The first president oversees the goings-on in an area known as Market Square in downtown Houlton from atop his highly polished black marble plinth in an island in the square. The bust of Washington and plinth were gifted to the citizens of the state of Maine by several Masonic Lodges and the Grand Commandery of Maine in 1999. This is fitting, as George Washington himself was a Freemason.
On the rear of the plinth is a quote of Washington's, taken from a prayer he presented in 1783. It reads as follows:
"ALMIGHTY GOD, WE MAKE OUR
EARNEST PRAYER THAT THOU
WILT ... INCLINE THE HEARTS OF
THE CITIZENS ... TO ENTERTAIN
A BROTHERLY AFFECTION AND
LOVE FOR ONE ANOTHER
AND FOR THEIR FELLOW CITIZENS
OF THE UNITED STATES AT LARGE."
WOR. BRO. GEORGE WASHINGTON
FROM A PRAYER DATED 1783
George Washington
On April 30, 1789, George Washington, standing on the balcony of Federal Hall on Wall Street in New York, took his oath of office as the first President of the United States. “As the first of everything, in our situation will serve to establish a Precedent,” he wrote James Madison, “it is devoutly wished on my part, that these precedents may be fixed on true principles.”
Born in 1732 into a Virginia planter family, he learned the morals, manners, and body of knowledge requisite for an 18th century Virginia gentleman...
...From 1759 to the outbreak of the American Revolution, Washington managed his lands around Mount Vernon and served in the Virginia House of Burgesses. Married to a widow, Martha Dandridge Custis, he devoted himself to a busy and happy life. But like his fellow planters, Washington felt himself exploited by British merchants and hampered by British regulations. As the quarrel with the mother country grew acute, he moderately but firmly voiced his resistance to the restrictions.
When the Second Continental Congress assembled in Philadelphia in May 1775, Washington, one of the Virginia delegates, was elected Commander in Chief of the Continental Army. On July 3, 1775, at Cambridge, Massachusetts, he took command of his ill-trained troops and embarked upon a war that was to last six grueling years...
...Washington longed to retire to his fields at Mount Vernon. But he soon realized that the Nation under its Articles of Confederation was not functioning well, so he became a prime mover in the steps leading to the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia in 1787. When the new Constitution was ratified, the Electoral College unanimously elected Washington President.
He did not infringe upon the policy making powers that he felt the Constitution gave Congress. But the determination of foreign policy became preponderantly a Presidential concern. When the French Revolution led to a major war between France and England, Washington refused to accept entirely the recommendations of either his Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, who was pro-French, or his Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, who was pro-British. Rather, he insisted upon a neutral course until the United States could grow stronger...
...Washington enjoyed less than three years of retirement at Mount Vernon, for he died of a throat infection December 14, 1799. For months the Nation mourned him.
From The Whitehouse