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One of the most popular historical exhibits at Mount Vernon, originally the estate of the first President of the United States and now a monument to his life and legacy, is a set of the great man's dentures. The crude, handmade prosthesis, comprising both upper and lower teeth, is displayed in a circular glass case permitting a 360-degree view. The majority of Mount Vernon's one million visitors per year, one presumes, pause to stare at the famous choppers for at least a moment before moving on to the table settings. The fascination with George Washington's false teeth could be attributable to various factors — that they're a medical curiosity from the 18th century, when dentistry was still just this side of barbaric; that they're an intimate vestige of the man himself, letting us feel closer to him; or, maybe, that we're all just eager to see if the scuttlebutt we heard and repeated as kids is true: that the Father of Our Country had wooden teeth. The exhibit does not disappoint. One look at the contraption itself, which is actually made out of metal, ivory, and real teeth (both animal and human), is enough to see that it wasn't carved out of wood: Plus, there's a plaque that lays out the facts in black and white: As was common at the time, the dentures were ill-fitting, awkward, and sometimes painful. They distorted Washington's appearance, mainly by making his lower lip protrude, as can be seen in contemporaneous portraiture of the first president. According to historian Michael Beschloss, his teeth were an embarrassment to him: Washington was plagued by dental problems throughout most of his adult life. He attributed the misfortune to cracking of walnuts in his youth, his friend John Adams wrote, though heredity must have played a part, as well. Bad hygiene, too, though Washington wouldn't have been entirely to blame. It’s not that George Washington was sloppy about dental hygiene, John L. Smith notes in Journal of the American Revolution, it’s just that dental hygiene was practically non-existent in the late eighteenth century: George Washington wore several different sets of dentures over the course of his lifetime, none made of wood. Instead, the dentists treating him would have used the cutting-edge materials of the time: bone, ivory, lead, brass, gold, and the castaway teeth of horses, donkeys, cows, and, yes, human beings. Washington is said to have saved his own extracted teeth for future use in dentures. A longstanding rumor that Washington purchased teeth from his slaves may be true, as well, Michael Beschloss writes: As to how and why the rumor of Washington's wooden teeth took hold in the first place, no one knows for sure, but there are two main theories, both based on the assumption that his dentures must have looked like they were made of wood. One holds that they turned mottled and brown with age, the other that their woodiness was due to Washington's habit of drinking fortified wine: Two hundred fifty years later, we're still talking about Washington's wooden teeth. Like the cherry tree he never chopped down as a child, they are forever enshrined in American legend.
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