Special Update on Rare Discovery of Preserved Cherries at Mount Vernon

[00:00:00] Anne Fertig: Since the recording of this interview on April 30th, 2024, archaeologists have uncovered even more bottles in the basement of Mount Vernon. So be sure to listen all the way to the end of the interview to hear the most recent updates on the situation.

[00:00:26] Anne Fertig: On April 22nd, 2024, news broke that archaeologists at Mount Vernon had found two intact 18th century glass bottles buried in the basement of George Washington's mansion. Inside these bottles were whole, recognizable cherries, preserved for generations to come. for over 200 years. Since that initial report, we at George Washington's Mount Vernon are pleased to announce that there have been more exciting discoveries in the basement, including a trove of [00:01:00] additional intact bottles.

[00:01:02] Anne Fertig: In this episode, you'll be the first to hear Revelations that unearthed not only new insights about the food, customs, and world of Mount Vernon in the 18th century, but also new evidence about the lives of the enslaved community. Thanks to the efforts of archaeologists here at Mount Vernon, we can put a name to the person whose skill and knowledge allowed these cherries to thrive.

[00:01:24] Anne Fertig: Hello, my name is Ann Fertig, and I am the writer and director of Inventing the Presidency. In this special bonus episode, we're taking a pause from the presidency to share with you a conversation with two of the people behind this extraordinary discovery. Sitting with me here today are Dr. Jason Boroughs, Principal Archaeologist at Mount Vernon, and Lily Carhart, Curator of Preservation Collections.

[00:01:50] Anne Fertig: to discuss their excavations and reveal their insights about the objects recovered from the basement. Thank you both for joining me.

[00:01:59] Jason Boroughs: It's great to be [00:02:00] here. Thanks for having us.

[00:02:01] Anne Fertig: So, for people who are listening to this who might not have seen the images on the news, can you describe what the bottles look like and what was inside of them exactly?

[00:02:11] Lily Carhart: Yeah, sure. So, the bottles are a little bit shorter and a little bit sort of fatter than typical wine bottles that you see today. They're also very, um, uh, imperfect in that they lean to one side and the necks are not quite straight because these are all formed by hand, by hand pulls, but also mass produced.

[00:02:37] Lily Carhart: But they've also been in the ground for hundreds of years and exposed to all the different types of things, both in the soils, but also the contents that are in the bottle may have impacted. This glass itself, they are coded in what looks like basically shiny gold material, which is actually the glass breaking down.

[00:02:56] Lily Carhart: And beneath that is that characteristic dark olive green that you [00:03:00] see of most in most wine bottles, even today. We removed the contents because, um, glass or liquid and water can actually speed up that corrosion of glass and having it break down more. So we made the strategic decision to remove the contents.

[00:03:16] Lily Carhart: Um, and. At first it sort of looked like a golden liquid that was coming out. Farther down towards the bottom of the bottle we got a lot of, it looked sort of like brown, dense material that was coming out. And could actually see round shapes. And then pits that looked characteristically, undeniably like cherry pits.

[00:03:39] Lily Carhart: And stems started to come out of the bottles. Which was, I mean, really interesting. It was, uh, unbelievable in many ways and really exciting for us.

[00:03:50] Anne Fertig: So, can you tell us the story of how these bottles were first found?

[00:03:55] Jason Boroughs: We have been excavating in the mansion cellar ahead of our, uh, [00:04:00] revitalization campaign for the mansion.

[00:04:02] Jason Boroughs: The mansion, the early core of it was designed and constructed in the 1730s and it's a timber framed building. It's a wooden building. It was not really designed to have over a million visitors a year. That puts a lot of stress and strain on the structure. It's been repaired many times since the 19th century.

[00:04:22] Jason Boroughs: So ahead of this campaign of revitalization, we've had to do a bit of archeology for some proposed infrastructure upgrades. Primarily for the new HVAC system that's going to go into the mansion that will keep everything at a constant temperature and humidity level, the HVAC ducts will actually be buried underground, which will allow us eventually, hopefully, to open the cellar to public interpretation, to restore it to its 18th century appearance, and actually use that as a setting to tell the stories of the people that lived and worked on the estate.[00:05:00]

[00:05:00] Jason Boroughs: So anytime there's going to be a disturbance to the buried resources, we do archaeology to record everything that we can, because it will be destroyed by these necessary upgrades. So we had a list of research questions that sort of overlap with the proposed upgrades. And, um, in the middle of that, in this, the process of excavation, we came across a series of storage pits, and the bottles.

[00:05:30] Anne Fertig: And where were these storage pits found exactly in the basement?

[00:05:34] Jason Boroughs: So the mansion was expanded twice under George Washington's tenure. In the late 1750s, he actually added a second story to the mansion about the time that Martha Washington was coming to the plantation. And that also included expanding a cellar underneath.

[00:05:52] Jason Boroughs: The second period was in the 1770s where the wings were added and the cellar was expanded under those wings. [00:06:00] So the bottles were found in what would have been the southernmost room of the earlier part of the house that was then expanded 20 years later in the 1770s. So it is a room that we're pretty sure now is used for food storage and storage of other sort of precious materials.

[00:06:19] Jason Boroughs: Things like butter, maybe cheese or milk products, paint that actually had linseed oil in it was pretty volatile. So it also had to be stored in kind of a cool, constant temperature setting. So in this room, I should say underneath this room, cut into the floor of this room, um, were a series of, we're still figuring it out, a neighborhood of eight to 10 storage pits.

[00:06:47] Jason Boroughs: That are sort of on top of each other used from the 1750s and to the mid 1770s, most likely. So they're perfect little time capsules.

[00:06:56] Anne Fertig: And I have to imagine, right, these bottles were buried, [00:07:00] so were they constantly digging up and reburying objects in these storage pits?

[00:07:05] Jason Boroughs: Yeah, that's a great observation.

[00:07:07] Jason Boroughs: That's why we're saying right now 8 to 10 pits, because we're trying to figure out which storage pits were cut into older storage pits. So in many of these cases, we sort of have just small bits of older storage pits peeking out from ones that cut into them. So yeah, they were constantly putting bottles in the ground with, at least in the case of the ones we've taken out, we know that they were full of cherries.

[00:07:34] Jason Boroughs: There are more. We're not sure what's in the ones we have not yet taken out of the ground. It probably will be other fruits, could be cherries, could be gooseberries, could be something we haven't thought about yet. But yeah, they were constantly putting them in and taking them out.

[00:07:50] Anne Fertig: So how do you even begin that process of removing something like that?

[00:07:53] Anne Fertig: I know if I were anywhere near those bottles, I'd be terrified to even touch them.

[00:07:59] Lily Carhart: I mean, it was, it was pretty nerve wracking, I'm not going to lie, for [00:08:00] all of us involved. Um, not often do we get to handle in complete intact. archaeologically recovered objects like that. It was definitely nerve wracking, but originally we used basically a siphon to try and remove the contents, but it actually worked best to literally pour it right out of the bottles, and then used more of the siphon to try and remove a lot more of the solids that were still somewhat congealed towards the bottom of the bottles that had been literally settling there for hundreds of years.

[00:08:31] Jason Boroughs: But it's incredibly interesting that when we got the liquid out and we got as many of the intact cherries out as we could, we could look in through the top of the bottle, shine a flashlight in, and we could actually see clumps of solid round cherries that were sort of stuck on the side of the bottle.

[00:08:49] Lily Carhart: It was very difficult to get a lot of that out originally, and so at a later point in time, we actually came back and used ethanol because it evaporates much faster than water, and so we [00:09:00] didn't want to introduce any new water. So we used ethanol and basically poured it in and swirled it around to try and break up those clumps and poured those out.

[00:09:09] Lily Carhart: So we got another, I mean, it looked almost like 20 pits or, and pieces of solid cherries that were coming out in that second round. So hopefully if we do this, if we do this again, it will all come out in one go.

[00:09:23] Anne Fertig: So that must have been some preservation method then for them to survive this long, mostly whole, right?

[00:09:29] Anne Fertig: Absolutely. Absolutely. Do we have any idea of what these methods were? What was the thinking behind or the process that they would have used?

[00:09:37] Jason Boroughs: Right. So we have a couple of 18th century accounts. There are some planters accounts from diaries in the Chesapeake region from the 18th century and what amounts to sort of an early recipe book coming from South Carolina at the same time period.

[00:09:54] Jason Boroughs: And they all talk about preserving fruits to be used off season. [00:10:00] So the cherries, for example, are often harvested around here in June, thereabouts, depending on the, you know, the weather. These accounts suggest, especially with cherries or gooseberries, which seem to have been ubiquitous on plantations here and in the South Carolina low country.

[00:10:18] Jason Boroughs: You basically get the condensation off them as you pick them off the trees, um, put them in as dry a bottle as possible and cork it tightly. And some of the accounts suggest dipping them in rosin, which is sort of a, a sticky sap like substance that would actually kind of make it even more airtight. And then the ultimate way of keeping the atmosphere at bay, which is the kind of the main goal here, is to actually dig a storage pit and bury them under the heavy clay.

[00:10:47] Jason Boroughs: And there they should be preserved for up to, at least according to the accounts, up to about a year. There's a great account by the planter William Byrd the second. Who was just this phenomenal diarist. [00:11:00] He wrote many diaries. They're very famous among historians where he visited, uh, his brother in law in the Northern Neck or sorry, his brother and sister in law and after dinner.

[00:11:11] Jason Boroughs: And this is in November of 1709, he talks about his sister in law bringing out a bottle of cherries that were picked in summer and that they were as great as they were in summer. This type of preservation, you're preserving the whole fruit. And that's why we have the plump, fleshy cherries with the pits and the stems.

[00:11:33] Jason Boroughs: We have the entire cherries in these bottles because they were probably meant to be eaten in that manner.

[00:11:40] Anne Fertig: This discovery of cherry bottles isn't the first discovery of such bottles, even in Virginia, right?

[00:11:48] Lily Carhart: So, yes, there have been two other instances of bottles with cherries or bottles with cherries and other fruits found in them in Virginia, specifically in the Chesapeake.

[00:11:59] Lily Carhart: The [00:12:00] first was in 1966. Um, and they actually found dozens of bottles, but only a handful of those actually contained fruit. And the second instance was in 1981, um, in the dry well at Monticello, with Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. Those bottles actually contained, in addition to cherries, they also contained cranberries and grapes.

[00:12:26] Lily Carhart: And so that's part of why we're very curious to see what other fruit might be in any potential bottles that are in, uh, that we may find at Mount Vernon. I think that what we're looking forward to when it comes to testing and, uh, the contents in the bottles and what's actually in the bottles is that the past two instances where these similar things have been found were 40 and 60 years ago, if I'm doing my math correctly and science and technology have [00:13:00] greatly evolved even since 1981.

[00:13:02] Lily Carhart: And so I think that is where our excitement really lies is, is building on the knowledge that. That our colleagues in the field at Colonial Williamsburg and Monticello have generated in trying to store and test the fruit in the past. We can build off that and use modern techniques to hopefully tease out even more information about how the process that these fruit went through in the preservation efforts that took place.

[00:13:34] Anne Fertig: When the bottles were first discovered, I know that the first thought on many people's minds was that it could be cherry bounce. And there are a few very good reasons for this. For those who don't know, Cherry Bounce was and still is a popular drink in this region that is made from cherries that are infused in typically whiskey, although I think it can be made with other spirits as well.

[00:13:58] Anne Fertig: It was a [00:14:00] favorite of Martha Washington's, and we do know that it was served here at Mount Vernon. But it seems as though you don't believe that it could be Cherry Bounce. Can you explain why that is?

[00:14:12] Jason Boroughs: No, that's a great question. Um, we know it was popular with the Washingtons here and the Washingtons actually altered the traditional recipe, which you're correct.

[00:14:21] Jason Boroughs: Usually is whiskey at Mount Vernon. The surviving recipe in Martha's papers indicates that brandy or cognac would have been used. Which, I'm not gonna lie, it sounds delicious. Um, And her recipe talks about using the juice of 20 pounds of cherries, not the actual whole cherries.

[00:14:43] Lily Carhart: 20 pounds. 20 pounds.

[00:14:45] Jason Boroughs: And this would have made a 5 gallon batch, which, I'm not gonna lie, I'm not hating that either.

[00:14:51] Jason Boroughs: And you would have included spices like cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves. So the trick about [00:15:00] understanding the difference here is that, well, first of all, cherry pits, if they are cracked or bruised and left within a liquid, they actually produce a compound that can be turned into hydrogen cyanide, which obviously is poisonous, but Martha's own recipe suggests taking a pint and a half of

[00:15:21] Jason Boroughs: carefully cracked pits and putting it in this five gallon batch. Now the upside is it adds a pleasant almond taste. The downside is that pleasant almond taste is cyanide, but at that level, you know, it's, it's not something that would have caused a significant amount of distress, but you're taking all of those ingredients and remember this is about five gallons.

[00:15:44] Jason Boroughs: So the most likely place for that to rest and it had to be rested for six weeks to several months. is in a wooden cask. And then you decant it into bottles, but not the solids, because nobody really wants a large, you know, cinnamon stick or [00:16:00] a bunch of cherry stems floating in their cocktail. That's one of the reasons why we think this was probably the preserved whole fruit that was meant for the Washington's dinner table, as opposed to their cocktail glasses.

[00:16:13] Jason Boroughs: But we still have to test the liquid. There are other 18th century preservation methods that suggest there could be an alcohol as a preservative as well.

[00:16:23] Anne Fertig: How do you test that? Like now that you have the bottles and the juice or the cherries, what's next?

[00:16:32] Lily Carhart: That is a very good question. So we can use things like mass spectrometry to test the contents of the liquid, but I will fully admit I am no chemist.

[00:16:42] Lily Carhart: We will be sending the contents off to different specialists. We're looking at talking with people who are specialists in Ancient or very old bottle residues and bottle contents who have worked to rebuild the contents of [00:17:00] these old bottles to see what materials were in there and even what drinks or what the recipes were of the contents of those bottles.

[00:17:09] Lily Carhart: That is what, you know, have to stay tuned to hear part two. Two or maybe part seven by that point.

[00:17:14] Anne Fertig: Well, I love that you brought up part seven because since the discovery of these two cherry bottles My understanding is you guys have discovered even more down in the basement.

[00:17:25] Jason Boroughs: That is correct. Um, as far as last week We had announced that there were two bottles we had recovered and those are the the famous bottles with the cherries We discovered a third bottle still in the cellar.

[00:17:40] Jason Boroughs: We had just exposed the very top of it, but we could see it was holding liquid as well. And then last, I don't remember I think it was Wednesday. Yeah. So, uh, the tail end of last week, we discovered five more. Wow. So we have a total discovery of eight bottles at the moment. Six are still in the cellar. [00:18:00] In situ, which is just archaeology talk for in place, we have only exposed the very tops of the bottles and all but two of them are still holding liquid.

[00:18:11] Anne Fertig: Any idea what's inside these ones?

[00:18:13] Lily Carhart: Hopefully more. Actually, we're hoping that we get a variety of fruits in these that might speak to what different, uh, fruits or treats or vegetables, who knows what's in these, um, that may have been desired by those living at Mount Vernon in the 18th century.

[00:18:31] Anne Fertig: You know, and that's really, really interesting because I think it talks to, you know, how much work is going on down in the basement that you've now found eight cherry bottles total at the moment, eight bottles total.

[00:18:44] Anne Fertig: What else are you finding in the basement down there?

[00:18:47] Jason Boroughs: Many things. Many, many things. The mansion revitalization project has really been an opportunity https: otter. ai To examine some of the spaces that we [00:19:00] wouldn't have done so otherwise. So obviously we've learned a lot about this one room for, for sure.

[00:19:06] Jason Boroughs: It was clearly, um, utilized at least for the two decade period in which the storage pits were cut into the floor as sort of a food storage area. But we've also learned a lot about how the cellar was put together. We've found remnants of architectural features in the floor. We've actually found out how the, or discovered the, the techniques behind leveling the floors.

[00:19:35] Jason Boroughs: We actually found wooden stakes, which are still in the cellar from, you know, 1770s. Well, now they're in the lab. So we have removed those, but, you know, all of these little clues have helped us understand how the spaces were put together, but we also hope to learn a lot about the enslaved community and the people that [00:20:00] had access, primary access to the cellar, other than the Washington's.

[00:20:04] Jason Boroughs: In particular, the southernmost room, which was constructed after the 1770s expansion of the mansion, was the living space for Frank Lee, the enslaved butler, his wife Lucy, the cook, and their three children. And in this space, we've actually taken off all of the soil layers that would have been under the floor of their living space, and we're actually going to do some very in depth Analytical techniques for teasing out maybe the smallest artifacts that we normally wouldn't see things as small as eggshells or fish scales or tiny little ceramic or glass beads.

[00:20:49] Jason Boroughs: Um, we've saved all that soil, actually go through that probably this summer. So we'll be still making discoveries even when we're not in that space anymore. But we've also [00:21:00] made some documentary discoveries as well and trying to put faces and names onto these spaces and onto these objects because the objects were attached to real people with real lives.

[00:21:14] Jason Boroughs: And that is our primary course of study. We want to know about the people that lived here, uh, from the Washingtons all the way down through the enslaved community.

[00:21:24] Anne Fertig: When we're talking about this kind of documentary evidence, where do you look in the archive for those stories and how does that help you illuminate what you find in the ground?

[00:21:34] Jason Boroughs: We are historical archaeologists, which means our two primary ways of understanding the past are the things people left behind and the things people wrote about. the things they left behind. Because this is Mount Vernon, many of Washington's papers were kept in trust by family members, and they've been reassembled here at our library and at other libraries that work with us.

[00:21:59] Jason Boroughs: And so we [00:22:00] have many, many documents, and we're incredibly fortunate to know the names of every, for example, enslaved man, woman, and child that was living here in the year that Washington died. I have never worked anywhere else in Virginia where I've had the privilege of having those types of documents.

[00:22:18] Jason Boroughs: In this case, I went back through Washington's records, which have, many of which have been digitized, and found a letter from Martha Washington to her niece, Fanny Bassett Lear, in 1795. Where she was asking her niece to help prepare for a return visit by the Washingtons, who were living in Philadelphia at the time, which was the capital, at least until D.

[00:22:43] Jason Boroughs: C. was built, the federal city. And she was asking her niece that if there were any gooseberries that were ripe, she would like them to be bottled and stored in the usual manner. And she said that Old Doll would remember how to do it. [00:23:00] At this point in time, Hercules was the main cook for the Washington family, but he was with the Washingtons at the presidential household in Philadelphia.

[00:23:10] Jason Boroughs: But Doll had been the cook for many years. So it makes sense that Doll would sort of have overseen this process or known how to preserve fruits in this manner. Doll was past working age. She was in her 80s at this point. But Doll actually came to Mount Vernon with Martha Washington in 1759 at the age of 38 and was the primary cook for the Washington household at that time.

[00:23:38] Jason Boroughs: The bottles that we pulled out of the cellar, the storage pits, we date to between 1758 and 1770s. which is the time when Doll would have been the cook here. So it's not that much of a leap to think that Doll would have either prepared [00:24:00] these bottles herself or as the enslaved cook and the person who oversaw the kitchen, people working with her, she would have overseen that process and directed them to do it.

[00:24:12] Jason Boroughs: So this is one of those times that we just don't see very often in our line of work Um, enslaved people did not leave a lot of records of their own in the 18th century. But in this case, I think Martha has given us more than a clue of who may have prepared and stored these bottles in the cellar. We really think it probably would have been done by Doll.

[00:24:39] Anne Fertig: I think that is one reason why this discovery in particular is so extraordinary. Yes, it is rare to find such an intact object with preserved foodstuffs in the ground, but it is even rarer to be able to connect that object with a specific enslaved [00:25:00] person from this time period. It is because of Doll's knowledge, skill, and labor that these cherries managed to survive for over two centuries.

[00:25:12] Anne Fertig: It is important to acknowledge her role in all of this. And archaeology lets us do that. Archaeology is a way for us to recover these lost stories.

[00:25:24] Lily Carhart: Well, and in finding these bottles, it gives us, uh, more depth and puts a lot of these records or these references in context. You know, if we had seen that, Um, the, the record or the note, the letter that Martha wrote, um, it has, we might not have interpreted or understood it in the same way without having found those bottles in place.

[00:25:47] Anne Fertig: Yeah. In the usual manner. It doesn't give us a lot of hints. Does it? Exactly. Exactly.

[00:25:52] Jason Boroughs: Yes. But I mean, you're absolutely right. So having the objects and not just the objects, but. The actual [00:26:00] food remains, actual cherries that were picked over 250 years ago, intact in the bottle that was placed in the ground, and the document that allows us to put a name to that bottle of, of Dahl, the enslaved cook, it really enriches the historical narrative that we present here and the ways that we understand the past at Mount Vernon, or really the, the entire Mount Vernon community.

[00:26:26] Jason Boroughs: I usually like to point out that. In the way that archaeologists think, these objects, while they are objects, and they're very interesting in and of themselves, but for us, it's really the attachments to people of the past that is our primary goal. So when you hold one of those objects, you know, in this case with the bottles, when we pulled them out of the ground, we were the first people to lay eyes and hands on these bottles.

[00:26:58] Jason Boroughs: Since they were put in the [00:27:00] ground, maybe by Dahl or one of the other enslaved folks that worked in the kitchen or on the grounds here at Mount Vernon. And so for us, we have this kind of personal, tangible connection in, in touching these objects and recovering them. And that's hard to put into words. We use words like thrilling, but what it really is, is humbling as well.

[00:27:24] Jason Boroughs: But even if you are not on the archaeological team, And you see these objects, you see images of these objects, or you come to, um, you come to our museum and you see them on display, know that these were real objects that were attached to real people in the past. And their stories live on through the things they've left behind, as long as we can access them and put them together in sort of a coherent way.

[00:27:53] Jason Boroughs: And that's really what our goal is here.

[00:27:56] Anne Fertig: Once again, there is so much that is preserved [00:28:00] in these bottles. We have the bottles, yes. We have the fruit, yes. But we also have the stories of the people attached to them. So as you move forward from this discovery, as you continue your excavations for this project, is there anything else in particular that you're hoping to learn or to find?

[00:28:23] Anne Fertig: Any other research questions burning in the back of your head?

[00:28:27] Jason Boroughs: We never have a shortage of research questions. It's all sort of brand new information. It's not that we didn't have access to these spaces before, but we really didn't want to disturb those, those buried resources in the cellar until we had an absolute reason to.

[00:28:45] Jason Boroughs: You know, in this instance, we're actually upgrading the mansion, making sure that it will stand another century plus, but we're also gaining all these, these new insights. We had no idea we would find ten, you know, eight to [00:29:00] ten plus pits with, at the moment, at least eight bottles of, actually, yeah, maybe more, of preserved food remains from this time period that's sort of unheard of.

[00:29:11] Jason Boroughs: So we are still excavating, and I can say just as early as this morning, one of our archaeologists discovered the remains of a bird, fowl, that was, well, we don't know if it was eaten or not, didn't have butchery marks, but it actually had lead shot in association with it. We think it was probably a duck that was hunted.

[00:29:34] Jason Boroughs: And at the time, if you think of like a shotgun shell today, it's full of tiny little, uh, metal projectiles. In the past, you would have just put those straight down the barrel and it's called birdshot. So finding lead shot in association with basically an entire bird suggests that it was probably a bird that was hunted.

[00:29:54] Jason Boroughs: It was probably waterfowl. We know the enslaved community hunted waterfowl here and [00:30:00] sold poultry and waterfowl to the Washington's dinner table. So we have another new story right there and another new way of understanding what was happening at the time. And these are just, these are discoveries of objects, but looking at the remnants of the building itself and the living spaces, we also might be able to tease out additional information that we hadn't even really begun to look for until we.

[00:30:26] Jason Boroughs: Started to think about who was in this space, who had access to this space, who moved through this landscape, you know, basic questions that are very hard to answer without archaeological sort of lenses and ways of thinking about it.

[00:30:44] Lily Carhart: And I will say every day we are surprised by something that comes up, you know, we have, we start with a series of questions, but those questions change and evolve every time something new comes out of the ground.

[00:30:58] Lily Carhart: So, and, you know, as [00:31:00] those pieces start getting, start building up into. The stories that we're able to, you know, flesh out and put together, um, new questions come up and we have new avenues to explore and consider. And it's really exciting.

[00:31:16] Anne Fertig: Well, to finish up, I'm going to ask the one question that I know has been burning on everyone's minds.

[00:31:23] Anne Fertig: Did you taste it? No way.

[00:31:28] Jason Boroughs: So that question comes up a lot. You know, if you had seen Sort of the congealed mass that came out along with these perfectly intact little cherries, you probably wouldn't, you know, let's put it this way. It didn't look appetizing. It did smell like cherries. They were recognizable as cherries.

[00:31:48] Jason Boroughs: I'm sure there's one brave soul that would probably try to ingest one of them, but none of them were in the room.

[00:31:55] Lily Carhart: Lots of people have told me, oh, well, for science, I'd taste it. Well, you [00:32:00] can then, therefore, possibly end up in the hospital.

[00:32:07] Lily Carhart: We have enough technology in the world now that. They can probably tell us what it tastes like. Or, you know, we get asked a lot, too, well, can you plant the seeds, the pits, to actually regrow cherries? And that, who knows? Hopefully we'll have an answer to that, um, again, in the future.

[00:32:30] Jason Boroughs That is: a, that is a question we have, and we don't, we don't have an answer yet.

[00:32:35] Anne Fertig: I think I can speak on behalf of everyone when I say that we are excited to hear what new discoveries you find as you continue to excavate and process the objects recovered from the basement.

[00:32:53] Anne Fertig: So if you're listening at home, be sure to keep track of the latest reports from Mount Vernon. You can do this by [00:33:00] following Mount Vernon on social media, or by going to www.mountvernon.org. And, if you're interested in learning more about George Washington, his life, and world, be sure to check out our other podcasts at

[00:33:17] Anne Fertig: www.george Washington podcast.com. You can learn about the lives and stories of the enslaved community and Intertwined the enslaved community at Mount Vernon. Discover Washington's presidential precedents in Inventing the Presidency, or dive into the collections of the George Washington Presidential Library in Secrets of Washington's Archives.

[00:33:44] Anne Fertig: That's once again. www. georgewashingtonpodcast. com Inventing the Presidency is a production of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association and CD Squared Productions. This episode was produced and [00:34:00] posted by Dr. Anne Fertig. Additional fact checking and review provided by Dr. Alexandra Montgomery. We'd like to thank our guests for this episode, Dr.

[00:34:11] Anne Fertig: Jason Burroughs and Lily Carhart. We hope to see you next time on Inventing the presidency.