Teacher : S. Maksimova Student : S. G’ulomov

2. Early life (1732–1752) 
The Washington family was a wealthy Virginia planter family that had made its 
fortune through land speculation and the cultivation of tobacco.
[14]
 Washington's 
great-grandfather John Washington emigrated in 1656 
from Sulgrave, Northamptonshire, England, to the English colony of 
Virginia where he accumulated 5,000 acres (2,000 ha) of land, including Little 
Hunting Creek on the Potomac River. George Washington was born on February 
22, 1732, at Popes Creek in Westmoreland County, Virginia,
[15]
 and was the first 
of six children of Augustine and Mary Ball Washington.
[16]
 His father was 
a justice of the peace and a prominent public figure who had four additional 
children from his first marriage to Jane Butler.
[17]
 The family moved to Little 
Hunting Creek in 1735. In 1738, they moved to Ferry Farm near Fredericksburg, 
Virginia on the Rappahannock River. When Augustine died in 1743, Washington 
inherited Ferry Farm and ten slaves; his older half-brother Lawrence inherited 
Little Hunting Creek and renamed it Mount Vernon.
[18]
 
Washington did not have the formal education his elder brothers received 
at Appleby Grammar School in England, but did attend the Lower Church School 
in Hartfield. He learned mathematics, trigonometry, and land surveying and 
became a talented draftsman and map-maker. By early adulthood he was writing 
with "considerable force" and "precision";
[19]
 however, his writing displayed little 
wit or humor. In pursuit of admiration, status, and power, he tended to attribute 
his shortcomings and failures to someone else's ineffectuality.
[20]
 
Washington often visited Mount Vernon and Belvoir, the plantation that belonged 
to Lawrence's father-in-law William Fairfax. Fairfax became Washington's patron 

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and surrogate father, and Washington spent a month in 1748 with a team 
surveying Fairfax's Shenandoah Valley property.
[21]
 He received a surveyor's 
license the following year from the College of William & Mary.
[c]
 Even though 
Washington had not served the customary apprenticeship, Fairfax appointed him 
surveyor of Culpeper County, Virginia, and he appeared in Culpeper County to 
take his oath of office July 20, 1749.
[22]
 He subsequently familiarized himself with 
the frontier region, and though he resigned from the job in 1750, he continued to 
do surveys west of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
[23]
 By 1752 he had bought almost 
1,500 acres (600 ha) in the Valley and owned 2,315 acres (937 ha).
[24]
 
In 1751, Washington made his only trip abroad when he accompanied Lawrence 
to Barbados, hoping the climate would cure his brother's 
tuberculosis.
[25]
 Washington contracted smallpox during that trip, which 
immunized him and left his face slightly scarred.
[26]
 Lawrence died in 1752, and 
Washington leased Mount Vernon from his widow; he inherited it outright after 
her death in 1761.
[27]