Under the Julian calendar in use at the time, Washington's birth was recorded as February 11, 1731. Britain's 1752 adoption of the Gregorian calendar shifted the date to February 22, 1732, the date Americans now celebrate. Washington himself began observing the new date after the calendar reform.
The confusion over Washington's birthday is a small but telling artifact of the British Empire's slow, grudging move from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. When Britain finally made the switch in 1752, eleven days vanished from the calendar overnight, and every earlier date had to be recalculated. Washington, born on a modest tobacco plantation on Popes Creek in Westmoreland County, Virginia, found his own birth date shifted forward, and after some initial resistance, he adopted February 22 as the day to mark.
His father Augustine Washington was a moderately prosperous planter and justice of the peace; his mother Mary Ball Washington raised George largely alone after Augustine's death when the boy was eleven. Nothing about this rural Virginia birth suggested the trajectory that followed: surveyor, colonial militia officer, revolutionary general, and first president of a nation that did not yet exist.
February 22 became a de facto national holiday in the 19th century, celebrated with parades and oratory long before Congress made it official in 1879. Today it survives, somewhat diluted, as the federal Presidents' Day, observed on a floating Monday rather than the actual date.
Key people: George Washington