A to Z of Windows – W is for Washington

Before driving into Yorkshire we stopped briefly at Washington Old Hall, another National Trust property and the ancestral home (allegedly) of George Washington of American Independence and First president of the USA fame.

It has to be said that the link is quite tenuous because George’s ancestors left Washington Old Hall almost a hundred years before he was born and he himself apparently confessed had little interest in genealogy or his English heritage.

I have said before that I always like to see how far a place name has travelled and not unsurprisingly there are a lot of Washingtons in the USA and thirty States have a place named after the town in Tyne and Wear or, more likely of course, the first President of the USA.

Restricting the statistics to cities, towns and villages, in the USA there are thirty-six called Washington, thirty-four called Franklin (after Benjamin Franklin), twenty-six called Clinton (after DeWitt Clinton, Governor of New York 1825-28), twenty-one called Arlington (no explanation) and, this might surprise some people, twenty-one called Lebanon, apparently because (don’t quote me on this) Lebanon is a Biblical reference, and as Christian missionaries first settled across the US they named their new towns after names that inspired them.  There were also a significant number of immigrants from Labanon entering USA in the late nineteenth century.

We spent a very pleasant hour or so at Washington Old Hall and as we finished with a cup of tea and a slice of cake in the café I did some final reckoning up and was happy to find that we had fully recovered the cost of National Trust membership and we had a full year ahead of us to make a tidy profit.

 

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