George Mason Memorial

Namesake

The memorial commemorates George Mason, a Founding Father who wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights, served as a delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and created much of the language, inspiration, and groundwork for what became the United States Bill of Rights. Mason, an Anti-Federalist, did not sign the United States Constitution because it did not abolish the slave trade and because he did not think it had necessary protection for the individual from the federal government. He was sometimes known as the "reluctant statesman", which was also the title of a 1980 biography written about him by Robert A. Rutland.

History

The memorial was authorized by Public Law 101–358 on August 10, 1990, to be developed by the board of regents of Gunston Hall, a museum at Mason's historic home in Mason Neck, Virginia. The memorial's landscape architect was Faye B. Harwell and the sculptor was Wendy M. Ross. The groundbreaking was October 18, 2000, and the completed memorial was dedicated on April 9, 2002. The memorial was placed within an existing historic garden, at the site of the last remaining "national garden" of the four that had been established in Washington by the McMillan Plan of 1902.

In 1929, the garden was redesigned as "the Pansy Garden". The designers researched and restored the original circular garden layout, and plantings drew from that heritage, as well as from Mason's own favored plants and those used at Gunston Hall. The George Mason Memorial is currently administered as part of the National Park Service and is within the jurisdiction of the National Mall and Memorial Parks. It is one of three sites in the National Mall area where weddings are permitted; the nearby Jefferson Memorial and the District of Columbia War Memorial are the others.

Sculpture

The design features a 72 ft long stone wall with a one-third larger than life-sized statue of a sitting Mason, his legs crossed, and a circular pool with a fountain. Mason leans back on his left hand to ponder something from Cicero's 44 BC treatise De Officiis, which he holds closed on his right index finger. Two other volumes, John Locke's 1706 posthumously published Of the Conduct of the Understanding and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Du Contract Social (1762), sit on the bench to Mason's left. Mason's walking stick leans on his hat which sits on the bench to his right.