Farm Report on Fruit Harvesting

Work at Mount Vernon was recorded by the Farm Manager each day. Then it was reported weekly to George Washington. These records are from July 1798. They record the moment the cherries in Washington’s fruit nursery (garden) were ripe to pick and ready for an enslaved person to remove the pits. The cherries would be served fresh, canned for the winter, or even used to flavor ice cream. Some information was added to these reports by historians in order to help organize data. The text in quotation marks is from the original 18th-century source.