page_title: Bel Air (Woodbridge, Virginia)
section_title: Home of Parson Weems
hierarchical_section_title: Bel Air (Woodbridge, Virginia) / 19th century / Home of Parson Weems
caption_attribution_description: English: Painting depicting Parson Weems and his famous story of George Washington and the Cherry Tree.
context_page_description: Bel Air is a colonial-era plantation manor located in Woodbridge, Prince William County, Virginia. Built in 1740 as the Ewell family seat, the home was regularly visited by Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, who was a cousin. It later served as the home of Mason Locke Weems, the first biographer of George Washington and the creator of the cherry tree story. Extraordinarily well preserved for its age, Bel Air was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1970.Today, Bel Air remains a private residence and a working farm.
context_section_description: After Jesse Ewell died at Bel Air on September 30, 1805, the family became so reduced in circumstances that Charlotte Ewell was compelled to borrow considerable sums from her son-in-law, Mason Locke "Parson" Weems, who had married her daughter Fanny Ewell (1775–1843) at Bel Air in July 1795. In partial satisfaction of the debt, Charlotte allowed Weems to move his family into Bel Air around 1806. Weems's home in Dumfries, which was subsequently sold to Benjamin Botts, has been preserved and is now the Weems–Botts Museum.
  Weems, an Episcopal clergyman who began writing and peddling books out of a Jersey Wagon to supplement his income, had met Fanny in Dumfries during one of his book selling trips. Although Weems wrote several biographies and moralistic tales, he is best known for authoring the first and most famous biography of George Washington, The Life of Washington (1800). The book would go through 70 accredited and varying editions and greatly influenced Abraham Lincoln, who read the book when he was 11. Weems would do much of his writing at Bel Air, including the fifth edition (1806) of The Life of Washington, in which he added the famous tale of the cherry tree.
  At home, Weems consulted with Fanny, whom Washington Irving, a family friend, described as a "chimney critic." Together they would decide which books were the "best sellers," a term coined by Weems, and restock the wagon before leaving on another book selling trip. They had ten children, eight of whom survived infancy, and it was said to be a happy time when the husband and father came home from one of his trips to entertain the family with stories and music played on his fiddle, which had been given to him by a French refugee he had befriended on one of his trips. As the violin was too precious to carry with him, he kept it at home.
  Over the next twenty years, Charlotte continued to borrow from Weems, and by January, 1812, these loans amounted to $2300. Charlotte then gave Weems a mortgage on the estate to cover the debt. Four months later she was compelled to borrow $1,000 more from him to avoid a forced sale of the estate. Charlotte Ewell died in 1823, and in August of the following year, Bel Air, which at the time had 700 acres, was sold at public auction to Weems for $2212. Weems was a Freemason and member of Lodge No. 50 in Dumfries. On May 23, 1825, Weems died during a book-selling trip in Beaufort, South Carolina, and the following winter his remains were brought to Dumfries by boat and buried at a corner of the Ewell family cemetery at Bel Air.  Fanny was buried by his side 18 years later.
caption: 'Parson Weems' Fable', a 1939 painting by Grant Wood, depicting both Weems and his famous "Cherry Tree" story. A copy of the painting is mounted above the fireplace mantel in the parlor.
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