George Washington's dentures were carved from wood.

The story settled into American classrooms sometime in the early nineteenth century and proved impossible to dislodge. George Washington, the founding president, wore wooden teeth. Teachers told it. Textbooks included it. It became one of those historical details that functions less as a fact than as a social token, a shared piece of national lore passed from one generation to the next with the casual confidence of common knowledge.

Washington did suffer terribly from dental disease. His diary and correspondence document a relentless campaign against tooth decay and gum deterioration that began in his twenties and continued throughout his life. By the time of his first inauguration in 1789, he had one natural tooth remaining. His dentist, John Greenwood of New York, built Washington's dentures and maintained them for years. Greenwood's surviving correspondence with Washington, including an 1798 letter advising the president to clean his dental plates more carefully because port wine had turned them black, is among the primary source documentation preserved by the New York Academy of Medicine.

The materials Greenwood used were not wood. Washington's dentures were constructed from a combination of human teeth, animal teeth from horses and cattle, and ivory carved from hippopotamus and elephant tusks, all set into a lead alloy base with gold wire springs and brass screws. Four of Washington's denture sets survive in museum collections; the most complete example is preserved at Mount Vernon, his Virginia estate. Analysis of that set, along with records from Greenwood and from Washington's own household accounts, has established the material composition with considerable precision. No documented set, no invoice, no letter, no physical examination of surviving artifacts has ever indicated the use of wood.

Where the myth came from is a matter of some informed speculation. The Mount Vernon archivists who have studied the question most closely point to the visual properties of aged ivory. Ivory is not a uniform material; it contains fine internal grain lines, the remnants of the tusk's growth structure. Washington had a well-documented fondness for Madeira wine, and Greenwood's 1798 letter confirms that the wine was staining the dentures. As ivory ages and absorbs liquid, those grain lines darken at a different rate than the surrounding material, producing a pattern of parallel lines that can look, at a glance, very much like wood grain. An observer in the early nineteenth century who saw Washington's dentures under those conditions, or heard a description of them, might plausibly have made the comparison.

The myth circulated in an era before systematic historical documentation of material culture was standard practice, and it attached itself to Washington with particular tenacity because it humanized him in a specific way, making the great man slightly ridiculous and therefore more accessible. A president suffering through speeches with ill-fitting ivory and animal-tooth dentures held together by metal springs is perhaps a more vivid and comprehensible figure than the marble portrait of the history books. The Smithsonian Institution and the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association both addressed the myth directly in the late twentieth century, and physical examination of surviving artifacts settled the question definitively. The wood was never there.