The Mary Washington House is the modest frame dwelling on Charles Street where George Washington's mother Mary Ball Washington lived from 1772 until her death in 1789. George purchased it for her when she moved from Ferry Farm, and he visited her here on his way to and from Yorktown and, later, to his presidential inauguration.
The house is operated as a historic site, with costumed interpreters presenting the domestic life of an 18th-century household. The garden behind the house is particularly well-maintained, with a sundial and box hedges that Mary tended herself, and the boxwood she is said to have planted still survives. The house is smaller and more intimate than Kenmore or Chatham Manor — it gives a better sense of middling colonial domestic life than the grander establishments nearby.