On August 7, 1765, a 33-year-old Virginia planter scribbled a single sentence in his diary: “Began to seperate the Male from the Female hemp at Do.—rather too late.” For two centuries, stoners have read that line and smelled a co-conspirator. The actual George Washington would like a word.
The farmer who hated losing to the British tobacco market
Before he was a statue, Washington was a failing tobacco planter getting gouged by his London factors. Joseph Ellis argues in His Excellency that Washington’s debts to English merchants “instilled him with a prickly resentment of imperial power” — the tobacco system was rigged, and he knew it. So the guy experimented. Ron Chernow notes that Washington trialed roughly sixty different crops at Mount Vernon, chasing an alternative cash crop. Hemp was one of them. In September 1765 he wrote Robert Cary & Co. in London asking about “the general price one might expect for good Hemp in your Port watered & prepared according to Act of Parliament.” The business case was simple: Parliament was paying a bounty to get colonists off Russian hemp imports, and Washington wanted in.
It didn’t work out. By 1766, wheat was out-earning everything else — his wheat yield exploded from 257 bushels in 1764 to 6,241 by 1769. Washington pivoted. But he never stopped growing hemp; he just stopped trying to ship it to London. According to Mount Vernon’s Director of Horticulture Dean Norton, Washington “references hemp more than 90 times in his journals and diaries.” It grew at all five farms — Mansion House, River Farm, Dogue Run, Muddy Hole, and Union Farm.
What was the hemp actually for?
Here’s where we throw cold water on the “GW was a pothead” meme. Mount Vernon’s official position, with primary-source receipts:
“There is no truth to the statement that George Washington grew marijuana. His hemp crop was strictly the industrial strain needed for the production of rope, thread, canvas, and other industrial applications.”
Industrial hemp — Cannabis sativa bred for fiber — contains less than 0.3 percent THC. Smoke a field of it and you’ll get a headache, not a buzz. Washington’s hemp went into rope, thread for sacking, sailing canvas, and — most lucratively — the seine nets for Mount Vernon’s shad and herring fishery, the estate’s biggest moneymaker.
But what about “rather too late”?
Stoner folklore reads “rather too late” as Washington lamenting he missed the window for sinsemilla — unfertilized female buds. Cute theory. Zero evidence. The standard agricultural practice, documented in the books Washington owned, was to separate the male plants because their stalks yielded coarser, stronger fiber — you pulled them at a different time than the seed-bearing females. Washington himself clarifies two weeks later: “Began to pull Hemp at the Mill and at Muddy hole—too late for the blossom Hemp by three Weeks or a Month.” He was griping about fiber timing, not drug potency.
The India hemp experiment
In 1794, while running the country, Washington kept nagging his farm manager William Pearce about a variety called “India hemp.” On August 17, 1794 — literally during the Whiskey Rebellion crisis — he wrote Pearce to “desire that the Seed may be saved in due season & with as little loss as possible: that, if it be valuable, I may make the most of it.” In 1796 he judged India hemp “more valuable than the common Hemp.” Valuable for what? The surrounding correspondence — textiles, rope, plantation self-sufficiency — makes the answer unambiguous: better fiber.
The renegade angle
Here’s what we love about Washington for this brand: he lost more battles than he won. He got chased off Long Island. He nearly lost Brandywine. A frustrated John Adams grumbled, “I am sick of Fabian systems in all quarters.” Washington was nicknamed the “American Fabius” because his whole strategy was to refuse to lose decisively, wear the empire down, and keep the army alive for one more winter. That’s renegade as hell. He was also a farmer-innovator who designed a sixteen-sided treading barn, pioneered seven-year crop rotation, and confessed in 1788 that he wanted nothing more than to “glide silently and unnoticed through the remainder of life.” The guy didn’t want to be president. He took the job because the republic needed him to.
Why this matters in 2026
On the 250th anniversary of a country Washington bled for but wasn’t sure would survive, we’re naming a strain after a man who quietly grew hemp at five farms while fighting the most powerful empire on earth. He didn’t get high off it. He made rope with it — rope that hauled in the fish that fed his estate, rope that rigged the ships of a newborn navy. That’s the whole damn American story in one fiber.
Sources
- “George Washington Grew Hemp,” Mount Vernon Digital Encyclopedia, Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association.
- Washington diary, 7 Aug. 1765; Washington to William Pearce, 17 Aug. 1794 and 29 May 1796; Washington to Robert Cary & Co., 20 Sept. 1765 — Founders Online, National Archives.
- Donald Jackson & Dorothy Twohig, eds., The Diaries of George Washington (University Press of Virginia, 1976–79).
- Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (Penguin, 2010); Joseph J. Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington (Knopf, 2004); Edward G. Lengel, First Entrepreneur (Da Capo, 2016).
- John L. Smith Jr., “The Truth About George Washington and Hemp,” Journal of the American Revolution, Oct. 6, 2016.
- Associated Press, “Rope, not dope: Mount Vernon grows hemp for first time since Washington,” Aug. 22, 2018.
