On the morning of April 30, 1789, the man about to become the first president of the United States had exactly one of his own teeth left in his head. It was a lower left premolar, and it was failing. Everything else in his mouth was a feat of carpentry and metalwork: a lower plate of carved ivory and animal bone, a set of human teeth fixed with brass, the whole apparatus held against his gums by springs that pushed so hard he had to clench to keep his jaw closed. When he stood on the balcony of Federal Hall and took the oath, witnesses noticed that he barely opened his mouth. He read the oath in a low, halting voice. Then he retreated indoors to deliver his inaugural address to Congress in a near-mumble, his hands trembling, his words swallowed. The crowd in the street below assumed they were watching modesty, the famous Washington reserve. They were watching a man trying not to let his teeth fall out in public.

The country has spent two centuries telling itself a softer story about that mouth. The teeth were wooden, the legend goes, a folksy detail that turns a grown man’s chronic agony into a charming bit of frontier improvisation, the sort of thing that belongs in a primary-school pageant beside the cherry tree and the silver dollar thrown across the Potomac. The wooden teeth are false. Not metaphorically false, not exaggerated, but materially, physically, documentably false. No denture Washington ever wore was made of wood. The surviving sets still exist, in museum vaults, and they can be examined, X-rayed, and chemically analyzed. They contain ivory and bone and metal and human teeth. They do not contain wood for biting.

What the wooden-teeth story hides is not a neutral fact about cabinetry. It hides the most uncomfortable truth in the whole account: that some of the human teeth set into the first president’s mouth were bought, in May 1784, from enslaved people at Mount Vernon, recorded in his own plantation ledger in a single cold line of accounting. The myth is not merely wrong. It is anesthetic. It replaces a record of bodies, money, and power with a fairy tale about wood.

This article does three things the wooden-teeth legend was built to prevent. It establishes, from the physical artifacts and the forensic literature, exactly what Washington’s dentures were made of, set by set. It traces where the word “wooden” likely came from, since the answer turns out to be more interesting than a simple lie. And it reads the 1784 ledger entry closely, because the entry is the document the whole soft legend exists to keep out of the room. The verdict is not that Washington was uniquely monstrous. The verdict is that a national myth performed a specific kind of work, smoothing a record that deserved to stay rough, and that the cost of the smoothing falls on people whose names the ledger never bothered to write down.

The Myth and Its Reach

Few historical errors are as widely held, as confidently stated, or as rarely questioned as the belief that George Washington wore wooden teeth. Ask a hundred American adults what they know about the first president’s body and a large share will produce the wooden teeth before they produce anything else, ahead of the height, ahead of the smallpox scars, ahead of the fact that he survived four bouts of life-threatening illness. The detail has a stickiness that resists correction. People who know perfectly well that the cherry tree story is a fabrication, who can name the man who invented it, will still tell you the teeth were wood.

The reach of the myth is worth measuring before it is dismantled, because the size of a false belief is itself a piece of evidence about how the belief survives. The wooden teeth appear in children’s books, in trivia decks, in cartoons, in advertising, in the casual asides of otherwise careful writers. For most of the twentieth century, American schoolrooms taught the detail as fact, not because any teacher had examined the dentures, but because the textbooks said so, and the textbooks said so because earlier textbooks had. The belief propagated the way the cherry tree propagated, through repetition rather than evidence, and it acquired the same air of settled knowledge. The persistence is structurally similar to the durability of the cherry tree fabrication that Parson Weems invented in 1806, and the two myths feed the same appetite: a hunger for a Washington who is simple, legible, and morally tidy.

What makes the wooden teeth different from the cherry tree is that nobody invented the wooden teeth as a deliberate fiction. Weems sat down and made up the hatchet and the confession. No equivalent author sat down and decided to claim the teeth were wood. The error grew out of something real, which is part of why it has been so hard to kill. A deliberate lie can be exposed by naming the liar. A misdescription that hardened into fact over generations has no single author to expose, and so it floats free, attaching itself to a face on the dollar bill, immune to the usual tools of debunking.

The stakes of the correction are not pedantic. If the only thing at issue were the substitution of ivory for wood, the myth would be a harmless piece of trivia, the kind of thing that gets corrected in a footnote and forgotten. The reason the correction matters is that the wooden-teeth story does not simply get a material wrong. It performs a substitution, and the thing it substitutes away from is a documented transaction involving enslaved human beings and their teeth. To leave the myth standing is to let a fairy tale occupy the space where a moral reckoning belongs. That is the argument of this article, and everything that follows is built to support it.

A Lifetime of Dental Ruin

To understand the dentures, it helps to understand the decades of suffering that produced them, because the false teeth were not a single event but the end stage of a long collapse documented in Washington’s own diaries and account books. The man did not wake up one day toothless. He lost his teeth across his entire adult life, one painful extraction at a time, and the record of that loss is one of the more thoroughly documented private agonies of any eighteenth-century figure.

The first recorded loss came early. At the age of twenty-four, Washington noted in his diary that he had paid five shillings to a practitioner he called Doctr Watson for the removal of a tooth. He was a young man, vigorous, physically formidable, already a soldier, and already losing his teeth. The cause is not fully known. The eighteenth-century diet of the wealthy was heavy in sugar, dental hygiene was primitive, and there is a long-standing suggestion that the mercury-based medicines Washington took for various illnesses, including the calomel commonly prescribed for the diseases that repeatedly nearly killed him, accelerated the destruction of his teeth and gums. Whatever the cause, the diaries and letters from that point forward make steady reference to aching teeth, loosened teeth, inflamed gums, and the endless small expenditures of a man fighting a losing war inside his own mouth. He bought toothbrushes, tooth scrapers, denture files, toothache medicines, and cleaning solutions. He paid a long sequence of dentists. None of it stopped the decline.

By the time of the Revolution, Washington’s teeth were already badly compromised, and the relationship with the transplantation dentist Le Mayeur began in this period. By the inauguration in 1789, only the single lower premolar survived. By 1796, that last natural tooth was gone, extracted by Greenwood and preserved in its locket. For the final years of his life, every tooth in Washington’s head was an artifact made by someone else, fitted by springs, and a source of constant discomfort that he managed in private and concealed in public with a discipline that itself became part of his legend.

The following chronology consolidates the documented arc of that decline, drawn from the diaries, the account books, and the dental correspondence. It serves as a second findable reference alongside the composition table, and it makes visible how long and how steadily the loss proceeded before the famous dentures became necessary at all.

Date	Event	Source
1756, age 24	First documented extraction; paid five shillings to “Doctr Watson”	Washington’s diary
1770s onward	Regular references to aching teeth, lost teeth, inflamed gums	Diaries and letters
Early 1780s	Relationship with transplantation dentist Le Mayeur begins	Le Mayeur correspondence
May 1784	Ledger records cash paid to enslaved people for nine teeth	Mount Vernon plantation ledger
1789	Inaugurated with one natural tooth; Greenwood builds inaugural denture	Greenwood correspondence
1789 to 1795	Two surviving sets containing human teeth are made	Surviving artifacts; Van Horn
1796	Last natural tooth extracted; saved by Greenwood in a locket	Greenwood correspondence
1799	Washington dies, fully dependent on dentures	Documentary record

The chronology matters to the myth-bust because it dissolves the image of a single quaint object and replaces it with a process: a lifetime, a sequence of craftsmen, a running expense, and a continual demand for teeth. That demand is what connects the suffering to the slavery dimension. A man losing teeth across forty years needs a steady supply of replacements, and the supply, as the next sections show, came from the bodies of those least able to refuse.

What the Dentures Were Actually Made Of

Start with the artifacts, because they exist and they settle the basic question. Washington did not own one set of dentures. He owned and discarded a sequence of them across roughly the last quarter-century of his life, as his remaining natural teeth failed one by one and the fit of each successive appliance went wrong. Several of these sets survive. The most complete one, an upper and lower full set, is held by George Washington’s Mount Vernon and catalogued as object W-1520/A. A partial denture made by his New York dentist John Greenwood, together with the locket holding Washington’s last extracted tooth, belongs to the New York Academy of Medicine. Additional dental material associated with Washington has been studied and held at other institutions, including the dental collections in Baltimore that grew into the museum work on early American dentistry.

These are not reconstructions or replicas. They are the objects themselves, and they have been examined repeatedly by people equipped to identify what they are made of. The most rigorous of these examinations came from Reidar F. Sognnaes, a dental researcher who in the 1970s subjected the surviving Washington dentures to forensic analysis, published as work on “George Washington’s bite,” and who treated the appliances the way a pathologist treats evidence rather than the way a patriot treats a relic. Sognnaes catalogued the components. Later, the curatorial staff at Mount Vernon, including the art historian Jennifer Van Horn during her time as an assistant curator there, conducted and published their own detailed material study. The findings of these independent examinations agree, and they agree on this: there is no wood functioning as teeth in any of the surviving sets.

The full set at Mount Vernon is built on a base of lead, shaped to fit the contours of Washington’s gums and jaw, with the upper and lower plates connected by springs of a silver alloy. The teeth fixed into that base include human teeth, set as the lower incisors, along with teeth that appear to come from a cow and probably a horse, carved and shaped to match. The harder structural carving in Washington’s various appliances was done in ivory, drawn from hippopotamus, walrus, and in some pieces probably elephant. Brass screws and a connecting metal rod hold components in place. Gold appears in wire and fittings. The teeth themselves are fixed to the plates by metal, not glue, not wooden pegs holding the biting surfaces.

To make the composition legible at a glance, the following table consolidates what the documented and surviving dentures contain, drawn from the forensic literature and the Mount Vernon collection records. This composition table is the findable artifact at the center of this article, the thing a reader can carry away and cite, and it is paired later with the 1784 ledger entry so that the material record and the moral record sit side by side.

Material	Source	Function in the dentures	Evidence
Hippopotamus ivory	Imported ivory trade	Carved base plates and some teeth	Surviving sets; Sognnaes forensic analysis
Walrus and probably elephant ivory	Imported ivory trade	Additional carved components across sets	Mount Vernon collection study
Human teeth	Purchased, including from enslaved people in 1784	Set as visible incisors in at least two sets	Surviving sets; 1784 ledger; Van Horn
Cow teeth	Animal sources	Carved and fitted alongside human teeth	Surviving Mount Vernon set
Horse or donkey teeth	Animal sources	Carved and fitted in some sets	Mount Vernon collection records
Lead	Metalworking	Base plate shaped to the jaw	Mount Vernon set W-1520/A
Brass	Metalworking	Screws and fastenings holding components	Greenwood denture; forensic analysis
Silver alloy	Metalworking	Springs connecting upper and lower plates	Mount Vernon set W-1520/A
Gold	Metalworking	Wire and fittings	Greenwood correspondence and surviving pieces
Tin, copper, steel	Metalworking	Alloy components and spring steel	Mount Vernon collection records
Tiny wood pegs	Woodworking	Minor fasteners in some appliances, not biting surfaces	Mount Vernon dentures FAQ

The last row is the one that requires care, and an honest myth-bust has to put it on the table rather than hide it, because hiding it would replicate the exact intellectual vice this article exists to oppose. Mount Vernon’s own catalogue of the materials across Washington’s several dentures notes the presence of small wood pegs functioning as minor fasteners in some of the appliances. This is the only wood in the entire account, and its function bears no relationship to the myth. The legend claims that Washington’s visible teeth, the things that chewed and showed when he spoke, were carved from wood. The reality is that a few small wooden pegs may have served as construction hardware deep in the assembly, the way a modern object might use a wooden dowel inside a frame. Nobody would describe a chair with wooden dowels as a wooden chair if its seat and back were upholstered leather. The pegs do not rescue the myth. They are a footnote that, if anything, sharpens the point: even the trace of actual wood in the dentures was structural, hidden, and irrelevant to the teeth that the legend describes.

So the basic factual question is closed. The teeth were ivory, bone, metal, and human teeth. They were never wood in any sense the myth intends. The interesting questions begin only after this is settled, and they are two: where did the word “wooden” come from, and whose human teeth were in the first president’s mouth.

The Men Who Built the Mouth

Washington did not improvise his own dentures, and understanding the myth requires understanding the craftsmen who did. Two dentists matter most. The first is Jean-Pierre Le Mayeur, a French dentist who left British-occupied New York during the Revolution and passed through American lines, having previously served Sir Henry Clinton and other senior British officers. Le Mayeur and Washington formed a relationship during the 1780s. Le Mayeur was a practitioner of tooth transplantation, the era’s most ambitious and least successful dental procedure, in which a tooth pulled from one living person’s mouth was implanted directly into the socket of another. The theory held that a fresh, healthy tooth could take root in a new host. In practice the transplants almost never succeeded, the grafted teeth loosened and fell out within weeks or months, and the procedure mostly enriched the dentists and the sellers of teeth while doing little for the buyers. Le Mayeur advertised for teeth, and the people who answered such advertisements were, without exception, people who needed the money badly enough to undergo an extraction without anesthetic.

The second dentist is John Greenwood, a New York practitioner and a veteran of the Revolution, who became Washington’s principal dental craftsman during the presidency. Greenwood was a genuine innovator. The set he made when Washington was inaugurated used a hippopotamus ivory base fitted with human teeth and held together with gold and brass, and Greenwood deliberately left a hole in the lower plate so that the appliance could fit over Washington’s single remaining natural tooth. Greenwood’s reasoning was that a dentist should never pull a tooth while there was any chance of saving it, and so he engineered the denture around the survivor. When that last tooth finally came out in 1796, Washington sent it to Greenwood, who kept it in a special locket attached to a watch chain, an artifact that survives alongside one of the dentures at the New York Academy of Medicine. The correspondence between Washington and Greenwood is itself a primary source of unusual intimacy, a series of letters in which the most controlled public man in America discusses, in frank and miserable detail, the failures of his mouth.

The dentists matter to the myth in two ways. First, they establish that the dentures were objects of real craft and expense, not folk-improvised wooden carvings. A set built on a lead base with silver springs, gold wire, and imported ivory was a luxury good, made by a specialist, costing real money. The wooden-teeth image erases the craft along with the cost, replacing a precision appliance with something a frontier whittler might produce. Second, and more importantly, the dentists are the link to the human teeth. Le Mayeur’s transplantation practice and Greenwood’s denture construction both ran on a supply of human teeth, and that supply had to come from somewhere. The somewhere is the part of the story the myth was built to bury.

The transatlantic market in human teeth was real and large in the late eighteenth century. Dentists across Europe and America preferred human teeth to carved animal substitutes because they looked more natural and, in the case of transplantation, were thought to be viable. The teeth came from the poor, the desperate, the dead, and the powerless. Battlefields supplied teeth pulled from corpses, a trade so notorious that decades later, after the carnage of 1815, dentures fitted with the teeth of dead young soldiers were sold under the grim nickname of Waterloo teeth. Living sellers came from the bottom of the social order, because no one with other options chose to have healthy teeth yanked from their head for cash. This is the market into which Washington’s dentists were buying, and it is the market in which, in 1784, a transaction at Mount Vernon was recorded.

The Surviving Sets and the Economics of Teeth

It is worth pausing on the individual objects, because each surviving piece tells part of the story and the differences among them matter. The full set at Mount Vernon, object W-1520/A, is the showpiece, the only complete upper-and-lower denture of Washington’s to survive intact. It is the set most often photographed, the one that became a refrigerator magnet, and the one whose lead base and silver springs and human incisors anchor the forensic account. Its very completeness is what makes it so useful: a researcher can see how the whole apparatus fit together, how the springs forced the plates apart against the gums, and where the human teeth sat in the line of sight.

The partial denture and tooth locket at the New York Academy of Medicine tell a different part. This is the Greenwood work, the appliance built around Washington’s last natural tooth, with the hole left deliberately so the survivor could anchor the plate. When the tooth finally came out in 1796, the locket preserved it. Together the partial denture and the locket document the intimacy of the Greenwood relationship and the engineering logic of building a prosthesis around a single failing anchor. The Baltimore dental collections, which grew into the institutional study of early American dentistry, held and examined further material and were central to establishing the forensic baseline that the wooden-teeth myth fails against.

The economics of the tooth trade deserve their own attention, because money is the hinge on which the moral reading turns. Human teeth commanded a range of prices depending on the seller’s position. Teeth from free people who chose to sell fetched more; teeth from the desperate and the enslaved fetched less. A dentist building a denture or attempting a transplant needed teeth of a particular size and condition, and the buyer’s market favored those with the least power to negotiate. The grim logic was self-reinforcing: the more powerless the seller, the cheaper the teeth, and the cheaper the teeth, the more attractive the powerless seller became as a source. Into this logic stepped a plantation owner who controlled the bodies, the labor, and the choices of more than two hundred enslaved people, and who needed a steady supply of teeth for a mouth that kept failing.

The contrast with the public Washington is stark and deliberate to point out. The man who in his public life established the precedent that the executive would set foreign policy through cabinet deliberation rather than royal whim, who built the careful institutional machinery of a new republic, was in his private medical life a consumer in a market that ran on the bodies of the powerless. The two facts are not in tension because they describe two different men. They describe one man, and the discomfort of holding them together is exactly the discomfort the wooden-teeth myth was so useful in dissolving.

Washington’s Own Words

One of the reasons this story can be told with such confidence is that Washington documented his dental misery himself, in letters that survive and that puncture the cheerful folklore as effectively as the artifacts do. The correspondence with John Greenwood is the richest of these. In it, the most self-controlled public figure in America drops the mask entirely and writes about the failures of his mouth with a frankness he allowed himself almost nowhere else. He describes the way the springs forced the plates outward and distorted his lips. He complains about the discomfort, the poor fit, the discoloration, and the difficulty of eating and speaking. He sends the appliances back to Greenwood for adjustment and asks for repairs. He discusses the proper cleaning and care of the ivory and frets over the staining. These are not the letters of a man with quaint wooden novelties in his head. They are the letters of a patient managing a chronic medical problem with a specialist he trusted.

The intimacy of the Greenwood letters is itself historically significant, because Washington guarded his image so carefully in every other domain. The same man who refused to be drawn into partisan combat, who measured every public word, who understood that his bearing was a political instrument, wrote openly to his dentist about the most undignified facts of his physical decay. The dentures were the one place where the performance of perfect republican composure broke down into ordinary human suffering, and the letters preserve that breakdown. They show a Washington who was not marble but flesh, and failing flesh at that, dependent on a craftsman in New York to keep his mouth functioning.

The letters also matter because they help date and confirm the material record. Washington’s instructions about cleaning, his complaints about specific appliances, and his discussion of the springs and the fit all corroborate what the surviving objects show. The documentary and material records do not merely coexist; they reinforce one another, which is why the account is so secure. A skeptic who doubted the forensic analysis would have to also discount Washington’s own letters about caring for ivory, and a skeptic who doubted the letters would have to explain away the physical objects. The two lines of evidence converge on the same conclusion, and neither line contains a single reference to wooden teeth, because there were none.

There is a poignancy in the gap between the public image and the private correspondence that the wooden-teeth myth flattens entirely. The dollar-bill Washington, serene and composed, is the public performance. The man writing to Greenwood about his aching, ill-fitting, discolored appliances is the private reality. The folklore took the private reality, which was painful and complicated and entangled with the tooth trade, and replaced it with a public-facing cartoon. The letters are the corrective. They return the suffering, the craft, and the dependence to a story that the myth had reduced to a single false adjective.

Where “Wooden” Came From

A satisfying myth-bust does more than prove the myth false. It explains why the myth existed, because an unexplained error invites the suspicion that the debunkers have missed something. The wooden teeth are unusual among presidential legends in that their origin appears to be honest misperception rather than invention, and the most persuasive account of that misperception is material, not literary.

Hippopotamus ivory, the substance from which much of Washington’s denture structure was carved, does not stay white. It is organic, porous in its fine structure, and it darkens with age and use. In a mouth subjected to red wine, to the dark medicinal tinctures of the period, to tea, and to the tobacco of the era, the ivory stained. As it stained and aged, the carved ivory developed fine hairline cracks and a grain. Stained ivory with a grain, cracked along its length and browned by decades of wine and medicine, looks, to an untrained eye and especially in the dim light of a candlelit room, remarkably like wood. The resemblance is not fanciful. Conservators who handle the actual dentures describe exactly this: an aged, browned, grain-textured material that a casual observer could easily take for carved wood.

This gives the myth a plausible and innocent root. A contemporary who glimpsed the president’s discolored, grained ivory teeth might have described them as looking wooden, meaning that they resembled wood, not that they were made of it. A later writer, working from such a description at second or third hand, might have compressed “looked like wood” into “was wood.” A nineteenth-century schoolbook author, simplifying for children, would have had every incentive to keep the vivid, concrete image of wooden teeth and drop the careful qualifier. Over generations the qualifier vanished entirely and the metaphor became a claim. This is a different mechanism from the deliberate fabrication behind the cherry tree, and the difference matters for how the two myths should be judged. One was a lie. The other was a game of generational telephone in which a true observation about appearance decayed into a false claim about substance.

The staining explanation also fits the timeline of the myth’s spread. The wooden teeth do not appear prominently in the documented record of Washington’s own lifetime, when people who actually saw the dentures, or knew the dentists, or read the Greenwood correspondence, understood perfectly well what the appliances were made of. The belief hardens later, in the nineteenth century, as the eyewitnesses died and the schoolroom mythology took over, the same window in which the cherry tree completed its conquest of the American classroom. By the time the wooden teeth were universal classroom fact, no one repeating the claim had seen a denture or read a ledger. They had read a textbook that had read a textbook.

There is a temptation, having established an innocent origin for the myth, to let Washington and the era off the hook, to treat the wooden teeth as a harmless drift of a true observation into a false one. That temptation must be resisted, and resisting it is the whole point of the article. The origin of the myth may be innocent. The function of the myth is not. Whatever started the wooden-teeth story, what kept it alive and useful was its capacity to occupy the space that the true story should have filled, and the true story is not about staining or ivory or the optics of candlelight. It is about a ledger entry from May 1784.

The Ledger Entry

In the financial records kept for Mount Vernon, there survives an account-book notation from May 1784. The relevant line, transcribed from the plantation ledger, reads as follows.

“By Cash pd Negroes for 9 Teeth on Acct of Dr. Lemoin”

That is the entire entry. It is a single line of bookkeeping in the same hand and the same ledger that recorded the purchase of nails, the sale of flour, the wages of overseers, and the thousand other transactions of a working plantation. “Lemoin” is a phonetic rendering of Le Mayeur, the transplantation dentist, confirming that the teeth were bought in connection with the dental work being done for and around Washington. The “Negroes” from whom the nine teeth were purchased are not named. They are not described. We do not know whether they were among the more than two hundred people Washington enslaved at Mount Vernon, though the location of the transaction and the era’s practices make that overwhelmingly likely. We know only that cash changed hands, that nine teeth were pulled from the mouths of unnamed enslaved people, and that the transaction was tidy enough to fit on one line of a ledger.

Read the entry slowly, because every element of it carries weight. The verb is “paid.” The teeth were not simply taken; money was recorded as having been given. This detail has been used, by some, to soften the transaction, to suggest a kind of voluntary exchange. It cannot bear that weight, and the reasons it cannot are the subject of a later section. For now, hold the bare facts. Nine teeth. Unnamed enslaved sellers. A dentist who practiced transplantation. A plantation owner who needed teeth. A single line of accounting that has outlived everyone it describes.

The ledger entry is a primary source of a particularly unforgiving kind. It was not written to make a moral point or to be read by posterity. It was written to balance the books. Its evidentiary value lies precisely in its indifference. A diary can be self-serving and a letter can be performed, but an account book is written for the writer’s own use, and it records what actually happened to the money. The entry proves, beyond reasonable dispute, that in May 1784 Washington’s household paid enslaved people for nine of their teeth in connection with the dentist who served the future president. This is not interpretation. It is bookkeeping.

What the entry does not prove is equally important, and a responsible reading has to mark the boundary. The ledger does not state that those nine teeth were set into Washington’s dentures. It does not state that the sellers were coerced, nor that they consented, nor what they understood the transaction to mean, nor what the sum represented relative to a free person’s price for the same procedure. It does not name a single seller. The entry is a window the width of one sentence, and through that window we can see the fact of the purchase with perfect clarity while the surrounding circumstances remain in shadow. Honest history lives in that combination of certainty and shadow, refusing both the denial that says the purchase never mattered and the embellishment that fills the shadow with invented detail. The purchase is certain. The fate of the teeth and the inner life of the sellers are not, and the next two sections take up each of those uncertainties in turn.

Did the Purchased Teeth Enter His Mouth

Here the evidence becomes genuinely contested, and the contest is worth laying out precisely, because it is the place where careful scholars disagree and where the temptation to overstate runs in both directions. The question is narrow: were the nine teeth purchased from enslaved people in 1784, or other teeth bought from enslaved people, actually set into the dentures Washington wore? The honest answer is that we do not know with certainty, and the disagreement among historians is about how to weigh the probability.

On one side stands the reading associated most closely with Jennifer Van Horn, the art historian whose 2016 study in Early American Studies is the most thorough scholarly treatment of the dentures as objects. Van Horn argues that the human teeth purchased from enslaved people were likely used in Washington’s dentures, and she builds the case from the convergence of the documentary and material records. The ledger proves the purchase. The surviving dentures prove that at least two of Washington’s sets contain human teeth. The transplantation procedure that the 1784 teeth were bought for almost never succeeded, which means the purchased teeth, once a transplant failed, would have been available for the alternative use, mounting in a denture, exactly as Washington saved his own extracted teeth for possible reuse. Van Horn’s reading does not claim certainty; it claims likelihood, and it grounds the likelihood in the way these materials actually moved through the dental practices of the period.

On the other side stands the caution that Mount Vernon’s own research staff, including the historians who maintain the estate’s documentary record, have consistently voiced. Their position is that the surviving evidence does not let us confirm whose teeth are in the dentures. The two surviving sets that contain human teeth were made in the years around 1789 to 1795, and the teeth in them might have been obtained in New York, where Greenwood worked, or in Philadelphia, where Washington lived for most of the presidency, from sellers we cannot identify by race or status. Mount Vernon’s careful formulation is that historians do not know for certain whether the 1784 teeth ended up in the dentures. This is not denial. The estate’s researchers have been forthright that Washington paid enslaved people for teeth and that the moral weight of that fact is real. Their reluctance is specifically about the forensic chain connecting the 1784 purchase to the surviving artifacts, a chain the records do not complete.

The disagreement, then, is not about whether Washington bought teeth from enslaved people. Both sides accept that the ledger proves it. The disagreement is about the inference from purchase to denture, with Van Horn weighing the convergence of evidence toward likely and Mount Vernon’s researchers holding the question open. Ron Chernow, in his comprehensive biography of Washington, takes a path that effectively dissolves the dispute: he integrates the tooth purchases into the larger account of Washington’s entanglement with slavery without resting the moral argument on the unprovable forensic link. Chernow’s move is the correct one, and it points to the verdict this article will reach. The moral weight of the 1784 entry does not depend on resolving whether those specific nine teeth chewed the president’s dinner. The purchase itself is the morally salient fact, whatever became of the teeth afterward.

To see why, run the counterfactual. Suppose it could be proven tomorrow that the nine teeth from the 1784 ledger were discarded after a failed transplant and never entered any denture. Would that exonerate anything? It would not. The transaction would remain: enslaved people had teeth pulled from their living mouths so that a wealthy enslaver could attempt to improve his own. The destination of the teeth changes the gruesome specificity of the image, the picture of enslaved people’s teeth literally in the president’s mouth, but it does not change the transaction that the picture dramatizes. The forensic question is vivid. The moral question is settled regardless of how the forensic question comes out. This is why the article treats the dentures and the ledger as a paired artifact: the material record makes the moral record concrete, but the moral record stands on its own even where the material chain is broken.

The Consent Question

The single word in the ledger entry that does the most distorting work is “paid.” Because money is recorded as having changed hands, the transaction can be made to look like an exchange between willing parties, a sale rather than a taking. This framing is the last refuge of the soft story, and it deserves direct engagement rather than dismissal, because confronting the strongest version of a counterargument is the only honest way to defeat it.

The strongest version goes like this. Washington could have simply ordered the teeth taken, as an enslaver had the raw power to do. Instead, the record shows payment. Perhaps the payment signals a recognition, on Washington’s part, that teeth were something personal, something he felt he had to purchase rather than seize. Van Horn herself notes this possibility with care, suggesting that the decision to pay might reflect an acknowledgment that teeth were sacrosanct in a way that other extractions of enslaved labor were not. On this reading the payment is a small marker of a moral line, evidence that even within the brutality of the system some boundary was felt.

The reading is worth stating fully because stating it fully is what exposes its limit. The limit is the meaning of consent under enslavement, and here the analysis has to be exact. Consent requires the genuine ability to refuse without penalty. An enslaved person at Mount Vernon could not refuse Washington without consequence, because the entire structure of their existence was defined by his power over their body, their labor, their family, and their future. A transaction conducted inside that structure is not made fair by the addition of cash. The money does not create a free choice; it decorates a coerced one. Van Horn makes precisely this point, observing that being enslaved meant any economic exchange was inherently unfair, because the parties were not free and equal. The payment, in other words, does not move the transaction from coercion into commerce. It moves it from naked seizure into coerced sale, which is a different shade of the same fundamental wrong.

There is a further asymmetry that the payment framing conceals. The price recorded in the ledger was almost certainly far below what a free white person would have received for the same teeth in the open market. The transatlantic tooth trade had prices, and the prices paid to the desperate poor and the enslaved sat at the bottom of the scale. Even granting the maximally charitable reading of the payment, the enslaved sellers were paid less, for a more coerced extraction, under a power relationship that made refusal impossible. The cash in the entry is not a sign of fairness. It is a sign of how cheaply the system valued the bodies it exploited.

This is the register in which the true story has to be told, and it is the exact register the wooden teeth erase. Wooden teeth are nobody’s pain. They are a quaint material, a bit of homespun ingenuity, a detail that flatters the rough-hewn republican simplicity Americans like to project onto the founding. Replace the wood with the ledger and the register changes completely. Now the story is about a man with the power to compel, a market in human body parts, a procedure performed without anesthetic on people who could not say no, and a single line of accounting that closed the books on all of it. The myth is comfortable. The truth is not. That gap is the reason the myth survives, and it is the reason the myth has to be dismantled.

The Body as the Nation

There is a deeper layer to why Washington’s dentures mattered to him and to his contemporaries, and the most illuminating account of it comes from Jennifer Van Horn, whose study reframes the dentures from a medical curiosity into a problem of political symbolism. Van Horn’s central argument is that in the early republic the body of the leader carried the meaning of the nation, and that a visible deformity in Washington would have read as a deficiency in the republican experiment itself. Bodily perfection was understood to signal personal morality, and personal morality was understood to signal fitness for self-government. In a culture that fused these things, the president could not be seen to be falling apart. As Van Horn put it, Washington in a real sense was the nation, and the nation could not afford to look toothless before a skeptical world.

This is why the concealment mattered so much, and why the dentures were not merely a comfort device but a political instrument. To Europeans, America was already a place of gap-toothed provincials, and a toothless Washington would have confirmed the stereotype at the worst possible moment, when the new nation was trying to be taken seriously on a stage dominated by older powers. The dentures let Washington perform an intact, dignified, virtuous body in public while the reality underneath was a wreck of ivory and springs. Van Horn places this performance within a broader early-American comfort with a certain kind of deception, the same culture that delighted in trompe l’oeil painting and accepted that some dissimulation in the name of politeness was the price of a functioning society. The dentures were a socially sanctioned deception, a way of presenting a body the republic needed to see.

The slavery dimension cuts directly across this performance, and Van Horn draws the line sharply. The teeth that allowed Washington to perform the perfect republican body included, in all likelihood, teeth taken from the enslaved, the very people the republican body was constructed to exclude. The civic ideal depended on keeping certain people outside the circle of citizenship, on treating Black Americans and the poor as lacking the civility that republican membership required. And yet the literal apparatus that let Washington embody that ideal may have been built from their mouths. The president performed the inclusion-defining body of the new citizen using, in part, the bodies of those the new citizenship excluded. Van Horn’s reading turns the dentures into a small, dense emblem of the founding contradiction: a republic that proclaimed universal principles while resting on the bodies of the unfree, compressed into a single object that the president wore behind his lips and worked hard to hide.

The hiding is the connective tissue between the symbolic argument and the myth-bust. Washington concealed the dentures in his own lifetime out of political necessity. The nation, in the centuries after, concealed what the dentures were made of, out of a different necessity, the need for a comfortable founding story. The wooden teeth are the second concealment continuing the work of the first. Where Washington hid the springs and the ivory to protect the image of the republican body, the myth hid the human teeth to protect the image of the republican founding. The two concealments share a logic, and seeing them together is the payoff of taking the dentures seriously as more than a trivia item.

How the Myth Conquered the Classroom

The wooden teeth did not become universal by accident, and the mechanism of their spread mirrors the mechanism that carried the cherry tree into every American schoolroom. Both myths rode the nineteenth-century expansion of mass schooling and the textbooks that fed it, and both completed their conquest in the same window, roughly the middle decades of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, when the eyewitnesses were long dead and the schoolbook had become the authority of record.

The crucial feature of the propagation is that it ran entirely on repetition rather than evidence. No textbook author who printed the wooden teeth had examined a denture. They had read an earlier book, which had read an earlier book, in a chain that traced back not to the dentures themselves but to the decayed metaphor about stained ivory looking like wood. The claim acquired authority through sheer iteration. By the time a child in a twentieth-century classroom learned that Washington wore wooden teeth, the statement carried the full weight of apparent settled fact, indistinguishable in tone from the date of the Declaration or the name of the first president. The wooden teeth were taught the way arithmetic was taught, as something simply known.

The image’s durability also owes something to the face on the currency. Washington’s portrait, the most reproduced human likeness in American life, appears on the one-dollar bill, and the famous Gilbert Stuart portraits that fixed his image for posterity show the distorted lower face that the ill-fitting dentures produced. The puffy, set jaw of the dollar-bill Washington is itself a product of the dentures pushing his lips outward. Generations who absorbed that face also absorbed the folklore attached to it, and the wooden teeth became part of the package, a caption that traveled with the most familiar image in the country. The myth had a permanent host.

The following timeline maps the propagation against the parallel correction, showing when the myth spread and when the scholarship and the institutions began to push back. It is the same shape as the cherry tree’s propagation timeline, a long lag between the establishment of the truth among specialists and its arrival in popular understanding.

Period	Propagation or correction	Mechanism
Washington’s lifetime	Materials understood by those who saw the dentures	Direct knowledge, Greenwood correspondence
Early to mid 1800s	Wooden-teeth belief takes hold as eyewitnesses die	Folklore, decayed metaphor
Mid 1800s to mid 1900s	Wooden teeth taught as classroom fact	Schoolbooks repeating schoolbooks
1970s	Forensic analysis catalogues actual materials	Sognnaes dental study
2010s	Scholarly study foregrounds enslaved-teeth dimension	Van Horn, Early American Studies
Recent years	Institution withdraws comfortable souvenir	Mount Vernon stops selling dentures magnet

The timeline reveals the same uncomfortable lag visible in the cherry tree case: the truth was available to specialists for decades before it dislodged the popular belief, and the popular belief persisted not because the evidence was hidden but because the comfortable version was preferred. The materials of the dentures were never a secret. The ledger was never sealed. The myth survived in plain sight of its own refutation, which is the surest sign that it was doing something other than informing people. It was comforting them.

The Face on the Dollar

There is a strange feedback loop between the dentures and the most familiar image of Washington in the world, and tracing it shows how thoroughly the prosthetics shaped not only his private life but the public face that posterity inherited. The portraits that fixed Washington’s appearance for all time, above all the unfinished Gilbert Stuart likeness that became the model for the engraving on the one-dollar bill, were painted late in his life, when his mouth was entirely dependent on the springs and plates. The dentures pushed his lips and lower face outward and gave his jaw a set, swollen, slightly clenched appearance. Stuart, who painted what he saw, recorded that distortion. The puffed lower face of the dollar-bill Washington is, in part, a portrait of ill-fitting dentures.

Contemporaries noticed. Stuart himself is said to have complained that the dentures spoiled the natural set of Washington’s mouth, and observers across the late presidency commented on how the lower face had changed from the man’s younger likenesses. There is even a tradition that Stuart, or his assistants, stuffed cotton into the sitter’s mouth to fill out the collapsed cheeks during sittings, though that detail sits closer to the folklore than to the firm record and should be held loosely. What is firm is that the face the nation memorized, the face on the bill in every wallet, was a face reshaped by the dentures. The most reproduced human likeness in American history is, at the level of the lower jaw, a likeness of a dental problem.

This closes a loop that the wooden-teeth myth never lets a person see. The dentures were hidden in life, concealed behind closed lips, performed away as nonexistent so that the republican body could appear whole. But the concealment was imperfect, because the very apparatus that hid the tooth loss visibly altered the face, and that altered face is what the portraitists captured and the engravers reproduced. The thing Washington most wanted to hide left its fingerprint on the image the nation would carry forever. Every dollar bill is, quietly, a record of the dentures, and the wooden-teeth myth has stood between the public and that recognition for two centuries. People look at the face a billion times a day and never connect the set of the jaw to the ivory and springs that produced it, let alone to the ledger entry behind the ivory.

The portrait connection also reinforces why this myth is worth the length of a full investigation rather than a one-line correction. The dentures are not peripheral to Washington’s image; they are baked into it at the most fundamental level, the level of the face itself. A myth that misdescribes the dentures therefore misdescribes the very thing that shaped the national icon. To correct the wooden teeth is to recover the real relationship between the man’s suffering body and his immortal image, and to recover, behind that, the human cost recorded in the ledger. The face on the dollar leads to the dentures, the dentures lead to the tooth trade, and the tooth trade leads to the enslaved sellers of May 1784. The myth severs that chain at the first link, leaving a charming face and a charming wooden story and nothing underneath. Following the chain all the way down is the work, and it ends where the comfortable story never wanted anyone to look.

The Complication

A myth-bust that refuses to complicate itself is propaganda in the other direction, and there are two complications here that an honest account must hold rather than smooth.

The first concerns the innocence of the myth’s origin. This article has argued that the wooden teeth probably grew from honest misperception, stained ivory mistaken for wood, rather than from deliberate invention. That argument cuts against the harshest possible reading of the myth, which would treat it as a conscious cover-up engineered to hide the slavery dimension. There is no evidence for a conscious cover-up. Nobody convened to decide that wood would make a better story than the ledger. The myth was not designed to bury the 1784 entry; the burial was a side effect of a metaphor decaying into a claim. This matters because the moral charge against the myth is not that someone lied to protect Washington’s reputation. The charge is subtler and, in a way, more damning: that a culture’s collective preference for a comfortable image did the work that no individual liar had to do. The error was innocent in origin and corrosive in function, and both halves of that sentence are true at once.

The second complication concerns the wood pegs. As the composition table records, Mount Vernon’s own material study notes small wooden pegs serving as minor fasteners in some of the appliances. A sufficiently motivated defender of the myth could seize on this to claim that the wooden teeth were not entirely false after all, that there was wood in there. This move must be refused, but refused honestly. There was a trace of wood, used as construction hardware, hidden inside the assembly, performing no function the myth describes. The myth claims the teeth, the visible biting surfaces, were carved from wood. They were ivory, bone, and human teeth. The pegs are to the wooden-teeth myth what a real cherry orchard at Mount Vernon would be to the hatchet story: a coincidental scrap of the right material that touches none of the actual claim. Acknowledging the pegs costs the argument nothing and protects it from the charge of overstatement. The teeth were not wood. A few fasteners deep in the mechanism were, and that is not what anyone means when they say Washington had wooden teeth.

There is a third, larger complication worth naming, which is the question of how hard to judge an eighteenth-century enslaver by twenty-first-century standards. The tooth purchase was not unusual for a wealthy white southerner of the period; the practice of buying teeth from the enslaved and the poor was woven into the dental medicine of the Atlantic world, and Washington was, in this as in much else, a man operating inside the ordinary brutalities of his time and class rather than inventing new ones. Recognizing the typicality is not the same as excusing it. The point of the ledger entry is not that Washington was a singular villain. The point is that the comfortable national myth has spent two centuries pretending the ordinary brutality did not happen at all, and the typicality of the practice makes that pretense worse, not better. A myth that hid a rare aberration would at least be hiding something exceptional. This myth hides something systemic, and the systemic is harder to face precisely because it implicates the whole structure rather than one bad actor.

The Verdict

The factual verdict is unambiguous and was settled by the surviving objects long ago. George Washington never wore wooden teeth. His dentures were carved from hippopotamus, walrus, and probably elephant ivory, built on bases of lead, sprung with silver alloy and steel, fastened with brass and gold, and fitted with the teeth of cows, horses, and human beings. The only wood in any of it was a scattering of small pegs functioning as hidden hardware, irrelevant to the teeth the myth describes. Anyone who tells you Washington’s teeth were wood is repeating a two-hundred-year-old game of telephone in which stained ivory, mistaken for wood by candlelight, became a false claim about substance.

The interpretive verdict is where the work of this article concentrates. The wooden-teeth myth is not a harmless factual error of the kind that gets corrected in a footnote. It is a substitution, and the thing it substitutes away from is the May 1784 ledger entry recording the purchase of nine teeth from unnamed enslaved people. Whether or not those specific teeth ended up in the president’s mouth, a question on which Van Horn leans toward likely and Mount Vernon’s researchers hold open, the purchase itself is the morally decisive fact, and the purchase is proven beyond dispute by Washington’s own account book. The myth’s function, whatever its innocent origin, has been to keep that ledger entry out of the national story. Every time the wooden teeth are repeated as charming trivia, the ledger entry is pushed a little further out of view.

The judgment this article renders is therefore double. On the facts, the myth is false, and the falseness is not close. On the meaning, the myth is worse than false. It is anesthetic, a story that numbs a record that should sting. The correct response to “Washington had wooden teeth” is not merely “no, they were ivory.” It is “no, and the reason that error matters is that it hides whose teeth they actually were.” The wooden teeth are the cherry tree’s grimmer cousin: where the cherry tree manufactured a virtue Washington never demonstrated, the wooden teeth erased a wrong he actually committed. One myth added a fiction. The other subtracted a fact. The subtraction is the more dangerous operation, because the fact it subtracted has names attached to it that the ledger never recorded.

A skeptic might ask whether this reading loads too much moral freight onto a piece of trivia, whether a denture can really carry the weight of the founding’s central contradiction. The answer is that the freight was always there; the myth simply hid it. Objects do not have to be grand to be revealing. A ledger line is not grand. A set of false teeth is not grand. But the small, ordinary, domestic scale of these things is exactly what makes them such honest witnesses. Grand monuments are built to say something; account books and dentures are not, and so they say what actually happened rather than what someone wanted remembered. The dentures testify against the myth not despite their smallness but because of it. They were never meant to be a statement, which is why they cannot lie, and which is why the comfortable story had to be wrapped around them from the outside. Strip the story away and the object speaks plainly: ivory, lead, brass, gold, animal bone, and human teeth, some of them bought, in a documented transaction, from people who were not free to refuse.

Legacy and Implication

The afterlife of this myth-bust is itself instructive, because the correction has begun to take hold in a way that reveals how the original myth functioned. For years, Washington’s Mount Vernon sold a popular souvenir, a refrigerator magnet shaped like the famous dentures, a piece of merchandise that turned the appliances into a joke and a keepsake. As scholarly attention to the human teeth and their likely source intensified, the estate stopped selling the magnet. The reasoning was not complicated. A souvenir that invites visitors to chuckle at the president’s funny old teeth becomes unbearable once those teeth are understood to include teeth pulled from enslaved people. The magnet depended on the wooden-teeth register, the register of harmless quaintness, and once the ledger entered the picture the register collapsed. The withdrawal of a refrigerator magnet is a small thing, but it is a precise small thing: it marks the exact moment when an institution decided it could no longer profit from the comfortable version of the story.

The broader implication concerns how national myths perform moral labor. Jill Lepore, writing about the American habit of storytelling, has argued that the nation tells itself simplified narratives that smooth the contradictions a fuller account would expose, and the wooden teeth are a near-perfect specimen. The simplification is not random. It runs in a consistent direction, away from the parts of the founding that implicate slavery and toward the parts that flatter republican virtue. The cherry tree manufactures honesty. The wooden teeth manufacture rustic simplicity. The crossing of the Delaware manufactures resolve. None of these myths runs toward the auction block or the ledger of bodies. The myths are not individually conspiratorial, but in aggregate they bend the national memory in a single direction, and the wooden teeth show the mechanism with unusual clarity because the true alternative is sitting right there in Washington’s own handwriting.

The historian Robert Darnton built an entire book around the proposition that an apparently trivial object from the eighteenth century, including Washington’s false teeth, can serve as a doorway into the strangeness of the period, the way its people thought about bodies, status, and the distance between appearance and reality. Darnton’s instinct is the right one for this material. The dentures are not a footnote to the serious history; they are a concentrated sample of it. The tooth trade, the transplantation fad, the obsession with the leader’s body, the casual brutality of the plantation ledger, the gap between public dignity and private decay, all of it is present in a single object small enough to hold in one hand. To read the dentures closely is to read the eighteenth century closely, and the wooden-teeth myth is precisely the refusal to read them closely, the substitution of a cartoon for the dense, uncomfortable reality.

The work of Mount Vernon’s own research historians, including Mary V. Thompson, who has written the most detailed account of slavery and the enslaved community at the estate, supplies the necessary grounding for the ledger entry. The nine teeth were not bought from abstractions. They were bought from specific people who lived and worked at Mount Vernon, people with names, families, and histories that the documentary record largely failed to preserve precisely because the system that enslaved them did not consider those names worth recording. Thompson’s scholarship insists on the reality of that community against the tendency to let it dissolve into the soft focus of founding nostalgia. The ledger entry’s anonymity, the bare word standing in for human beings, is itself a product of slavery’s bookkeeping, which counted teeth but not the people they came from. Reading the entry against Thompson’s reconstruction of the enslaved community restores at least the fact of the people, even where the names are gone.

This is also where the dentures connect to the larger reassessment of Washington that has occupied recent scholarship. The man who has become the marble figure of the founding was, in the flesh, an enslaver whose wealth and comfort were built on the bodies of people he owned, and whose own decaying mouth was repaired, in part, with teeth bought from those bodies. None of this erases the genuine achievements that the rest of this series examines, the decision to step away from power after two terms rather than govern for life, or the careful construction of executive precedent through documents like the Farewell Address and the foreign-policy framework he set in motion. Washington’s restraint with power was real and consequential. So was his ownership of human beings. A mature national memory holds both, and the wooden teeth are the small, strange place where the two collide most physically, where the founder’s body and the bodies he enslaved meet in a single line of accounting.

The myth-bust tier of this series does not bear directly on the larger argument the project advances about the expansion of executive power through national crises. The wooden teeth are not about the imperial presidency. But they are about the same underlying habit that makes the imperial presidency hard to see: the national preference for the legible, flattering version of the story over the rough, implicating one. The same impulse that turns ivory into wood turns emergency powers into ordinary governance and turns a slaveholding founder into a marble saint. Seeing through the smallest myth is practice for seeing through the largest. That is the case for spending fourteen thousand words on a set of false teeth.

The last word belongs to the ledger, because the ledger is the document the whole soft story was built to keep silent. Nine teeth. Unnamed sellers. A dentist named Le Mayeur. A line of accounting in the same hand that recorded the price of nails. The wooden teeth gave the nation two hundred years of permission not to read that line. The reading is overdue, and once you have read it, the charming wooden teeth can never again be charming. They were never wood. They were ivory and metal and bone and the teeth of people whose names their own president did not write down.

What Honest Remembering Requires

The point of dismantling a myth this thoroughly is not to replace one simple story with another, to swap the cheerful wooden teeth for an equally flat tale of villainy. The actual demand the dentures make on a reader is harder than either cartoon. It is the demand to hold complexity, to keep multiple true things in view at once without letting any of them cancel the others.

The first true thing is that Washington’s dental suffering was genuine and lifelong, a source of real pain and real humiliation that he managed with extraordinary discipline. Sympathy for that suffering is not naive; it is accurate. The second true thing is that the craft that addressed the suffering was sophisticated, the product of skilled specialists working at the edge of their field’s knowledge, not folk improvisation. Respect for that craft is also accurate. The third true thing is that the suffering and the craft together depended on a supply chain that reached into the mouths of the enslaved and the desperate, and that Washington, with the power of a major enslaver, was a participant in that supply chain. Moral seriousness about that participation is accurate too. The honest account does not choose among these. It carries all three.

This is harder than it sounds, because the gravitational pull of national memory is always toward the single clean story. The temptation on one side is the old comfort: the founder as marble saint, the teeth as quaint wood, the slavery as an unfortunate background detail that need not disturb the celebration. The temptation on the other side is the inverse comfort: the founder as nothing but a monster, the achievements as mere hypocrisy, the whole legacy collapsed into the single worst fact. Both are evasions, because both relieve the reader of the work of holding contradiction. The dentures resist both. They are at once an object of sympathy, a feat of craft, and a record of exploitation, and the only honest response is to feel all of it.

The reason this matters beyond Washington is that the habit of mind required to read the dentures honestly is the habit a mature relationship with any national past requires. A country that can only tell flattering stories about itself cannot learn from its history, and a country that can only tell damning ones cannot draw strength from it either. The capacity to say that Washington built durable republican institutions and owned human beings and bought their teeth, all in the same breath, without flinching from any clause, is the capacity that turns history from mythology into knowledge. The wooden teeth are a small training ground for that capacity. They are low-stakes enough to practice on and dense enough to teach the lesson, which is why they repay the attention.

So the closing instruction is not to feel a particular way about Washington. It is to refuse the comfort of the simple story in either direction. The next time the wooden teeth come up, as they will, the honest move is neither to repeat them nor merely to correct the material. It is to say what the correction reveals: that the teeth were ivory and bone and human, that some of the human teeth were bought from enslaved people, that the buyer was the first president, and that the cheerful myth survived precisely because the truth was the kind of thing a nation would rather not chew on. That is the whole of it, and it does not fit on a refrigerator magnet.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Were George Washington’s teeth really made of wood?

No. This is one of the most persistent myths in American history, and it is entirely false. None of George Washington’s surviving dentures, and several do survive in museum collections, contains wood as the teeth or biting surfaces. His appliances were carved from ivory, drawn from hippopotamus, walrus, and probably elephant, built on bases of lead, connected by springs of silver alloy and steel, fastened with brass screws and gold wire, and fitted with teeth taken from cows, horses, and human beings. The only wood anywhere in the dentures is a small number of wooden pegs that functioned as minor fasteners deep in the assembly, performing no role the myth describes. When people say Washington had wooden teeth, they mean the visible teeth were carved wood, and that claim has no basis in the surviving objects or the documentary record.

Q: What were Washington’s dentures actually made of?

Across the several sets he wore during his life, the materials included hippopotamus ivory, walrus ivory, and probably elephant ivory for carved structure, lead for the base plates shaped to his gums, silver alloy and steel for the springs that held the upper and lower plates together, brass screws and a connecting metal rod for fastening, gold wire for fittings, and teeth from cows and horses or donkeys carved to fit. Most significantly, at least two of the surviving sets contain human teeth, set as the visible lower incisors. The most complete surviving set, held at George Washington’s Mount Vernon, is built on a lead base with silver alloy springs and contains human teeth alongside animal teeth. These materials have been confirmed by forensic dental analysis and by curatorial study of the objects themselves.

Q: Did Washington’s dentures contain human teeth?

Yes. At least two of Washington’s surviving denture sets, made in the years around 1789 to 1795, contain human teeth, fitted as the lower front teeth where they would be visible when he spoke. The use of human teeth in dentures was common in the period because they looked more natural than carved animal substitutes. Human teeth were difficult to obtain and came from the poor, the desperate, the dead, and the enslaved, all people at the bottom of the social order who either sold their teeth out of need or had no say in the matter at all. The presence of human teeth in the dentures is not disputed. What remains uncertain is exactly whose teeth they were and whether any of them came from the documented 1784 purchase from enslaved people at Mount Vernon.

Q: Did Washington buy teeth from enslaved people?

Yes, and this is documented in his own records. A May 1784 entry in the Mount Vernon plantation ledger records a cash payment to unnamed enslaved people for nine teeth, made in connection with the dentist Jean-Pierre Le Mayeur. The entry reads, in period spelling, that cash was paid to “Negroes” for nine teeth on the account of Dr. Le Mayeur. The sellers are not named or described. The transaction is recorded in the same ledger that tracked the ordinary financial business of the plantation. This is a primary source written for the household’s own accounting, which is what makes it so reliable: it was not composed to make any point or to be read by posterity, only to balance the books, and it records what actually happened to the money.

Q: Did the teeth bought from enslaved people end up in Washington’s mouth?

This is the genuinely uncertain part of the story, and careful historians disagree about it. The art historian Jennifer Van Horn argues that the purchased teeth were likely used in Washington’s dentures, reasoning from the fact that the transplantation procedure they were bought for almost never succeeded, leaving the teeth available for the alternative use of mounting in a denture. Mount Vernon’s own research staff are more cautious, noting that we cannot confirm whose teeth are in the surviving sets, since the teeth might have been obtained in New York or Philadelphia from sellers we cannot identify. Both sides agree the purchase happened. The disagreement is only about the forensic link between that purchase and the surviving artifacts, a link the records do not complete.

Q: Does it matter whether the purchased teeth were actually used?

Morally, the answer is that it matters less than it might seem. The vivid, disturbing image of enslaved people’s teeth literally in the president’s mouth depends on the forensic link, but the moral weight of the story does not. The decisive fact is the purchase itself: enslaved people had teeth pulled from their living mouths, without anesthetic, so that a wealthy enslaver could attempt to improve his own dental situation. That transaction is proven beyond dispute by the ledger, and it remains a serious wrong regardless of where the teeth ended up afterward. If it could be proven tomorrow that the nine teeth were discarded after a failed transplant, the purchase would still stand as a documented act of exploitation. The destination of the teeth changes the imagery, not the ethics.

Q: Where did the wooden teeth myth come from?

The most persuasive explanation is honest misperception rather than deliberate invention. Hippopotamus ivory, the main carved material in the dentures, darkens with age and use. Stained by red wine, tea, medicine, and tobacco over years, and developing fine cracks and a grain, aged ivory comes to look remarkably like carved wood, especially in dim candlelight. A contemporary who glimpsed the discolored, grained teeth might have described them as looking wooden, meaning they resembled wood, not that they were made of it. Over generations that observation about appearance decayed into a claim about substance, helped along by nineteenth-century schoolbooks that kept the vivid image and dropped the careful qualifier. Unlike the cherry tree, which was deliberately fabricated, the wooden teeth seem to have grown from a true observation about how the ivory looked.

Q: Why do so many people still believe the wooden teeth myth?

The myth has the durability of any belief transmitted through repetition rather than evidence. For most of the twentieth century, American schoolrooms taught the wooden teeth as fact, and the textbooks repeated it because earlier textbooks had, with no one in the chain ever examining a denture. The image is also memorable and concrete in a way that the truth is not. Wooden teeth are easy to picture and emotionally simple, a bit of rustic charm attached to the founder’s face. The real materials, ivory and lead and human teeth, are complicated and uncomfortable. Beliefs that are simple, vivid, and flattering travel farther and last longer than truths that are complex and disturbing, which is exactly why the myth has outlived every correction.

Q: Who made Washington’s dentures?

Two dentists matter most. Jean-Pierre Le Mayeur was a French dentist who served British officers before passing through American lines during the Revolution and forming a relationship with Washington in the 1780s. Le Mayeur practiced tooth transplantation, and the 1784 tooth purchase was made on his account. John Greenwood, a New York dentist and Revolutionary War veteran, became Washington’s principal denture maker during the presidency. Greenwood built the set Washington wore at his 1789 inauguration on a hippopotamus ivory base, deliberately leaving a hole so it could fit over Washington’s single remaining natural tooth, on the principle that no tooth should be pulled while it might be saved. The surviving Washington-Greenwood correspondence is a frank and detailed record of the president’s dental misery.

Q: How many teeth did Washington have when he became president?

When Washington was inaugurated on April 30, 1789, he had exactly one natural tooth remaining, a lower left premolar. His dentist John Greenwood engineered the inaugural denture with a hole to fit over this surviving tooth, hoping to preserve it. The tooth was finally extracted in 1796, and Washington sent it to Greenwood, who kept it in a locket attached to a watch chain. By the time he took the oath, then, almost the entire functioning apparatus of his mouth was prosthetic, which is why witnesses noticed he barely opened his mouth during the ceremony and delivered his inaugural address in a low, halting voice.

Q: Why did Washington seem so reserved at his inauguration?

Part of what observers read as the famous Washington reserve was a practical problem with his dentures. The springs that held the upper and lower plates against his gums pushed outward with considerable force, and with almost no natural teeth to anchor them, the appliances could shift or slip if he opened his mouth too wide. Eating and speaking with such dentures was a genuine ordeal. At the 1789 inauguration, Washington read the oath quietly and then delivered his address to Congress in a near-mumble, his hands trembling. The crowd assumed they were watching modesty. They were partly watching a man managing an unstable mouthful of ivory and metal in front of the largest audience of his life.

Q: Was buying human teeth unusual in the eighteenth century?

No. A transatlantic market in human teeth was active and substantial in the late eighteenth century. Dentists across Europe and America preferred human teeth to carved animal substitutes because they looked more natural and, for transplantation, were thought viable. The teeth came from the poor selling out of desperation, from the dead, and from the enslaved. Battlefields were a notorious source; decades later, dentures fitted with teeth from soldiers killed in 1815 were sold under the grim nickname of Waterloo teeth. Washington buying teeth from enslaved people was, horribly, typical for a wealthy white southerner of his time. The typicality does not excuse it. It means the comfortable myth has been hiding something systemic rather than something rare.

Q: What does the 1784 ledger entry actually say?

The entry, transcribed from the Mount Vernon plantation ledger for May 1784, records in period spelling that cash was paid to “Negroes” for nine teeth on the account of “Dr. Lemoin,” a phonetic rendering of Le Mayeur. That is the entire notation, a single line in the same hand and ledger that recorded routine plantation transactions. The sellers are unnamed. The entry does not state whether the teeth went into Washington’s dentures, does not describe the circumstances of the extractions, and does not record what the sum meant relative to what a free person would have been paid. It proves the purchase with complete certainty while leaving the surrounding circumstances in shadow, which is the characteristic shape of evidence drawn from a working account book.

Q: Can the payment be read as a fair exchange?

No, and the reasons are precise. Consent requires the genuine ability to refuse without penalty, and an enslaved person at Mount Vernon could not refuse Washington without consequence, because the entire structure of their existence was defined by his power over their body, labor, family, and future. A transaction conducted inside that structure is not made fair by the addition of cash; the money decorates a coerced choice rather than creating a free one. The price recorded was also almost certainly far below what a free person would have received for the same teeth. Even on the most charitable reading, in which the decision to pay reflects some recognition that teeth were personal, the exchange remains coerced, underpriced, and conducted under a power relationship that made meaningful refusal impossible.

Q: How do we know what the dentures are made of?

The surviving dentures have been examined repeatedly by qualified specialists. In the 1970s, the dental researcher Reidar F. Sognnaes conducted a forensic analysis of Washington’s surviving appliances, cataloguing the components the way a pathologist treats evidence. Later, the curatorial staff at Mount Vernon, including the art historian Jennifer Van Horn during her time as an assistant curator there, conducted and published detailed material studies. These independent examinations agree on the composition: ivory, lead, silver alloy, brass, gold, animal teeth, and human teeth, with no wood functioning as teeth. The objects themselves are the evidence, and they can be inspected and analyzed, which is why the factual question of the materials is genuinely closed rather than a matter of competing opinion.

Q: Where are Washington’s dentures kept today?

Several pieces survive in different collections. The most complete set, a full upper and lower denture catalogued as object W-1520/A, is held by George Washington’s Mount Vernon in Virginia. A partial denture made by John Greenwood, along with the locket holding Washington’s last extracted natural tooth, belongs to the New York Academy of Medicine. Additional dental material associated with Washington has been studied and held at institutions connected to the history of American dentistry, including collections in Baltimore. The survival of these objects is precisely why the wooden-teeth myth is so cleanly refuted: there is no need to rely on hearsay or folklore when the actual appliances can be examined directly.

Q: How is the wooden teeth myth related to the cherry tree myth?

Both are Washington myths that simplify and flatter, but they work by opposite operations. The cherry tree story, invented by Parson Weems in 1806, added a fiction, manufacturing a display of honesty Washington never performed. The wooden teeth subtracted a fact, replacing a documented record of exploitation with a harmless material. The cherry tree was a deliberate fabrication by a known author; the wooden teeth grew from honest misperception of stained ivory and hardened over generations with no single inventor. The subtraction is arguably the more dangerous operation, because the fact the wooden teeth erased, the purchase of teeth from enslaved people, has real human beings attached to it, while the cherry tree merely invented a virtue out of nothing.

Q: Did Mount Vernon change how it presents the dentures?

Yes. For years the estate sold a popular souvenir refrigerator magnet shaped like Washington’s dentures, a piece of merchandise that treated the appliances as a charming curiosity. As scholarly attention to the human teeth and their likely source from enslaved people intensified, Mount Vernon stopped selling the magnet. The decision marks the precise moment when the comfortable, jokey version of the dentures story became untenable. A souvenir that invites visitors to chuckle at the president’s funny old teeth cannot survive the understanding that those teeth include teeth pulled from enslaved people. The withdrawal of a small piece of merchandise is itself a marker of how the deeper truth, once surfaced, reorganizes everything around it.

Q: What is the larger lesson of the wooden teeth myth?

The lesson is about how national myths perform moral labor by smoothing the parts of the past that implicate the present. The wooden teeth are a near-perfect specimen: a comfortable simplification that runs, like so many founding myths, away from slavery and toward rustic virtue. The same cultural impulse that turns stained ivory into folksy wood also turns a slaveholding founder into a marble saint and, in larger matters, turns expansions of government power into ordinary governance. Seeing through the smallest myth is practice for seeing through the largest. The point of examining a set of false teeth at length is that the habit of mind required to do it honestly, holding both the achievement and the wrong, is the habit a mature national memory most needs and most often lacks.

Q: What happened to the people whose teeth Washington bought?

We do not know, and the not-knowing is itself part of the story. The 1784 ledger entry records only the payment, the number of teeth, and the dentist’s name. It does not preserve the names of the enslaved sellers, their ages, their genders, or what became of them afterward. This anonymity is not an accidental gap; it is a direct product of how slavery’s record-keeping worked, counting transactions while erasing the people inside them. Historians of Mount Vernon’s enslaved community, including Mary V. Thompson, have worked to reconstruct the lives of the people Washington enslaved from the fragmentary records that survive, but for these specific sellers the trail is effectively blank. What can be said is that they were among the more than two hundred people Washington held in bondage, that they underwent extraction without anesthetic, and that the system that recorded their teeth did not consider their names worth recording.

Q: Why does correcting a small myth like this matter?

Because the correction is not really about teeth; it is about what the myth was doing. A factual error about denture materials would be trivial on its own. This error is not trivial, because it functioned for two centuries as a substitution, replacing a documented record of exploitation with a harmless folk image. Correcting it restores the ledger entry to the national story and forces a confrontation the myth was structured to prevent. It also trains a habit. The capacity to hold a founder’s genuine achievements and genuine wrongs together, without collapsing into either celebration or condemnation, is the capacity a country needs to learn from its history rather than merely flatter or flagellate itself with it. The wooden teeth are a small, manageable place to practice that harder honesty.