Take an Unlikely Travel With Washington's Tent at the Museum of the American Revolution

Exhibition Highlights

The battlefield was just the beginning for General George Washington’s home-away-from-home.

Over the last 250 years, the tent had a front row seat to key moments of struggle and triumph in American history, including the chaos sparked by the Civil War, the celebrations marking the country’s centennial anniversary and the birth of the National Museum (later the Smithsonian).

  — Photo courtesy Museum of the American Revolution

The Museum of the American Revolution invites exhibit visitors to follow the tent’s twisty-turney journey and meet the men and women — Black and white, free and enslaved — who cleared the way for its survival.

  — Photo courtesy Museum of the American Revolution

Be sure not to miss:

• Washington’s foldable bedstead: Take a look at the place where the Founding Father slept alongside several other items he carried during his wartime travels.
• Panoramic watercolor of the Continental Army’s 1782 encampment at Verplanck’s Point, New York: Admire the only known eyewitness image of the tent on the battlefield created by Continental Army engineer and artist Pierre Charles L’Enfant.
• Original correspondences pertaining to the tent: Read the letter sent by Mt. Vernon’s enslaved housekeeper Selina Gray to Mary Anna Randolph Curtis Lee, great-granddaughter of Martha Washington and wife of Confederate General Robert E. Lee about the tent’s safety.

  — Photo courtesy Museum of the American Revolution

For more info on Witness to Revolution: The Unlikely Travels of Washington’s Tent, including hours and ticket information, click the button below.