George Eskridge was guardian to Mary Ball, who would become the mother of George Washington. According to family tradition, Mary named her son “George” in honor of her devoted guardian—a practice not uncommon at the time, and notable since no ancestral Georges are known in either the Ball or Washington families. But Eskridge’s significance extended far beyond this connection to America’s first president.
An eminent lawyer in colonial Virginia, George Eskridge served for thirty years in the Virginia House of Burgesses, from 1705 until his death in 1735. During this time, he worked in both the Jamestown and Williamsburg assemblies, where he was appointed to important committees, prepared legislation, and served as a messenger conveying the House’s sentiments to the Governor of Virginia and to London.
Eskridge established his home at Sandy Point in Westmoreland County, though his holdings extended throughout the Northern Neck, the Richmond area, and Northern Virginia. The inventory taken after his death reveals a man of considerable intellectual breadth: his large library contained extensive collections on law, theology, religious history, spiritual questions, and philosophy—the library of a man who thought deeply about both earthly justice and eternal questions.
George married Rebecca Bonum sometime before 1696, and together they had eight children before her death in 1715. He married his second wife, Elizabeth Vaulx Porten, about a year later, and they had one child. George Eskridge died in 1735; his burial place remains unknown.
Today, the Virginia Museum of History and Culture preserves the legacy of George and Rebecca Eskridge through their portraits—works considered especially valuable because of their extensive provenance and the unusual presentation of the subjects. While the museum holds many portraits from the colonial period, a great number depict unknown individuals, particularly women. Rebecca’s portrait is one of the few from that era in which a colonial woman can be positively identified, and it was featured in the museum’s exhibition on Virginia women for this reason. These portraits once hung at George Washington’s Mount Vernon but were eventually transferred to the Virginia Museum, as they were not displayed there during Washington’s lifetime.
For more information about the portraits, including stylistic analysis of the subjects, visit the