George Washington's Home, Grave, and False Teeth
Mount Vernon, Virginia
Mount Vernon's grounds are large and well-manicured. The home is impeccably restored and maintained. Down a path are the graves of George Washington, the nation's first President, and his wife.
But none of this stuff really matters. It's just what you politely survey on your way to see the teeth: a full set of Washington's dentures.
The teeth reside at the modern Donald W. Reynolds Museum and Education Center, a huge complex with all sorts of artwork, artifacts, and dioramas. The Donald and Nancy de Laski Gallery is home to, "A Leader's Smile." At the center is a large glass display case containing the dentures, allowing a 360 degree view. A timeline of "Washington's dental agonies" runs along the gallery walls. As you are reminded, Washington's falsies were not made of wood, but of a mishmash of cow's teeth, human teeth, and elephant ivory set in lead.
George Washington, the world's most famous wearer of falsies, left dentifrice in many places. If he slept there, he probably forgot his teeth there. Bits of bogus bicuspid can be found at The National Museum of Dentistry and in other collections. The false teeth are what we remember most about him. That, and that he never lied, and that he probably had XXY chromosomes, which rendered him sterile.
The dentures are a big draw; a crowd milled around the case when we visited. So big a draw -- and so surprisingly controversial, in fact -- that visitors are not allowed to take photographs of the presidential choppers.
For years Mount Vernon tourists had a perfectly acceptable option: a souvenir, absolutely unique to the site, and grisly but accurate. The George Washington false teeth refrigerator magnet. It looked like the wax hillbilly teeth you'd get at Halloween. Hard to imagine Washington wearing them at elegant state dinners, easy to imagine Washington hiding behind a door, waiting to pop out and scare his stepchildren. Who wouldn't want one of these on the refrigerator, grinning back at you, when it was time to eat?
Unfortunately, sales of the magnet ended in February 2020, when it was publicized that the "human teeth" component of the dentures came from the people George Washington enslaved. His meticulously kept Mount Vernon account books noted that he paid the enslaved people for their teeth, but the donors likely didn't have much say in the arrangement.
So... no more magnet as a memory aid. Visitors will just have to stare longer and harder at the horrific real teeth when they visit.