Woodlawn, a historic 126-acre plantation located just outside Washington, D.C., in Fairfax County, Virginia, was once part of George Washington’s Mount Vernon. Today, the National Trust Historic Site includes a mansion house constructed at the turn of the nineteenth century and the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Pope-Leighey House, which was relocated to the property in 1965.

For years, visits to Woodlawn and Pope-Leighey House have focused on the lives of the plantation’s former owners. This April, the site launched a pair of groundbreaking exhibitions, marking a shift in its mission toward collaborating with the community and telling fuller and more inclusive stories about the generations of people who have shaped the historic site.

“If you had come to Woodlawn ten or fifteen years ago, you would have gotten a version of its history that was really focused on two people: George Washington and Nelly Custis Lewis,” explains James Wells, program assistant at Woodlawn and Pope-Leighey House. Washington gifted the plantation to Nelly Custis Lewis, his step-granddaughter, in 1799. Now, Wells said, the team at Woodlawn is “reinterpreting Woodlawn’s history to combat romanticized versions of plantation histories and move toward something that’s more honest.”

The new exhibitions, “Woodlawn: People and Perspectives” and “Offerings for Tauxenent: Acknowledging Indigenous Place,” expand the old perspective to incorporate and honor the histories of enslaved persons, free Black families, Quaker community members, and Indigenous peoples who also inhabited Woodlawn or the land that came to form the plantation.

“Offerings for Tauxenent,” housed in the primary bedroom at the mansion house, marks Woodlawn’s first major effort to collaborate with Indigenous peoples living in the Washington, D.C., area today and to acknowledge the Indigenous Doeg people, the original inhabitants of the land before colonization.

Honoring the Doeg People

Wells says the idea for an Indigenous-focused exhibition surfaced last year while the Woodlawn team was hard at work researching the lesser-known histories of the site. “We realized we had a pretty big gap,” he said. “We know plantations are an expression of colonialism in a lot of ways, but we realized that we weren’t including Indigenous histories in the bounds of our research.” That soon changed with help from Dr. Gabrielle Tayac, an associate professor of public history at George Mason University (GMU) and member of the Piscataway Tribe.

Tayac has spent years researching Indigenous histories, including that of the Doeg people who lived in what is now Virginia before colonization. Because of a lack of record keeping, biases in archives and research funding, and sometimes purposeful erasure, our knowledge of Indigenous histories remains fragmented. For the Doeg people, Tayac said, “It has taken years of fairly intensive work, digging through archival materials, maps, early colonial-era and seventeenth-century documents, and working with archaeologists to reconstruct some of Doeg history.”

Rather than mount an exhibition featuring research in its early stages, Tayac envisioned a collection of offerings to the Doeg people from Indigenous peoples living around their ancestral lands today. Tayac said the project started with big questions: “How would these communities and community members relate to the Doeg homeland? What would they have to offer? How would they introduce themselves on this landscape?”

To answer these questions, Tayac enlisted a class of public history students at GMU. Under her supervision, these students conducted research, collaborated with local tribal, intertribal, and immigrant Indigenous communities, and ultimately curated “Offerings for Tauxenent.” The exhibition is named for a Doeg town at the mouth of the Occoquan River, a tributary of the Potomac River in Northern Virginia, which appears on colonial-era maps.

At the exhibition's opening reception on May 4, 2024, Tayac and Heather Johnson, interim director at Woodlawn and Pope-Leighey House, addressed a room filled with community members, including many from the Indigenous communities who contributed to the project and were visiting the Woodlawn for the first time.

“An amazing and unexpected outcome was that, in opening this Indigenous exhibit, we had at least three people come to us who are Doeg descendants,” recalled Johnson. “If we had not had this exhibit here, if we had not started this conversation, we would not have those connections with these descendants that will allow us to continue our exploration of Doeg history through research and oral histories.”