Weems–Botts House Museum is a small historic museum in Dumfries, Virginia, United States. The museum tour showcases the history of Dumfries, Virginia's oldest chartered town, and people associated with the house, including Mason Locke "Parson" Weems, and attorney Benjamin Botts. The museum was restored in 1975 as part of a bicentennial U.S. restoration project. The museum is owned by the Town of Dumfries and operated by Historic Dumfries Virginia, Inc., a non-profit organization.
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The house was purchased by Parson Weems, a native Marylander, in 1798. Weems was a clergyman who became an author and purveyor of books, which he would sell from the back of his jersey wagon. While traveling through Dumfries during one of his book-selling tours, Weems met Fanny Ewell, the daughter of Colonel Jesse Ewell, a wealthy tobacco planter with a warehouse business in Dumfries. They married in 1795.
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EST. 1798
During his ownership of the house, Weems wrote an 80-page booklet that would influence the thoughts of Americans to this day entitled A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits of General George Washington. Weems published the first biography on George Washington and was the creator of the famous cherry tree story ("I cannot tell a lie, I did it with my little hatchet"). Weems also created the fable that Washington threw a silver dollar more than 300 feet across the Rappahannock River. He also wrote biographies on Benjamin Franklin, Francis Marion, and William Penn. Sometime after the death of his father-in-law in 1805, Weems moved his family into the Ewell family estate, Bel Air.
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Parson Weems
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