George Washington bought this Fredericksburg house for his mother in 1772; she died here in 1789, and visitors still report a protective presence near her garden.
1200 Charles St, Fredericksburg, VA 22401
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
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$
$10 adults, $8 discounted (AAA/Senior/Military/Trolley), $5 youth 6-18, free under 6.
Access
Limited Access
18th-century frame house; limited accessibility on interior steps
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Photos OK
Est. 1772 · George Washington Family · Colonial Domestic Life · Mary Ball Washington · Historic Preservation
Mary Ball Washington had been living at Ferry Farm, the family property across the Rappahannock River, since her husband Augustine Washington died in 1743. By 1772, the demands of the farm were beyond her means, and her son George purchased the small frame house on Charles Street in Fredericksburg so she could live close to her daughter Betty Lewis at Kenmore Plantation, a quarter mile away.
Mary Ball Washington was 64 when she moved in and lived in the house for 17 years. She maintained a formal English garden that she tended herself into advanced age. She was known as a resolute woman — accounts from the period describe her as demanding and fiercely independent, and contemporary accounts suggest her relationship with her son was complicated by her temperament. She refused to attend his inauguration in New York.
She died at the house on August 25, 1789, of breast cancer, at roughly 81 years of age — four months after her son had been inaugurated as the first president of the United States. She is buried nearby, and the site is marked with a Masonic monument erected in 1894.
The house remained in private hands through the 19th and early 20th centuries, eventually passing to the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, the predecessor organization to Preservation Virginia. Washington Heritage Museums now operates it as an 18th-century period house museum, one of several Washington-family sites they maintain in Fredericksburg.
Sources
Mary Washington's ghost, as described in Fredericksburg ghost-tour lore, does not conform to the dramatic apparition model. The accounts are quiet: a warmth felt when walking through the garden, a sense of being observed from the windows, and occasional glimpses of a figure — gray-haired, upright — standing in the rooms or near the house's exterior.
The reports cluster around the garden, which was the center of her daily life for 17 years. She was still tending it in her last summer before she died. Ghost tour operators in Fredericksburg have included the house on walking routes for decades on the strength of these visitor accounts.
Unlike at Kenmore next door, where the haunting is linked to documented financial catastrophe, the Mary Washington accounts carry no specific grievance or trauma — she died in her own home, on her own terms, after a long and largely independent life. The presence described fits that history: occupying but not threatening, alert but not aggressive.
The house appears regularly on the US Ghost Adventures Fredericksburg ghost tour itinerary, which cites visitor reports of an apparition at the windows and unexplained activity in the garden.
Notable Entities
Tour of the white frame house where George Washington's mother lived from 1772 until her death in 1789. The tour covers 18th-century domestic life, the garden she tended until her final months, and the Masonic marker at her grave site nearby.
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