08/20/2026
“I was but a child of twelve years old.”
Britannia Peter Kennon, seated at left, remembered summer evenings at Tudor Place: visitors arriving by carriage, the pleasure of familiar company, and a yellow carriage waiting beneath the locust tree near the box circle.
Britannia was Tudor Place’s longest-tenured owner. Born while James Madison was president, she lived to 95, long enough to witness the arrival of electric light, the telephone, and the automobile.
Her letters, papers, household accounts, and receipts from 1860 to 1911 offer an intimate record of life at Tudor Place across more than half a century.
But Britannia belongs to this history not only as a subject. 𝐒𝐡𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐚 𝐬𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐜𝐞 ✍️
In the 1890s, her grandchildren began asking what she remembered, and they wrote down her recollections. Much of what we know about the first century of this house reaches us through the memory of a woman in her eighties.
It is a reminder that history does not live only in documents and objects. Sometimes, it survives because someone remembered.
Those reminiscences were published for the first time as 𝐴 𝐺𝑒𝑜𝑟𝑔𝑒𝑡𝑜𝑤𝑛 𝐿𝑖𝑓𝑒, edited by Grant S. Quertermous. Find it in the Tudor Place Museum Shop – 20% off for members through August. Link in bio. 🌷
