George Washington was a dancer and 3 other things you didn’t know about our first president

CNN, GEORGE WASHINGTON’S MOUNT VERNON

By Amanda Sansone and Michael Yoshida

George Washington is on the $1 bill; he’s got a monument named after him in our nation’s capital; a state in the Pacific Northwest that bears his moniker, and he chopped down that cherry tree and told his father he “could not tell a lie.”

Well, that “fact” about the cherry tree is actually a lie.

One of Washington’s first biographers invented the story after Washington’s death, according to the website of George Washington’s home in Virginia, Mount Vernon.

But here are four facts about Washington’s hidden talents that will get that cherry tree lie out of your heads.

1. George Washington could dance.

Imagine a 6’3” slender yet formidable man, “floating across the dance floor, filling the room with his authority and power.”

“He learned fencing, of course, to become a gentleman and a soldier, but his fencing instructor was also his dancing master, and so George Washington became the greatest dancer of the age,” said Douglas Bradburn, president and CEO of George Washington’s Mount Vernon.

2. Washington loved the theater.

Washington attended whatever play he could when he was in town.

“He even had the soldiers at Valley Forge perform a play called ‘Cato’,” Bradburn said.

The play is about a Roman senator opposing tyranny – a fitting play to inspire the troops fighting against the British Army.

3. He used science with agriculture – including breeding dogs and mules.

Washington was using science to experiment with different types of plows, as well as crop rotation, soil boosters before most Americans were doing it.

“He’s one of the first scientific farmers in America,” said Jason Boroughs, principal archaeologist at George Washington’s Mount Vernon. “And he wanted Mount Vernon to be a model for a new American agriculture.”

Washington also bred the American mule and American foxhound.

4. Washington distilled whiskey.

After his term as president, Washington built one of the largest American whisky distilleries of the 1700s.

Yes, the same president who marched in Pennsylvania to put down the Whiskey Rebellion during his presidency had a distillery at Mount Vernon.

The distillery burned down six years after Washington’s death. However, it was rebuilt from 2005 to 2007, so visitors can pick up a bottle when visiting Mount Vernon.

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