George and Martha

"To my dearly beloved wife Martha Washington I give and bequeath the use, profit and benefit of my whole Estate, real and personal, for the term of her natural life…." So begins the dispositive portion of George Washington's will.

You remember Martha, the frumpy, dumpy widow we suspect George of marrying partly for her ample wealth. But what if she wasn't dumpy? And what if she ditched a richer boyfriend to marry George because George was a hunk?

George and Martha probably met while in their mid-20s. They wed, two hundred fifty years ago, when they were about 27, young by today's standards. One of his biographers, Flexner, pictures George as "Very tall for his generation – over six feet – with reddish hair and gray-blue eyes…. George exuded such masculine power as frightens young women just wakening to the opposite sex."

Martha, The Washington Post notes, may have been quite a foxy lady. Well over a foot shorter than George, petite and slender. Here's how she was portrayed before her marriage, together with an "age-regression" image based on what's believed to be the most faithful portrait of Martha in her later years.