George 3: Surveying the Wilderness

From March to April 1748 the 16 year old George Washington was off on his first expedition into the wilderness. His assignment was to survey the land, and lay out lots, from Lord Fairfax's vast holdings along the banks of the Shenandoah River. He traveled on horseback, accompanied by the Lord's son, George William Fairfax. Many nights they slept out in the open, beside a campfire, eating wild turkey or some other game they managed to capture.

There were already some settlers out there on the frontier west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Many of the settlers were actually squatting on Lord Fairfax's land, and many of them spoke German rather than English. At one cabin the family offered to sleep in front of the fireplace and give George the bed. When he found that the bed was a straw mat with no sheet overed by a thin blanket, the whole thing swarming with bugs, George decided he would sleep in front of the fireplace as well. At one point the surveyors came across an Indian war party with a scalp and watched them dance in celebration late into the night.

We know quite a bit about this trip because George kept a journal where he recorded his observations of the land and people he came across. The surveying expedition was a great success and with his new experience and the support of the Fairfax family George became a Public Surveyor for Culpepper County, Virginia.

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[This is one of the best single volume biographies of our greatest President.]

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Young George spent about three years working as a surveyor. He did more than 190 surveys in that time and must have been pretty well paid because he saved up enough money to buy a 1,459 acre estate on Bullskin Creek.

During these years tensions were growing between the British and the French in North America since they both laid claim to the lands along the Ohio River. The English were moving West from Virginia and Pennsylvania while the French were moving South from Canada and they were ending up in the same place – starting to crowd each other. Both sides were trying to win the loyalty and trade of the Native American tribes in the Ohio Valley while keeping the other side out.

Lawrence Washington now used his influence with Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia to have George appointed an Adjutant-General with the rank of Major. This position made George responsible for raising, organizing, and equipping militia units when he was just 19 years old. Two of Lawrence's friends were called upon to give the young officer some training. A man named Adjutant Muse started teaching him military tactics while a Jacob Van Braam taught him to fence.

George would be interested in land for the rest of his life but his professional surveying career was over. He was now starting out on a military career that would lead through many twists and turns, and one long period of retirement, but would ultimately make him known and respected around the world, and also lead to the founding of a new nation.

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Note:

My biographical study of George Washington was intended for my own education but I thought I would also like to share what I have learned here on my blog. The main sources of information I used were:

First, "George Washington: A Biography" by Washington Irving. I like this one because it was written by one of our early American literary masters and because it was written so long ago that Irving often mentions talking with people who had actually seen George.

Second, "Washington: An abridgement in one volume By Richard Harwell of the seven-volume George Washington" By Douglas Southall Freeman. I wanted the complete seven volume set but that is not yet available on Kindle. Too bad. Still, this abridgement is a great work, packed with information.

Third, "Washington: A Life" By Ron Chernow. This is an excellent modern biography that came out in 2010, helping me to get some of the more recent research missing from the older biographies.

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Copyright © 2018 by Joseph Wayne Gadway

George 2: Befriending Aristocrats

When the youthful George Washington visited his half-brother Lawrence at Mount Vernon he was only a few miles from Belvoir, the estate of Lord Fairfax. Of all the members of the British Peerage Lord Fairfax was the only one who visited the colonies and decided to make his permanent residence there. Maybe he was influenced by the fact that he owned more than 5 MILLION acres in the Potomac and Shenandoah Valleys.

Since Lawrence had married into the Fairfax family George had many opportunities to visit the old aristocrat who was about 40 years his senior. As a young boy George had written out 110 maxims of good behavior from a book of etiquette so he would know how to behave in polite society and this probably helped him make a good impression in the noble household.

Lord Fairfax's true passion, though, was not etiquette but fox hunting – and what really won him over to friendship with his teenaged neighbor was the discovery that George was a great horseman who could ride to the hounds just as hard and fearlessly as he could himself. Fairfax grew to respect his young neighbor so much that he hired him to survey his vast lands when George was only 16 years old.

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[This is one of the best single volume biographies of our greatest President.]

[If you want to support "Anything Smart" just click on book links like the one below to buy your books. "Anything Smart" will receive a commission. Thanks!]

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George had very little formal education as a child. He probably had some lessons at home to supplement his meager classroom experience. Part of his self-education was copying all sorts of legal documents such as deeds into his notebooks. This was the kind of useful information that would be helpful to a great landowner someday.

He learned reading and writing and arithmetic from the parish sexton in a little school house. Later he did some more advanced studies under a Mr. Williams. Here he learned some higher mathematics and maybe some English Literature and the beginnings of surveying.

George became especially interested in surveying and practiced around Mount Vernon. He kept a field notebook where he recorded his measurements, diagrams, and calculations. Surveying was an especially useful skill in a land where millions of acres would soon be divided up and sold. When Lord Fairfax asked George to survey his lands the young man was ready for the job, and ready for his first expedition into the wilderness.

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Note:
My biographical study of George Washington was intended for my own education but I thought I would also like to share what I have learned here on my blog. The main sources of information I used were:

First, "George Washington: A Biography" by Washington Irving. I like this one because it was written by one of our early American literary masters and because it was written so long ago that Irving often mentions talking with people who had actually seen George.

Second, "Washington: An abridgement in one volume By Richard Harwell of the seven-volume George Washington" By Douglas Southall Freeman. I wanted the complete seven volume set but that is not yet available on Kindle. Too bad. Still, this abridgement is a great work, packed with information.

Third, "Washington: A Life" By Ron Chernow. This is an excellent modern biography that came out in 2010, helping me to get some of the more recent research missing from the older biographies.

***

Copyright © 2018 by Joseph Wayne Gadway

Achieving Excellence with Lean Manufacturing

Lean Manufacturing teaches us how to accomplish more with less. It focuses on serving customers with single-minded devotion because it is the customers who pay us. Lean continually reminds us that any activity that does not serve the customer is waste and we should do our best to eliminate it.

The creater of Lean Manufacturing was Toyota, which calls it The Toyota Production System. Lean ideas are often counter-intuitive and people find some of them hard to understand or accept. Some organizations trying to implement Lean do not achieve the success they were hoping for because they did not really have a deep understanding of what they were doing or why they were doing it.

This great article "Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System" from 1999 aims to tell us about some of the deep principles of Lean, the "unspoken rules," the key elements that can make the difference between success and failure in business.

The authors discuss four of the fundamental requirements of a Lean Manufacturing system:

1. All work is highly specified in its content, sequence, timing, and outcome
2. Each worker knows who provides what to him, and when
3. Every product and service flows along a simple, specified path
4. Any improvement to processes, worker/machine connections, or flow paths must be made through the scientific method, under a teacher's guidance, and at the lowest possible organizational level.

The underlying theme of all of these rules, and of the whole article, is the importance of combining rigidity and flexibility in an organization.

Why would we want to combine rigidity and flexibility? And how would we do that?

First, to get consistent performance we need work procedures precisely defined so they are done exactly the same way every time. Think of a checklist followed by a pilot before taking off. This is the rigidity part of the system. Why do we have to be so rigid? If different people do the same job in different ways at different times we will never know for sure what works and what doesn't work! If, on the other hand, we require everyone doing a job to follow exactly the same procedure every time then, if there is something wrong with that procedure, we are going to find out FAST.

Second, to drive continuous improvement, when we discover a situation where a procedure does not work then we need the flexibility part of the system to kick in. We need front-line workers to be trained in problem-solving techniques so they can handle issues quickly and effectively under the guidance of their immediate supervisors. Think of a race car coming into pit row for an emergency repair. Solving a problem with a procedure leads to a new procedure which everyone is required to follow so we can find out if this one works better.

By combining the rigidity of requiring adherence to precisely defined procedures with the flexibility of fast problem solving right on the manufacturing floor we get the advantages of consistent performance of best known practices while simultaneously driving continuous improvements.

That sounds like a great recipe for making a company more successful!

There are other powerful ideas in this article which is worth careful study by anyone interested in improving organizational performance.

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[Great book about using Lean to achieve world-class results in your organization.]

[If you want to support "Anything Smart" just click on book links like the one below to buy your books. "Anything Smart" will receive a commission. Thanks!]

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Copyright © 2018 by Joseph Wayne Gadway