Navigate to the Nearest Lock of George Washington's Hair!
Verify holdings, locations, hours, permissions required, and availability for viewing, with any individual institution before you go.
Navigate to the Nearest Lock of George Washington's Hair!
Verify holdings, locations, hours, permissions required, and availability for viewing, with any individual institution before you go.
Scores of institutions hold putative locks from George Washington's mane. Like breadcrumbs leading us back to the scenes of the Revolution, the debris field, as I have since mapped it, stretches from the East Coast across the Midwest, verges into baldness in sparsely populated areas in the West, then reappears on the West Coast. A hank of Washington's hair was even shot into space in 2024! George Washington’s Hair is a guidebook into forgotten features of early American patriotic memory culture that spawned this remarkable, now little-remembered bodily diffusion. Learn more here!
LIVE: GEORGE WASHINGTON'S HAIR IN SPACE
On January 8, 2024, the Celestis' space memorial company's Enterprise Flight carried a donated putative lock of George Washington's hair into deep space, where, in that company's words, it is currently with "the other planets, moons, comets, and asteroids in our solar system on a never-ending journey through the cosmos." The below animation shows the current position of the spacecraft bearing George Washington's hair, and their distance to Earth updated in real-time. Read historian Keith Beutler's contextualization of that out-of-this-world hirsute memorial to George Washington, reported by The Houston Chronicle, here.