George Washington purchased the Mount Vernon estate in 1754, two decades before independence, and expanded the original one-and-a-half-story farmhouse into the iconic twenty-one-room mansion that commands the Potomac bluff today. The estate's river frontage was no accident: the Potomac served as the young republic's primary commercial artery, and Washington himself operated a distillery, gristmill, and fishery that shipped grain and whiskey downriver to Alexandria and beyond. By the time of his death in 1799, Mount Vernon encompassed eight thousand acres worked by more than three hundred enslaved people, a scale that made it one of Virginia's most profitable agricultural enterprises. Today, the estate welcomes more than one million visitors annually, making it the most-visited historic home in America after the White House. The Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, the nation's first historic preservation organization, rescued the property from decay in 1858 and has maintained it ever since. Visitors walking the grounds encounter the original mansion with its signature cupola and weathervane, the four-acre pioneer farm demonstration site, and the burial vault where George and Martha Washington rest beneath a simple brick arch. The on-site museum and education center, opened in 2006, houses six hundred original artifacts including the general's field tent from the Revolutionary War and the key to the Bastille gifted by Lafayette. The mansion's interior preserves the Washingtons' tastes with surgical precision: Prussian blue paint in the dining room, imported Delftware in the butler's pantry, and the original harpsichord in the west parlor. The piazza—a two-story colonnaded porch overlooking the river—was Washington's own design, added in the 1770s to capture prevailing breezes during Virginia's humid summers. From this vantage, the Potomac stretches a mile wide, framed by Maryland's wooded shore. Washington DC boat tours to Mt Vernon restore the estate's original relationship to the river. For two centuries, most guests arrived by water; road access remained poor until the Mount Vernon Memorial Highway opened in 1932. Departures from the capital or Alexandria retrace the route Washington himself traveled when commuting between Mount Vernon and the President's House in Philadelphia. The downstream cruise passes Fort Washington, the only defensive fortification south of the capital, and Piscataway Park's undeveloped shoreline, offering a rare glimpse of the Potomac as Washington knew it—forested, tidal, and alive with ospreys and bald eagles.