Viewing the Landscape of the George Washington Memorial Parkway: A Cultural History of Scenic Resources and Landscape Ideology

This paper investigates several views along the George Washington Memorial Parkway, which runs along the Potomac River between Washington, DC, and George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon. It focuses on the role these views have had in transforming the banks of the Potomac into a landscape, and it compares them to a set of landscape paintings that reveal complexities in the ideology of landscape. These dimensions of landscape ideology are used to interpret the parkway as a landscape, a projection of certain values on the land. The paper concludes with a discussion of the values of this approach for the stewardship of visual resources.