I am related to a man who once knew a man who knew another man who knew George Washington. And to prove it, my family has a souvenir of the great relationship between the first President and that friend of a friend of my now departed relative.
It seems that when Washington was feeling pressed by affairs of state, he would drive out from the then capital city of Philadelphia and visit Belmont, the home of Judge Richard Peters. ''There, sequestered from the world, the torments and cares of business, Washington would enjoy a vivacious, recreative, and wholly unceremonious intercourse with the Judge," writes historian Henry Simpson in his voluminous The Lives of Eminent Philadelphians, Now Deceased.
According to Simpson and my 19th-century relative, one Henry Hoppin of Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, Belmont was also home to a grand old chestnut tree planted by Washington himself. Using wood taken from that tree after it died in the 1860s, Hoppin and his friend John Levering carved four walking sticks. In a letter written around 1876, Hoppin, a prudent man, carefully documented the facts relating to his two souvenirs of the President and the tree from which they were carved.
