George Washington's sleeping and office tent, the marquee he lived and worked in through the rest of the Revolutionary War, is the centrepiece of the Museum of the American Revolution at Third and Chestnut Streets. His first tents, bought in Philadelphia in May 1776 from the upholsterer Plunkett Fleeson, were worn beyond repair by the Valley Forge winter of 1777 and 1778. Artisans in Reading, Pennsylvania, made a new pair of marquees in early 1778: a larger dining tent for his aides and guests, and this smaller sleeping marquee, with an inner chamber dividing it into sleeping, office and baggage quarters. The tent went with Washington to Yorktown in 1781 and home to Mount Vernon in 1783.
The tent passed to Martha Washington's grandson George Washington Parke Custis, who hosted Lafayette under one in 1824. His daughter Mary inherited the tents, and when her husband, Robert E. Lee, joined the Confederacy in 1861 the family left them at Arlington. In January 1862 Selina Gray, an enslaved woman in charge of the house's contents, warned the occupying Union Army that the Washington relics were at risk, and they went on public view at the Patent Office in Washington.
Mary petitioned for their return until her death in 1873, and in 1901 President William McKinley ordered them returned to her family. Her daughter and namesake put two tents up for sale for charity in 1906, and the sleeping marquee went to the Reverend W. Herbert Burk's museum at the Washington Memorial Chapel in Valley Forge in 1909. Burk's collection passed to the Museum of the American Revolution, which opened on 19 April 2017 with the tent in its own theatre.
Getting there
39.9484, -75.1458
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