Did George Washington, the father of our country, our 1st President, actually have wooden teeth?

Well, he had only one natural tooth in his mouth when he was elected President, and he still had that single bicuspid when he gave his inaugural address, which may account for why it was so short (compared to the one at Gettysburg).

Tooth-care, in those days, was scanty, rare, painful, and expensive — but Washington was a very rich landowner, a slave owner, and an extremely wealthy soldier and politician from Virginia.

He could well have afforded the exorbitant cost of dental care — in fact, there were several sets of false teeth made for him, ranging from a type of hardened bone to authentic animal extracts that were mounted amidst cumbersome contraptions that were designed to give him a certain dietary and cosmetic flexibility.

However, none ‘worked’ to Washington’s specifications and satisfaction — none, that is, until he received a set of wooden false teeth (unsolicited) from a Dr. Homer Fessner, DDS of Philadelphia.

Although he never paid Dr. Fessner for the wooden teeth, he wore them for the official paintings by Sam Grissom — including the one which appears in the center of the one dollar bill today!

That may be why Washington’s cheeks appear ‘puffier’ than normal, more filled out than they should be. The springs and hinges were tough enough to orally manipulate but the teeth themselves were, for all attempts and purposes, unmanageable.

On his deathbed, at age 67, his doctors and others persuaded him to donate the wooden teeth to the Smithsonian Institution. Which he did.

On July 17, 1931 they were stolen from a locked drawer at the Smithsonian, a federal archive.

You may not know it, but someone has committed a Federal Crime.

***On a personal note: there will not be a My Newsletter or My Blog this coming Wednesday, Dec. 24, Xmas Eve***


Copyright©2014 by Robert A. Mills, all rights reserved, may not be published, nor re-written nor broadcast without the author’s permission