A young woman from Troy named Sarah Tracy attended the Troy Female Seminary from 1833 to 1835 and again in 1837-38, after which, like so many other young women who studied with Emma Willard, she went south to teach.  By 1860, however, she had a new job.  She was an assistant to Ann Pamela Cunningham, a South Carolinian who was heading up an effort to preserve Mount Vernon.  The home of the first president had fallen into serious disrepair, and a group of women had formed an association to repair and restore the mansion.  Cunningham and Tracy moved in on February 22, 1860.  Shortly, however, Cunningham was called home because of family illness, and she left Tracy in charge.  Momentous changes were coming to the United States.  In November Lincoln was elected president, and by December, 1860, South Carolina led the southern secession.  In March, 1861, Lincoln was inaugurated, and in April, rebel forces fired on Ft. Sumter.  By July, open hostilities between the northern and southern armies commenced with the first Battle of Bull Run, which took place just a few miles from Mount Vernon.

Sarah Tracy, a northerner who had spent two decades in the South, decided to stay at Washington’s home.  For the duration of the war, with the help of a caretaker named Upton Herbert, she kept both northern and southern troops from invading, attacking or destroying the home of the first president.  She determined that the “public…need fear no molestation of this one national spot belonging alike to North and South.”  She was there to stay.  She negotiated with General Winfield Scott and the governor of Virginia to insure that soldiers from both sides would lay down their arms before entering the grounds.  Most soldiers complied, and some even paid an entrance fee.  When General George McClellan created problems for her, she managed to travel to Washington, D.C., for an audience with Lincoln, himself.  He acceded to her request for a pass that would allow her to travel at will through Union barricades.

Thanks to Sarah Tracy, when the war ended, Mount Vernon was intact, and the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association took up their restoration work in earnest.  In Troy, Tracy had studied U.S. history from the textboook written by Emma Hart Willard.  Mrs. Willard stressed the idea that the success of the United States came from compromise among competing interests.  Sarah Tracy lived that idea in her defense of Mount Vernon during the Civil War.  And, in a romance reminiscent of  “The African Queen,”  she married the caretaker.  She was forty, and it was her first marriage.  According to the census, in 1880 they were living in Lee, Virginia.  He was a farmer, and she was “keeping house.”