There is another interesting story of a young black who helped George Washington. As I recall he was only 13 or 14 and wanted to help. The General deemed him to be too young, but gave him an assignment to remain on shore and to maintain a fire to help guide them back after the battle. Upon return, the fire was out and the boy had frozen to death. The General ordered a cast iron model of the boy standing up, holding a lantern. That may be the origin of the use of what later became known as 'lawn Jockey's'. The statuette was at Mt. Vernon for many years.
What a great story. Thanks.
George Washington was, and always be, our greatest president. He was a remarkable man.
I agree that Washington is amazing and remarkable and our greatest president. However, as to the story, I do not want to propogate things that are not true, and the story may be suspect. Washington is great without it.
That story seems mainly a copy-paste from Wikipedia.com.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawn_jockey
They are liberal, of course, though not all entries are. The last part of that article debunks itself somewhat!
“Neither the Revolutionary War nor the Civil War legends are corroborated by historical records. Mount Vernon’s librarian Ellen McCallister Clark wrote in a letter to Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library: “No record of anybody by the name of Jocko Graves, nor any account of somebody freezing to death holding Washington’s horses, exists in the extensive historical record of the time.” Nor do any of the many historical inventories and descriptions of Washington’s estate mention any such statue. Moreover, stories about the Underground Railroad using lawn jockeys as signals are rendered suspect by the fact that red and green as signal colors meaning “stop” and “go” (or “danger” and “safe”) were standardized by railway signals during the World War I era.”