As a boy, George Washington strongly considered a career in the Royal Navy and studying geometry and celestial navigation.  To improve his skills, he took up surveying using a set of surveyor’s instruments his father owned for his farm. Early in 1748, Washington accompanied George Fairfax and James Genn, the Royal Surveyor of Prince William County, on a month-long trip west across the Blue Ridge Mountains.  Although the surveys were actually performed by the more experienced members of the party, the trip was Washington’s formal initiation into the field and led him to pursue surveying as a profession.

 By 1749, convinced that settlements were essential to controlling lands, the English colony of Virginia was promoting western expansion by offering speculators 1,000 acres for every family they could place. That year, at the age of 17, George Washington was appointed as the Surveyor General for Virginia and Surveyor General by the College of William and Mary. The College was charged with the examination and licensing of surveyors.  After three years, George Washington knew western Virginia as well as anyone and was well aware of its great value. For the next several decades, he pursued two intertwined interests, military arts and western expansion.

Prospective settlers were required to obtain a survey warrant of their claimed acreage in a specific location. The survey warrant, issued directly from the Land Office to the county surveyor, instructed the surveyor to make a “just and true” survey of the land, thereby officially determining and limiting its boundaries. Because they were responsible for laying out the land claims, surveyors had a unique role in Virginia society. Their appointments guaranteed a certain social prominence.  Surveyors were also among the best-educated Virginians and were often in the best position to purchase land for themselves. It was not unusual for surveyors to acquire large estates from the many opportunities they had to patent land in their own names. Frontier surveyors could earn an annual cash income that was exceeded only by the colony’s finest trial lawyers.  This fit well to Washington’s aspirations to be as well respected as his older brother.

Washington’s decisive involvement in the French and Indian War, in which he served as lieutenant colonel of the newly formed Virginia Regiment, was due in part to the backcountry knowledge and map-making skills he had gained from surveying. In 1753, one year before Lieutenant Governor Dinwiddie called for additional troops under Washington’s command to defend Virginia’s Ohio Valley frontier, Washington was chosen to deliver an ultimatum to the French at Fort Le Boeuf (site of present-day Waterford, Pennsylvania), insisting that they withdraw from the valley. When his report of this venture, The Journal of Major George Washington, was printed in Williamsburg and then reprinted in London, it catapulted him onto the world stage.

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