1759–1825 · Anglican parson, traveling bookseller & Washington's first popular biographer
Mason Locke Weems — “Parson Weems” — was a clergyman turned traveling book peddler who published A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits of General George Washington in 1800, the year after Washington died. He kept enlarging it edition by edition, and the cherry tree first turns up in the fifth edition of 1806, credited only to an anonymous “aged lady, who was a distant relative.” Weems was writing improving stories for boys rather than documented history, and the anecdote’s reach through the McGuffey Readers made his invention one of the most widely believed ‘facts’ in American life.