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Dogue Run Farm, of six hundred fifty acres, lay back of Union Farm and upon it in 1793 stood the grist mill and later a distillery and the famous sixteen-sided "new circular barn, now finishing on a new construction; well calculated, it is conceived, for getting grain out of the straw more expeditiously than the usual mode of threshing."
Other sickness was equally attended to, as the following entries in his diary show: "visited my Plantations and found two negroes sick ... ordered them to be blooded;" "found that lightening had struck my quarters and near 10 Negroes in it, some very bad but with letting blood they recover'd;" "ordered Lucy down to the House to be Physikd," and "found the new negro Cupid, ill of a pleurisy at Dogue Run Quarter and had him brot home in a cart for better care of him.... Cupid extremely Ill all this day and at night when I went to bed I thought him within a few hours of breathing his last."
Whiting, however, did not manage the flock well, for the following February we find Pearce, the new manager, writing: "I am sorry to have to inform you that the stock of sheep at Both Union and Dogue Run farms are Some of them Dicing Every Week & a great many of Them will be lost, let what will be done Since I came I have had shelters made for them & Troughs to feed them In & to give them salt & have attended to them myself & was In hopes to have saved those that I found to be weak, but they were too far gone and Several of the young Cattle at Dogue Run was past all Recovery when I come & some have died already & several more I am afraid must die before spring, they are so very poor and weak."
To which I add all the land I possess west of the said Dogue Run and Dogue Creek, bounded easterly and southerly thereby; together with the mill, distillery, and all other houses and improvements on the premises, making together about two thousand acres, be it more or less.
There was besides, in Montparnasse's sentence, a literary beauty which was lost upon Gavroche, that is mon dogue, ma dague et ma digue, a slang expression of the Temple, which signifies my dog, my knife, and my wife, greatly in vogue among clowns and the red-tails in the great century when Moliere wrote and Callot drew.
In 1757 he acquired from a certain Darrell five hundred acres on Dogue Run near Mount Vernon, paying three hundred fifty pounds. It is evident, therefore, that very early he acquired the "land hunger" to which most of the Virginians of his day were subject, as a heritage from their English ancestry.
It was situated near the mouth of the stream known as Dogue Run, which was not very well suited for the purpose as it ran from the extreme of low water in summer to violent floods in winter and spring. Thus his miller, William A. Poole, in a letter that wins the sweepstakes in phonetic spelling, complains in 1757 that he has been able to grind but little because "She fails by want of Water."
In September, 1799, Washington told the pair that they might build a house on Grey's Heights on the Dogue Run Farm and rent the farm, "by all odds the best and most productive I possess," promising that on his death the place should go to them.
He experimented with deep soil plowing by running twice in the same furrow and also cultivated some wheat that had been drilled in rows instead of broadcasted. In 1793 he built a new sixteen-sided barn on the Dogue Run Farm. The plan of this barn, drawn by Washington himself, is still preserved and is reproduced herewith.
They formed the aristocracy of colored Mount Vernon society and gave themselves airs accordingly. Nominally our Farmer's slaves were probably all Christians, though I have found no mention in his papers of their spiritual state. But tradition says that some of them at Dogue Run at least were Voudoo or "conjuring" negroes.
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