Preserved Fruit From the 18th Century Found at George Washington’s Estate

Archaeologists have unearthed more than two dozen bottles from the 18th century containing well-preserved cherries and berries at George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate.

The researchers found 35 bottles in the estate’s mansion’s cellar, 29 of which were intact and contained preserved fruit, according to a statement from Mount Vernon. An enslaved worker known as "Doll" may have conducted or supervised the preservation of the fruit, Mount Vernon experts tell the Washington Post’s Michael E. Ruane.

The finding comes a few months after archaeologists first found two bottles of preserved cherries in the cellar.

“Now we know those bottles were just the beginning of this blockbuster discovery,” Mount Vernon president and CEO Doug Bradburn says in a statement. “To our knowledge, this is an unprecedented find and nothing of this scale and significance has ever been excavated in North America.”

“This is such a historic find,” Benjamin Gutierrez, a plant geneticist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Plant Genetic Resources Unit, tells the Washington Post. “There are very few examples where you could look at fruit remains in this condition.”

The researchers came across the bottles while working on a preservation project of the mansion, which was built in 1734 by George Washington’s father. The first two bottles, recovered from a pit beneath a brick floor laid in the 1770s, were dark green and made of glass. The bottles were shaped in a style characteristic of bottles made in the 1740s to 1750s. They contained cherries, their pits and stems preserved in liquid.

The recently uncovered bottles were found in five storage pits. Researchers will analyze the contents of the bottles, which have been emptied. The bottles are drying in a lab.

The artifacts likely haven’t been exposed to sunlight since before the American Revolution, according to the statement, and may have been forgotten when George Washington left to take command of the Continental Army.

Researchers have only looked at a small number of the samples so far, but have already identified 54 cherry pits and 23 cherry stems, as well as cherry pulp. The stems were neatly cut, suggesting they may have been removed from trees with shears. The cherries are also likely a tart type, which are more acidic and could have been better for preserving.

Scientists are looking at the pits to determine if they could be used to grow more cherries.

“We broke open a few pits, and they were waterlogged, so that kills the potential to germinate it,” Victoria Meakem, a molecular biologist at the Plant Genetic Resources Unit, tells the Washington Post. “But it’s something we’ve thought about.”

The estate’s gardens included a fruit garden and nursery. Washington also added orchards to his farms, and apple, pear, cherry, peach and apricot fruit trees were grown there. Fruit was eaten during meals and used in preserves and cider. Enslaved gardeners maintained the gardens.

Hundreds of enslaved people lived and worked at Mount Vernon. Family members were often separated by miles, and those who resisted working were punished. Enslaved people would not have eaten the fruit they harvested, instead subsisting on cornmeal and salted fish—a diet that lacked essential nutrients.

“These perfectly preserved fruits picked and prepared more than 250 years ago provide an incredibly rare opportunity to contribute to our knowledge of the 18th-century environment, plantation foodways and the origins of American cuisine,” Mount Vernon principal archaeologist Jason Boroughs says in the statement. “The bottles and contents are a testament to the knowledge and skill of the enslaved people who managed the food preparations from tree to table.”

Will Sullivan | | READ MORE

Will Sullivan is a science writer based in Washington, D.C. His work has appeared in Inside Science and NOVA Next.