Sarah's Ground (9781439115855) (17 page)

She wrote that although silver, some private papers, clothing, and furniture were saved, the trunk on the second floor, in which were her papers from her years at Mount Vernon, had burned. How strange to think that throughout all those years she spent at Mount Vernon, in the middle of a terrible war, it remained safe, yet in peacetime it was lost when their own house burned!

All that remained were the letters she had written to Miss Cunningham.

Sarah Tracy and Upton Herbert are buried in Ivy Cemetery, in Fairfax County, Virginia. They had no children.

The Mount Vernon Ladies' Association still exists and runs General Washington s home today.

T
his novel is
based
on the story of Sarah Tracy at Mount Vernon. For the sake of story I have moved some characters around, changed the chronology of some of the events that happened to them, and given them motivations, thoughts, and emotions that research does not provide.

But all the major happenings in the book really occurred. I made up none of them, except for the fight between Sarah and Mary. This was for the sake of story.

Sarah Tracy did write daily to Miss Cunningham. Her letters are preserved in the book
Mount Vernon: The Civil War Years
by Dorothy Troth Muir. This is one of the many books I used for research.

All the others I used as an updraft and flew with them on my own.

I am grateful to the writers of all the books I mention in my bibliography for providing the research I needed. But as a writer of fiction, I gave Sarah and Upton and the others a life they did not have in research. This is the job of a fiction writer, to create a satisfying story. And this story—of Sarah Tracy at a falling-down Mount Vernon,
working with Upton Herbert not only to repair it, but to keep it from ruin and make it the only neutral ground in America during the Civil War—haunted me until I actually wrote it.

Blair, William.
Virginia's Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861-1865
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Boyce, Burke.
Man from Mount Vernon
. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1991.

Dalzell, Robert F, Jr. , and Lee Baldwin Dalzell.
George Washington's Mount Vernon: At Home in Revolutionary America
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Greene, Constance McLaughlin.
Washington: A History of the Capital, 1800-1950
. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962.

Johnson, Gerald W.
Mount Vernon: The Story of a Shrine
. New York: Random House, 1953.

Leech, Margaret.
Reveille in Washinton, 1860-1865
. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1941.

Muir, Dorothy Troth.
Mount Vernon: The Civil War Years
. Mount Vernon, Virginia: The Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, 1993.