George and Martha Washington lived at Mount Vernon, which George Washington called home from 1754 until his death in 1799. After inheriting a smaller plantation home on more than 2,000 acres, he enlarged it into a 21-room mansion on 8,000 acres. George Washington praised its setting in 1793 as pleasantly situated in a high, dry country 300 miles by water from the sea and on one of the finest rivers in the world. The estate has long drawn visitors, and for much of that time boat service to and from Mount Vernon provided the only safe and convenient access. In 1850, John Augustine Washington III, George Washington's great-grandnephew and the last family owner, ended a longstanding ban on steamboat travel to the estate, and visitors began arriving aboard the steamship Thomas Collyer, favoring the 90-minute trip by water over 4 hours on poor roads from Alexandria. The Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, a private non-profit organization founded in 1853, officially opened the estate to the public in 1860, and construction of a new wharf increased steamboat traffic and provided important revenue before hostilities during the American Civil War curtailed it. After the war, boat traffic resumed and continued, and by the 1890s the Mount Vernon and Marshall Steamboat Company offered exclusive riverboat access to the estate and to Marshall Hall across the Potomac in Maryland. Visitors boarded the Charles Macalester in Washington D.C. for daily excursions, and later larger, faster Wilson Line ships such as the City of Washington and the Mount Vernon remained popular even after major transportation improvements. Today, tens of thousands of visitors still arrive at Mount Vernon by boat to see the estate from the river George Washington loved.