Virginia, the "Mother State of Presidents," reproduced George Washington's home at Mount Vernon. The architect, Charles K. Bryant, made exhaustive measurements of the original. One wing, joined to the house by covered galleries, held the kitchen and dining room. The other copied an old Virginia farmstead. Todd found that the quaint colonial architecture carried visitors out of 1915 and back to the Revolution.
Washington relics lent by Miss Nannie Randolph Heth, the hostess, filled the rooms. In an upper room was a bed shown as the one on which Washington died (Todd), though the bedstead he died in had been back at Mount Vernon since 1877. There were also Martha Washington's needlework table and Washington's desk. On Virginia Day, July 8, about a thousand guests danced on a platform built between the wings.
The very quaintness of its colonial architecture took you out of the atmosphere of the year 1915, and translated you into the time and place of the Revolution.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 3, p. 354 (1921)
