By gosh, they’ve found it.

Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine was to announce this afternoon that archaeologists have unearthed the remains of the Stafford County home where George Washington spent his formative years.

Locating and excavating the first president’s boyhood, the holy grail of Fredericksburg-area historic sites, was the goal of many groups over many years.

The George Washington Foundation made it happen, Kaine was to tell reporters gathered at Ferry Farm.

This morning, the four-member project team fielded questions about their discovery from international news media during a teleconference hosted by the National Geographic Society.

“This is it—this is the site of the house where George Washington grew up,” said David Muraca, director of archaeology for the foundation, which owns the 113-acre property.

The farm is the scene of some of the best-known stories about Washington, including his chopping down a cherry tree (“I cannot tell a lie, Pa”) and throwing a stone across the Rappahannock River.

“If George Washington did indeed chop down a cherry tree, as generations of Americans have believed, this is where it happened,” said archaeologist Philip Levy, whose research is partly funded by National Geographic. “There is little actual documentary evidence of Washington’s formative years. What we see at this site is the best available window into the setting that nurtured the father of our country.”

Muraca and his colleagues said that evidence excavated over seven summers proves they’ve found the foundation and cellars of the clapboard-sided house that sheltered George, his parents and siblings.

Far from being the rustic cottage of Washington lore, the house was a much larger one-and-a-half-story affair, perched on a bluff overlooking the Rappahannock, Muraca and Levy, an associate professor of history at the University of South Florida, determined.

The evidence also shows that a fire which struck the home on Christmas Eve 1740 was small and localized, near a hearth, and not the major catastrophe which some had depicted.