In 1936, a small sandstone manor house in the centre of Washington, Tyne and Wear, was declared unfit for human habitation. The slums above which it had been built had grown around it, and the building had spent its last years as tenement flats. A local schoolteacher named Fred Hill heard it was to be demolished. He gathered a few neighbours, formed what would eventually become the Friends of the Old Hall, and began to argue, persistently and against the indifference of bureaucracies, that this dilapidated property mattered. He was right. The first president of the United States had taken his name from this hall.
In the late 12th century, a man called William de Hertburne - originally William Bayard - assumed tenancy of an estate called Wessyngtonlands from the Bishop of Durham. As was the custom for English gentry of the era, he took the name of his new lands. William de Wessyngton, the records called him. Generations later, the spelling shifted to Washington. The family stayed at this hall through the Middle Ages until the early 15th century, when Sir William Mallory married Dionysia Tempest, the last Wessyngton heir at the hall. Dionysia was the daughter of Sir William Tempest and his cousin Eleanor Wessyngton - the family lines tangled through cousins and second marriages, as such families always did. In 1613, Sir John Mallory and his wife Anna Eure - both shareholders in the Virginia Company that would soon send colonists across the Atlantic - moved south to Sulgrave Manor in Northamptonshire. The Washington manor was sold to the Bishop of Durham. The trail that would eventually lead to a baby born at Westmoreland County, Virginia, in 1732 began with that sale.
The Hall continued to be lived in until the 19th century, when industrial Washington engulfed it. The old gentry rooms were subdivided into working-class flats. By the 1930s, the building was a wreck of damp plaster and crumbling sandstone, and the city was finished with it. Fred Hill was not. The schoolteacher refused to accept that the ancestral home of George Washington should be flattened. He found allies. Restoration began in 1937, paused for the Second World War, and was finally completed in 1955. The American Ambassador, Winthrop W. Aldrich, opened the restored hall. Two years later, in 1957, the National Trust took on responsibility for the building, ensuring it would not fall again.
The hall today is a small, dignified early 17th-century manor of warm sandstone, built on the medieval foundations of the older Wessyngton house. Only the foundations and the stone arches between the kitchen and the Great Hall survive from the original. Inside, oak panelling and a great hearth recall the rhythms of a Jacobean household. Every July 4, American Independence Day is marked here with a ceremony - the only place in England where the first president's ancestral home is celebrated as the family seat that gave his name to a continent. In 2007, Washington D.C. and the City of Sunderland signed a friendship agreement, hoping to build cultural and economic ties between the two places that share a name. One is a marble capital of 700,000 people. The other is a small Tyne and Wear town. Both trace back to the same family, and to this hall.
Washington Old Hall sits at 54.9027 N, 1.5164 W, in the centre of Washington, Tyne and Wear. Newcastle International Airport (EGNT) is approximately 5 nm north. Look for the village core just east of the A1(M) motorway between junctions 64 and 65, with the small sandstone hall visible against surrounding 20th-century housing. Sunderland's coast lies 5 nm east; the River Wear meanders south of the town. Best viewed at 1,500-3,000 feet AGL.