George Washington Memorial Tree (D.A.R.)
Seattle, King County, Washington
Marker Inscription
In memory of George Washington. This tree is planted by Mary Morris Chapter D.A.R. in the bicentennial year of his birth. 1932
The Story
In 1932, the two-hundredth anniversary of George Washington's birth, patriotic and civic groups across the country planted trees, raised markers, and held ceremonies in his honor. Here the Mary Morris Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution planted a tree and set this plaque to mark the bicentennial. Such living memorials linked a twentieth-century community to the founding generation.
Why it matters
The 1932 bicentennial was a nationwide act of civic memory, and markers like this one show how Americans have continually renewed their bond with the Revolution's leading figure.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
This memorial tree and its plaque were set in Seattle in 1932, the two-hundredth anniversary of George Washington's birth. That year marked a nationwide season of remembrance, when communities across the United States paused to honor the man most associated with the nation's founding — planting trees, dedicating markers, and holding ceremonies from coast to coast.
The early 1930s were hard years, deep in the Great Depression, and that context gives the bicentennial a particular poignancy. In a time of economic anxiety, Americans reached back to their founding generation for reassurance and a sense of shared identity. Civic memory became a source of steadiness.
Seattle, young by the standards of the original states, took part in the commemoration just as older cities did. The planting of a living memorial here linked a twentieth-century Pacific Northwest community to a founding figure whose life had unfolded three thousand miles away and two centuries before.
People & events
The plaque records that the tree was planted by the Mary Morris Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in the bicentennial year of Washington's birth. The D.A.R., an organization devoted to honoring the Revolution and its legacy, was among the many groups that made the 1932 bicentennial a truly national event.
The choice of a tree as the memorial is itself telling. Rather than carve a monument only in stone, the chapter planted something living — a memorial meant to grow, to endure, and to tie the passage of years to the memory of a founder. It was a gesture repeated in countless communities that year, each rooting the nation's past in local ground.
The figure at the center, of course, is George Washington himself — commander of the Continental Army and the first president. In 1932 his memory was invoked not as distant history but as a living inheritance, and this quiet Seattle planting was one community's way of claiming its share of that inheritance.
Its place in the American story
The 1932 Washington bicentennial was one of the largest acts of coordinated civic memory in American history, observed in cities and towns across the entire country. It reflected a recurring national impulse: at moments of uncertainty, Americans renew their connection to the Revolution and to the founders who gave the nation its start.
Markers and memorials like this one show how that connection is maintained not only in the original thirteen states but everywhere the nation later reached. A tree planted in Seattle for a Virginian-born founder is a small proof that the story of the Revolution belongs to the whole country, not just the ground where it was fought.
There is also a lesson here about how history stays alive. It is kept not only in textbooks and grand monuments but in the ordinary acts of civic groups — planting, dedicating, remembering — that hand the past forward from one generation to the next. This memorial is a modest but genuine link in that chain.
If you visit
Look for the plaque and the tree together, and read them as a pair: a marker fixed in 1932 beside a living thing that has been growing ever since. That pairing is the whole point — a memorial meant not just to be seen but to keep growing over the decades.
Give a thought to the year it was placed. In the depths of the Depression, a local chapter took the time to honor a founder from two centuries earlier, and to root that memory here in the Pacific Northwest. The gesture says something about how much the founding generation still meant.
As a stop, it's a small, contemplative one — the kind of quiet civic memorial easy to walk past without noticing. Slowing down to read it connects you to a nationwide moment of remembrance and to the everyday work of keeping the nation's earliest story present in a modern American city.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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