This year, Feb. 22 marks the 290th anniversary of President George Washington’s birth. The founding father of the nation is often remembered as a great military leader and statesman, but little is known about his business ventures and innovations.
Washington was not only the first president of the United States, but he was also the country’s “first entrepreneur,” according to historians who have extensively studied his business dealings.
Private enterprises he founded had an effect on the future of American agriculture, transportation, and manufacturing, says John Berlau, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the author of the book “George Washington, Entrepreneur: How our Founding Father’s Private Business Pursuits Changed America and the World.”
Berlau’s portrait of Washington, drawn in large part from his journals and letters, shines a light on the founding father’s endeavors as an innovator and entrepreneur.
The book presents “another side of Washington’s greatness and how our country is rooted in entrepreneurship,” Berlau told The Epoch Times.
Washington devoted his life to the improvement of his farm at Mount Vernon and American agriculture. His passion for his farm never ceased on the battlefield or during his presidency, Berlau wrote in his book.
Washington, on his estate, grew countless varieties of trees and built a greenhouse, which became a showcase for exotic fruits, herbs, and plants from around the world.
“Unlike his Virginia neighbors who remained wedded to tobacco, Washington planted seven types of wheat,” according to the book. “Transforming Mount Vernon from a tobacco plantation into a diversified farm with wheat as its main crop was a great entrepreneurial feat.”
Washington also went into the flour-making business, which was a big success. In 1772, he registered the “G. Washington” brand for his flour, pioneering in the distribution of branded food products. Even before the Revolutionary War, his flour was shipped through America and exported to England and its colonies in the West Indies.
The founding father also receives credit for introducing mules to American agriculture and promoting them as an efficient alternative to horses for plowing.
“We owe a lot to George Washington, and I think he’s someone that should be studied a little bit further than the surface,” says Tom Washington, a businessman and a certified public accountant from Texas. He’s a collateral descendant of George Washington through his brother, John Augustine, seven generations down.
“I appreciate George Washington as an entrepreneur, in that time of history when it was so hard to be an entrepreneur because there were predatory governments like Britain, always trying to keep an entrepreneur down and under control,” Washington told The Epoch Times during a family reunion at Mount Vernon in October 2021.
“But George found a way and he fought for the country as a general, but he also fought for his own self-interest and the wealth of the people that depended on him by being successful at Mount Vernon.”
By Emel Akan
