How Martha Washington Lived

Have you ever fallen madly in love with a pair of shoes? Luxury footwear, combining the art form of a sculpture with the beauty of a piece of sparkling jewelry, has obsessed women for centuries. Certainly this was true in the case with Martha Washington. Tucked away in the recesses of Mount Vernon’s archival vaults is a pair of avant-garde deep purple silk high heels studded with silver sequins that Martha wore on the day of her wedding to George Washington. Emily Shapiro, curator at Mount Vernon, describes the shoes as a little sassy and definitely “over the top” for the time, “They were the Manolo Blahniks of her time.”


At the time of her marriage to George Washington in 1759, Martha was 27 and George was twenty six. Martha was one of the wealthiest women in Virginia, having inherited five plantations when her first husband died. She was a bit of a clothes horse. Then, as now, if you had wealth you flaunted it, making sure you had the best clothes ordered from London in the deepest, richest colors. Such colors set the upper classes apart from poorer classes who wore drab homespun clothes in browns, beiges and tans.

We don’t generally think of Martha Washington as a vivacious fashionista. She has come down to us after two hundred plus years as a frumpy, dumpy, plump, double-chinned Old Mother Hubbard type. There may be more design than accident in this portrayal of Martha Washington and the women of the Revolutionary War generation (‘The Founding Mothers”). The new Republic needed to make a clean break with the aristocratic ways of Europe and completely embrace simple republican virtues. Both George and Martha Washington were transformed by generations of historians into marble figures of rectitude whose dignity and decorum fostered a sense of legitimacy for the new country.

But neither Martha Washington nor the women of the South’s leading families were marble statues, they had the same strengths and weaknesses, passions and problems, joys and sorrows, as the women of any age.

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The Largest Collection of Civil War Graffiti

As fighting surged across Northern Virginia during the four years of the American Civil War, many curious reminders were left behind for future generations to ponder. Near the City of Fairfax, for example, the historic mansion “Blenheim” boasts the largest collection of Civil War graffiti in the nation. Blenheim was a new and luxurious home at the beginning of the war, having just been completed in 1859. During the course of the war the Union army occupied the property on three separate occasions, with at least twenty two different regiments of the Union Army using the house at one point or another. For almost a year Blenheim was used as a convalescent hospital. The Union soldiers passing through Blenheim left a "diary on walls" providing insight into typical soldier life during the Civil War. One soldier from 4th New York Cavalry wrote along the walls of a staircase,

“First month’s hard bread, hard on stomach.”

“Second month, pay day. Patriotic-hic Ale. How we suffer for lager.”

“Fourth month: no money, no whiskey, no friends, no rations, no peas, no beans, no pants, no patriotism.”

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Duty, Honor, Service and Sacrifice

America Salutes a Very Great Lady (The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee)


Words to Inspire Now and Forever



God Save the Queen!

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The Pirate Jean Lafitte's Treasure

Most of the treasures hidden by the pirate Jean Lafitte are in Louisiana, although Florida and Texas claim their share as well.


- Lafitte buried treasure on Grand Isle at the southwest entrance of Barrataria Bay. The area around Lafitte village, twenty one miles south of Marrero, La Fourche Parish, founded by pirates and used by them for over one hundred years is also heavily endowed with treasure.

- Another legend asserts that Lafitte buried treasure near Starks, Calcasieu Parish, and also near Barbe House on Shell Beach Drive near Lake Charles, Calcasieu Parish.

- There are many tales of Lafitte burying different treasures up the Mermenteau and Calcasieu Rivers around Contraband Bayou. Another legend tells of gold and silver buried at White Lake north of Pecan Island, Vermilion Parish.

- Jefferson Island was one of Jean Lafitte's treasure storehouses. In 1923, Daynite, the straw boss for a work crew on a local estate, unearthed three boxes of gold coins dating from the 18th-19th centuries under what have subsequently been named the "Lafitte Oaks".

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A Colonial Murder Mystery

In February 1732, thirty six year old Ambrose Madison, the grandfather of future U.S. President James Madison, brought his wife, Frances and his three children, to an estate called Mount Pleasant (now known as Montpelier). Six months later, Ambrose Madison was dead. In the early summer, Ambrose fell ill. Poisoning was suspected. Like most poisoning victims during this period, the poison did not kill him outright, but caused enough internal damage that he lingered near death for weeks, finally dying in late August. Madison left what was regarded at the time as a “considerable estate” including “ten negro men, five negro women, and fourteen children”, along with cattle, hogs, sheep, horses, twelve books and four silver tea spoons.


Did Ambrose Madison die of accidental poisoning or was he murdered? His death marked a milestone in the annals of Virginia crime for it occasioned the first known conviction of slaves for the use of poison against their master.

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The Female Stranger (Archibald Mercer Colonial Detective Series)

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The Tomb of the Unknown Confederate Soldier

The tomb of the Unknown Confederate Soldier is located at the Beauvoir Confederate Cemetery located on the grounds of Beauvoir House in Biloxi, Mississippi. Beauvoir was the last home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Davis wrote The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government at Beauvoir.



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King Kong and the true story of Skull Island

The 1933 film King Kong (remade in 1976 and 2005) tells the story of a giant pre-historic creature which rules over a lost island (Skull Island) where it defeats all comers. Ultimately the creature is captured by a group of adventurers and brought back to New York, where it runs amok and is ultimately destroyed by man’s superior technology.


The film had its official world premiere on March 23, 1933 at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. In 1991, the film was deemed "culturally, historically and aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Was there ever such an island? Was there ever such a monster? In fact, the movie was inspired by a real life monster hunt on an Indonesian island conducted by W. Douglas Burden in 1926.

For years strange tales of a monster living on a remote Indonesian island circulated throughout the East Indies. Official interest was sparked in the early 1910s by stories from Dutch sailors. The creature was allegedly a "dragon" which inhabited a small island in the Lesser Sunda Islands. The fire breathing creature was reported to be seven meters long.

Lieutenant Steyn van Hensbroek, an official of the Dutch Colonial Administration accompanied by a detachment of soldiers landed on the island. After a few days, Hensbroek managed to kill a strange animal. But there were more of the beasts, which were photographed by Peter A. Ouwens, the Director of the Zoological Museum of Java who accompanied the expedition. The expedition provided the first reliable evidence of the existence of what we now call the Komodo dragon.




Secrets of Mysterious Islands


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