Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy

by Nathaniel Philbrick

the duck-tolling retriever. The term “tolling” comes from the Middle English word tollen, meaning to attract or entice; church bells toll to lure parishioners.

the domain of the longleaf pine—a species of tree most of us in the twenty-first century have never seen but that in the eighteenth century covered an estimated ninety million acres, all the way south from North Carolina to Florida and as far west as Texas. An individual longleaf pine tree could live for up to five hundred years and grow to a width of 3 feet and a height of 110 feet.