Historic Kenmore

Welcome to Kenmore, the home of Fielding and Betty Washington Lewis. Built in the 1770's, this house was part of a plantation of almost 1,300 acres. Fielding Lewis purchased the first parcel of this estate in 1752, two years after he married Betty. Her brother, George Washington, surveyed Fielding Lewis' new property, which was outside the village of Fredericksburg at the time. In 1754 Fielding inherited adjoining land from his father. The plantation had fields of tobacco, wheat, and corn, as well as a store and a shipyard on the Rappahannock River. A planter and merchant shipping to and from England, Fielding Lewis was a prominent citizen of Spotsylvania County. He sacrificed his fortune to build and operate an arms manufactory for the American Revolution. Col. Lewis died in mid-December 1781, only weeks after Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington in October of that year.

The only buildings to survive from the Lewis plantation are the main house and a store near the river. Other buildings on the original property were of wood and included a kitchen, a dairy, a laundry, a meat house, store houses, farm buildings, and slave quarters. Many people lived and worked on the plantation, including the Lewises, four of their eight surviving children, and over eighty slaves. The house was built by skilled tradesmen (some recently immigrated from England), indentured servants (most from Ireland), and enslaved African Americans.

After Betty Lewis died in 1797, the plantation was sold. The Gordon family purchased the property in 1819, naming it "Kenmore" after their ancestral home in Scotland. Occupying the property until just before the Civil War, the Gordons added the slate roof and stone portico that are still in existence today. The house remained in private hands until the Kenmore Association (now known as George Washington's Fredericksburg Foundation) saved the house from destruction or division into apartments in the early 1920s.

Kenmore was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1970.

Learn more about the several owners of Historic Kenmore and how it was saved.

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