More "Bakery" Hits, George Washington, and "ghost" writers

Sam Clements sclements at NEO.RR.COM
Sat May 3 00:14:20 UTC 2003


Doug's additions cited below caused me to learn more about Washington's
letters.  I'm not very scholarly along those lines, but  I understand that
many of the "letters" are not in Washington's hand(i.e. Fred Shapiro's
original find of a Washington letter dated 24 May, 1780).  The LOC notes say
the MS was in Alexander Hamilton's hand.

My question is, if many of the letters are written by various secretaries
and many are letterbook transcriptions, how sure can one be that GW said
"bakery?"  Or "Bake House?"  Who really knows what George called it?  It
occurs to me that a good secretary might use his/her own words to polish up
a letter that George dictated.

Might not the Bake House/Bakery choice be nothing more than "who" was doing
the writing?  Maybe Alexander Hamilton called it a bakery, and George called
it a Bake House.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas G. Wilson" <douglas at NB.NET>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Thursday, May 01, 2003 10:14 PM
Subject: Re: More "Bakery" Hits


> Here are two "consecutive" letters from G. W. (1781) showing "bake house"
> and "bakery".
>
> http://memory.loc.gov/mss/mgw/mgw3d/001/334334.gif
>
> -- Doug Wilson
>



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