Matuz Roger - Presidents Fact Book Revised and Updated!: The Achievements, Campaigns, Events, Triumphs, and Legacies of Every President from George Washington to the Current One

Although we mark Washingtons birthday with Presidents Day, a Monday in February, for many years the celebration took place on February 22, and Washington himself celebrated on February 11. Washington was born on the eleventh under the Old Style, or Julian, calendar, which was replaced by royal decree in England and her colonies with the Gregorian, or New Style calendar on April 5, 1751, when Washington was twenty years old. In order to convert from the Julian to the Gregorian, ten days were dropped from September 1752. (So a person going to bed on September 2, say at 11:00 P.M ., and sleeping eight hours would wake up at 7:00 A.M . to find it was September 13, not September 3.) Dropping those ten days from a year moved everybodys birthday, including Washingtonswhy his birthday was celebrated on February 22 instead of February 11. But Washington was an old-fashioned guy, and he stuck with the old date all his life.

George Washington was born on February 22, 1732, in Westmoreland County, Virginia, on his father Augustines farm, Wakefield. Augustine had two sons and a daughter before becoming a widower; his second wife, Mary Ball Washington, gave birth to six more children, including George. The family moved to nearby Ferry Farm in 1738, where Augustine Washington died five years later, when George was eleven.

Young George was schooled primarily at home because his mother didnt want to send him to England for his education, as was customary at the time. He was especially interested in mathematics, and that prompted him to learn the art of land surveying.

Washington was close to his older half-brother, Lawrence, who was married to Anne Fairfax, a daughter of a wealthy and distinguished Virginia family. When he was sixteen, George accompanied Annes brother, George Fairfax, to measure and map the familys land holdings in western Virginia, across the Blue Ridge Mountains and into the Shenandoah Valley. A year later, because of his success with that assignment, he became the official surveyor of Culpeper County, Virginia.

Washingtons survey of the Fairfax holdings.

Washingtons earliest job was as a surveyor in Virginia.

By then, at the age of seventeen, Washington was growing into a large man, eventually weighing 175 pounds in his prime. As an adult he stood six-foot-two and wore size thirteen shoes. Always fashionably dressed, he was erect in bearing, muscular, and broad-shouldered. He had a long, high-cheekboned face with a large straight nose and a determined chin. His blue-gray eyes were set under heavy brows, and he frequently powdered his dark brown hair, tying it back in a queue. He lost all but one of his teeth, and wore dentures, which were frequently replaced. They were generally made of human teeth or those of animals, sometimes of ivory and sometimes lead, but never did George Washington wear wooden false teeth, as is popularly believed.