This History Buff Found a Scrap of George Washington’s Tent at Goodwill

Two years ago, collector Richard “Dana” Moore bid on a small piece of fabric during an online auction organized by Goodwill, the nonprofit better known for its brick-and-mortar thrift shops.

The fragment supposedly came from a field tent General George Washington had used during the Revolutionary War. Moore, 70, was skeptical of this claim, which wasn’t backed by robust evidence, but he decided to take a chance. He spent around $1,700 for the fraying scrap with scalloped red trim.

Moore was right to trust his gut: The nearly six-inch-long piece was once part of Washington’s dining tent—a structure he used to host meetings and meals throughout the conflict. 

“Can you imagine the information and the things that were said within that tent?” says Moore to CNN’s Kaila Nichols.

The dining tent fragment is now on view at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia as part of the “Witness to Revolution: The Unlikely Travels of Washington’s Tent” exhibition. 

It’s displayed alongside the show’s main attraction: Washington’s headquarters tent, where the general slept and kept his office. The exhibition tells the story of the mobile office, which was passed down through generations before eventually becoming part of the museum’s collections.

In February 2023, curators were in the process of planning “Witness to Revolution” when they got an unexpected call from Moore, a Vietnam War veteran who lives in Virginia and works as a security specialist for the federal government. He told them all about the Goodwill auction and the fragment that was sitting safely on a shelf in his den.

Moore had learned of the museum’s headquarters tent while watching TV one night and decided he wanted to share his scrap with the masses. He loaned the piece to the museum for two years.

“I just thought it was the right thing to do,” Moore tells the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Mike Newall. “People have to see this.”

Museum experts authenticated the fragment, which was part of a tent now held by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. When Moore purchased the scrap, it had been attached to a handwritten note explaining that it had come from a 1907 exposition in Norfolk, Virginia, celebrating the founding of Jamestown.

The full tent had been on display at the exposition, where someone apparently cut off a piece from the roof and took it home. According to the note, the scrap ended up in the hands of a man named John Burns.

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Historians don’t know much about Burns’ backstory, but they’re determined to learn more.

“We’re still actively trying to figure out more of the context surrounding this ‘borrowing’ of a fragment of George Washington’s dining marquee,” says Matthew Skic, the Philadelphia museum’s curator, to WHYY’s Peter Crimmins.

Even with the mystery swirling around Burns, the fact that someone felt compelled to snag a piece “opens up the door to a kind of deeper understanding of how George Washington's tent came to be such a strong symbol of the American nation,” Skic tells NBC4 Washington’s Nicole Tan.

Long before his tents became national treasures, Washington used them to inspire confidence in his troops. He camped and worked among his soldiers, which was unusual—most military leaders used buildings, not tents, as their war headquarters.

Whenever the troops moved to a new location, Washington also made a point of pitching his headquarters on the highest point in the area, per the Philadelphia Inquirer. That way, it would be the first thing his soldiers saw when they woke up in the morning. At night, before bed, they could look up and see candles still burning in the tent as Washington read and replied to letters—a symbol of how hard their leader worked on their behalf.

“He was very consciously trying to model what leadership of the army in a republic would look like,” R. Scott Stephenson, the museum’s president, told Smithsonian magazine’s Richard Grant earlier this year.

These days, the museum uses Washington’s tent to help visitors connect with the past. It’s a tangible reminder of the events leading up to the nation’s founding and a symbol of the “fragile American experiment in liberty, equality and self-government,” as Skic tells the Philadelphia Inquirer.

“Witness to Revolution: The Unlikely Travels of Washington’s Tent” is on view at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia through January 5, 2025.

Sarah Kuta | READ MORE

Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.