Germantown

This guide to Germantown in Philadelphia traces President Washington's retreat from the 1793 yellow fever epidemic, when he ran the young United States from a rented stone farmhouse ten miles outside the city. It weighs the era's competing theories for the fever, from rotting coffee on the docks to bad air off the wharves to decayed produce, while thousands of Philadelphians packed the roads north seeking safety in the countryside. Washington called this rented cottage a fine, airy place. Stand on the porch of that same farmhouse on Germantown Avenue, in the shade of its old orchard trees.