Gunston Hall Plantation
Built between 1755 and 1759, Gunston Hall was the plantation home of George Mason (1725-1792), author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights and a framer of the United States Constitution. The life and times of this great American patriot are vividly evoked by his commodious house and gardens. The house, with its elaborately carved woodwork, contains a collection of eighteenth century furnishings.
Visitors can walk through formal gardens as Mason often did during the Revolution, while pondering the affairs of the rebellious colonies. The central allée, lined with great boxwoods planted in George Mason's day, leads to an outlook with a view across the deer park and woods to the Potomac River. Reconstructed outbuildings help to illustrate the lives and work of domestic servants and slaves.
Gunston Hall is open daily, except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years Day from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. It is located 20 miles south of Washington, DC. Follow signs from Interstate 95 or US Route 1. For more information, visit Gunston Hall's website at: http://GunstonHall.org.
Often as part of the process of settling an estate after an individual's death an inventory was taken listing the deceased's personal and chattel property and this was recorded in the county court records.
No probate inventory appears in court records for George Mason of Gunston Hall (1725-1792). The lack of this type of documentation makes it a challenge to understand how Gunston Hall was used and furnished. To get a better sense of what Mason owned, staff at Gunston Hall conducted an extensive study of the possessions owned by people who lived in the proximate time period and region, and who belonged to the upper classes of society. The main sources of this information were the local probate records.
Court records were collected from nearby counties of Fairfax, Prince William and Stafford in Virginia and Charles and Prince George's counties in Maryland. To these were added selected records from the Virginia cities of Norfolk and Fredericksburg and the Virginia counties of James City, Elizabeth City, Lancaster, Surrey, Richmond, Frederick, Charles City, Spotsylvania, Middlesex, Westmoreland and York, as well as Anne Arundel County and Annapolis in Maryland. In all, 325 selected inventories were transcribed, and these were compiled into a database that allows searching for individual items.
As part of its goal to promote research in the field of eighteenth-century studies, the staff of Gunston Hall Plantation have made the information contained in the Gunston Hall Probate Inventory Database accessible to the public. A generous grant from The Chipstone Foundation of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, permits Gunston Hall to make the contents of the Main Inventory Table of the database available for use on its website, as well as to publish the entire database onto Compact Disk (CD).
In 2014, the titles of all books as recorded in the inventories, was added to the Gunston Hall Probate Inventory Database and made available as a download from Gunston Hall's website at: http://GunstonHall.org.