JEK
Senior Insider
The Camp King Campers spent a delightful day touring the mansion, grounds and even fishing in the Potomac. Nice to see toruisim increasing in DC and especially Mount Vernon.
Came across this Washington anecdote in my emails today
Washington Anecdote
James Hosmer Penniman was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1931, after a lifetime as an educator, author, philanthropist, and champion of George Washington. Though largely forgotten today, he lived a remarkable life. He endowed libraries at three Ivy League institutions (Brown, Penn, and Yale). He wrote textbooks for education, historical treatises, and children’s books. There is a glacier in Alaska named for him. And, for the last two decades of his life, he wrote and published as widely as possible about George Washington, hoping, as he put it, "to set a higher standard for American patriotism." He wrote and published some of these works for the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, and several of his sketches of Washington reside in the MVLA Archives.
While the bar is very high for the most memorable and poetic praise of Washington, Penniman’s closing lines in his 1918 work, George Washington as a Man of Letters,deserve at the very least honorable mention:
"Virtue with him was no abstract quality. It lived and breathed in his every act, so that, though he has given us a record of his life with perhaps unequaled minuteness, there is no word which he or we would wish to have blotted out. Washington has demonstrated that man’s business here is to know for the sake of living rather than to live for the sake of knowing. His principal legacy is not the thousands of pages he has written but himself. England’s greatest contribution to the civilization of the world is the works of Shakespeare; America’s is the character of Washington."
Came across this Washington anecdote in my emails today
Washington Anecdote
James Hosmer Penniman was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1931, after a lifetime as an educator, author, philanthropist, and champion of George Washington. Though largely forgotten today, he lived a remarkable life. He endowed libraries at three Ivy League institutions (Brown, Penn, and Yale). He wrote textbooks for education, historical treatises, and children’s books. There is a glacier in Alaska named for him. And, for the last two decades of his life, he wrote and published as widely as possible about George Washington, hoping, as he put it, "to set a higher standard for American patriotism." He wrote and published some of these works for the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, and several of his sketches of Washington reside in the MVLA Archives.
While the bar is very high for the most memorable and poetic praise of Washington, Penniman’s closing lines in his 1918 work, George Washington as a Man of Letters,deserve at the very least honorable mention:
"Virtue with him was no abstract quality. It lived and breathed in his every act, so that, though he has given us a record of his life with perhaps unequaled minuteness, there is no word which he or we would wish to have blotted out. Washington has demonstrated that man’s business here is to know for the sake of living rather than to live for the sake of knowing. His principal legacy is not the thousands of pages he has written but himself. England’s greatest contribution to the civilization of the world is the works of Shakespeare; America’s is the character of Washington."