George Washington's Relics and Revolutionary War Memory
A Talk by Dr. Jamie L. Brummit
August 8, 2026 – 7:00 pm
The Alice T. Miner Museum
9618 State Route 9
Chazy, NY 12921
Join us for the second talk in our America 250 lecture series, Creating and Commemorating Our Nation, which will run through the summer and early fall of 2026. For this program, we welcome Dr. Jamie L. Brummitt of UNC-Wilmington, historian and author of Protestant Relics in Early America. This talk is free and open to the public and will be held in the Alice's third floor ballroom. Refreshments will be served.
In this talk, Dr. Brummitt explores how early Americans remembered George Washington by collecting his relics. It features locks of Washington’s hair, postmortem lithographs, mourning embroideries, coffin fragments, images of Washington’s embodied soul rising to heaven from Mount Vernon, and more. The talk considers how these Washington relics related to broader trends in Protestant mourning practices for the father of the American republic. It also explains how relic practices for Washington and other heroes of the American Revolution transformed through the colonial revival movement into what most Americans identify today as secular historical practices associated with collecting significant objects of America’s past in museums like the Alice.
About the Speaker: Dr. Jamie L. Brummitt is an Associate Professor of American religion and material culture at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Brummitt earned her PhD from Duke University. Her book Protestant Relics in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2025) examines relic veneration, corpse inspection, and the art of mourning in the early United States.
