even when it rained, even when his clothes froze stiff on him by morning.
One journal entry, almost in passing: thirty Native warriors walked into camp carrying a fresh scalp from battle. The teenage surveying party shared their liquor with them and watched them perform a war dance by firelight. George wrote it down the way a modern teenager logs a weird night out.
He swam horses across swollen rivers. He ate roasted meat off forked sticks because "our Spits was Forked Sticks our Plates was a Large Chip as for Dishes we had none." He met German settlers and noted in frustration that they "would never speak English but when spoken to they speak all Dutch." He measured timber in country where almost no English speaker had ever walked.
By 17 he was the commissioned surveyor of Culpeper County, the youngest official surveyor in the colony of Virginia. By 18 he had parlayed the earnings into nearly 1,500 acres of Shenandoah Valley land in his own name, bought outright, while boys his age back east were still reciting Latin in heated parlors.
The man who would one day command the Continental Army, defeat the largest empire on earth, and then voluntarily refuse a crown, did not learn leadership in a lecture hall. He learned it at 16, in a tent, in the dark, hundreds of miles from anyone who could save him.
You can read more in the book: https://www.peterstarkauthor.com/young-washington
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