Sunday

The Pink House & Garden

40174 Main Street

Open on Sunday: 10am to 5pm

In 1825, Lewis Klein opened this building as a “house of entertainment” —a tavern. He had purchased the lot from Quaker William Hough about 1815 for $80. Like many of its neighbors on Main Street, it was designed for mixed use—a store or other business below and a residence above. It therefore had no interior staircase between the first and second floors until a 1950s modernization.

The present large downstairs room was built as two rooms with a central corridor; it has seen many uses over the years. After serving as a tavern the space became variously an apothecary and hardware store. In the 1880s the building was the home and office of Dr. G. E. Connell, an enterprising physician. He introduced the telephone to the village in 1884 and charged customers ten cents to call Clark’s Gap, three miles distant at the other end of the line. A side addition was used as a barbershopin the early 20^th century. In the early 1950s, a new owner painted the house the color “of the setting sun on Waterford brick.” The paint was meant to slow weathering of the soft brick; it has been repainted in other shades since. The Pink House later was a popular bed and breakfast destination.

The present garden area has seen a succession of buildings over the past 200 years, including blacksmith and wheelwright shops and a succession of stores. A town hall and auditorium occupied the loft area of a large stable on the site. One of these shops stood where the new stone kitchen now stands. At least one of them served briefly as a residence. During an exceptionally rainy period with water pouring down the hill, a tenant joked, “I have the most modern house in Waterford— running water in every room!”

The Pink House is open through the courtesy of Isaac Johnson and Jeff Darrah.

The Samuel Steer House

15580 Second Street

Open on Sunday: 10am to 5pm

In 1856 Waterford miller Samuel C. Means (1827-1884) purchased vacant lots 39 and 40 of Mahlon Janney’s 1814 subdivision. By January 1861, with war looming and busy with his mill on Main Street, Means sold the lots on which this house stands to Robert W. Thomas (1825-1905), a blacksmith and hotel keeper. Thomas promptly built this house, but by September 1861, when Confederate troops occupied Waterford, they took over the new house for a hospital.

Later in the war, when the Rebels had withdrawn, Quaker businessman Samuel Steer (1811-1883) rented the house and moved his family into town from his farm south of the village for safety; he finally purchased it in 1867 for $700. Northern sympathizer Steer spent much of the war “exiled” at nearby Point of Rocks, Maryland, serving as the U.S. Customs Agent. During the war, his daughter Sarah and her young neighbors Lida and Lizzie Dutton co-established the fervently pro-union Waterford News. The young women would note, in their paper, after their father’s rare visits home that John Dutton and Samuel Steer had “returned safely to the United States….” In 1864 Steer was arrested by Confederates as he tried to visit his family and imprisoned for his Union sympathies.

At the close of the war, Sarah Ann Steer (1837-1914), held classes for village African-American children, first in her home, then in 1867 at the new one-room school just down Second Street. She taught until 1870 when that school became part of the County’s school system. Her sister Ella taught at the first public school for white children, the Waterford Academy, the predecessor of the Old School on Fairfax Street.

In the 1980s, the owners enclosed a porch. The present owners added an outbuilding, remodeled and enlarged the kitchen, installed a patio and designed and put in a garden with stone walls and a pond.

The Samuel Steer House is open through the courtesy of Edith Crockett and Ed Lehmann.

William Irish Shop

40153 Main Street

Open on Friday: 10am to 5pm

The construction date of this house is unknown but, like many in Waterford, it once served as a store. William Irish (1844-1882), a Quaker from New York, conducted a watchmaking and jewelry business here after the Civil War until a typhoid epidemic cut short his life. The Chamberlins renovated and added onto this home around 1970. Photos antedating the renovation depict a two-story facade with a shed roof instead of a gable. A porch ran along the southeast wall.

The William Irish Shop property is open through the courtesy of its current owners, Carl Scheider and Jane Williams.

Ephraim Schooley House

15547 Second Street

Open on Sunday: 10am to 5pm

The Ephraim Schooley House is also known as the Parker Bennett House is a Federal period home. The land was acquired in 1820 by weaver John Morrow who began building the left side, shorter portion of the house ca. 1820 using Flemish Bond brick construction. You can see that the center window of the left side of the home would have been the front door. The house was initially a weaving establishment for not only Morrow, but also later Thomas Donaldson who weaved carpet and dyed both carpet and cloth here. During the economic depression of 1819 – 1822, Morrow lost the property. It was bought at auction by Richard Henderson in 1824, who then sold it to Jesse Gover in 1830. William Mayne took over the weaving establishment in 1828 where he accepted jobs for all kinds of weaving. Ephraim Schooley, the Quaker for whom the home is named, bought the property from Gover in 1834. The taller structure on the right side of the home was likely constructed in 1851 using Common Bond brick construction and was a separate residence.

Saddler Asa Brown (1794 – 1872) lived in the home in the 1850’s and 1860’s. The Civil War split his large family down the middle. Asa, a veteran of the War of 1812, was a loyal Unionist, as was his son and two daughters. Sons Charlie and “Ab” were supporters of the confederacy, as was wife Aurena and a third daughter. All managed to survive the war, though Charlie took a Yankee bullet at the First Battle of Bull Run.

The house was used as two separate dwellings that were both sold to H.C. Bennett in 1876. From 1919 to 1959, the property was owned by the H.B. Parker family. Harvey, a blacksmith, came home from WWI and feuded with his brother Fred who had run the smithy in his absence. The two never spoke again. When Mr. and Mrs. John Lewis bought the property in 1959, they restored the home and named it “The Parker-Bennett House”. The two-level addition was added in the 1970’s and an easement was granted to the Virginia Historic Landmarks Commission. Further additions were done in the 1980’s. Although you would never know it by looking at it from the street, this is one of the largest lots in Waterford. There are four acres in the back. The house was built with “Waterford bricks,” which were fired right here on the property.

The Ephraim Schooley property is open through the courtesy of its current owners, the Manch family.

Weavers’ Cottage

40188 Water Street & 40188 Main Street

Open on Sunday: 10am to 5pm

This two-story stone and log house is the only one still standing on Water Street. It exemplifies housing for less affluent individuals in the early 19th century; many builders continued to use log and stone as a cheaper alternative to brick or frame construction. Its earliest known owner was Elizabeth Gore (c.1772-c.1848), who in 1818 bought what was probably a vacant lot. She sold the property in 1849 to a weaver from Germany. In the mid-1850s William Robinson (born c.1821), a free African-American, purchased the house; it remained in his family for close to a century. Two additional dwellings owned by African-American families stood to the right of the Weaver’s Cottage until the late 1800s.

The Weavers’ Cottage is open through the courtesy of Owners Jeff Darrah and Issac Johnson and Renter Shawn Perrine.

Asbury-Johnson House

15567 Second Street

Open on Sunday: 10am to 5pm

This house is the first of three Victorians built on contiguous vacant lots along the southwest side of Second Street in the late 19th century. During the Civil War, in October 1862, a Union division commander described the location as a beautiful site “in front of a most excellent family of Quakers on the opposite side of the street . . . They offered a nice room, but I prefer my tent,” (where he could keep an eye on his men bivouacked on the adjoining Phillips Farm).

Armida Athey Love (1841-1926), widow of a Union army surgeon, bought the land in 1886 and by the following year had added a new frame dwelling. The house was built by carpenter Asbury R. Johnson (1842-1905), whom she married in March 1887. The local press reported the following month that “Mrs. Kate Rickard, nee Compher, has purchased the handsome new residence lately built by Mrs. Love . . . as her [Kate’s] future home.” Kate, herself a widow, remarried John S. Paxson in 1889, and the property remained in the Paxson and Rickard families until 1956.

A protective easement on the house is held by the Virginia Department of Historic Resources (DHR). Many homes in Waterford have this protection. It prevents inappropriate changes to the original structure. And in fact there have been few alterations made—plumbing and wiring aside. It is less exuberantly embellished than its labor neighbors to the south. In 2010 an earlier deck was rehabilitated and a porch added that is sympathetic to the original architecture.

The Asbury-Johnson House is open through the courtesy of Debbie Zongoli & George Rambo.

The Bank House

40149 Main Street

This finely crafted house was probably built about 1806 by young Israel H. Thompson. Unfortunately, he died the same year, at age 22. The building he left is notable for its precisely mortared brickwork and an elegant architrave under the eaves.

Thompson’s executors sold the house to Richard Chilton in 1809, and in 1815 Isaac Steer and his son Jonah purchased the building. Early on, Isaac rented a “storeroom” in the house to the newly formed Loudoun Company, a bank founded by local farmers and businessmen. The enterprise was short-lived but, according to tradition, the steel door of its vault was repurposed to cap a horse-mounting block across the street.

The Chamberlin family that began the restoration of Waterford bought the property in the late 1930s and held it for more than 70 years. Wellman Chamberlin, National Geographic’s chief cartographer, made extensive repairs and improvements to the old building at mid-century, including replacing a dilapidated porch that spanned the front façade with a hand-carved door surround he fashioned himself.

The Bank House property is open through the courtesy of Tracy and Paul Shorn.

Old Waod

Old Waod/Off the Rails

This is one of several village buildings that look older than they actually are. A “1769” inscription, installed in jest by the original owner George Bentley, fooled visitors who marveled at the house’s “fine condition” for such an “old house.” Actually Bentley constructed it two centuries later than 1769, using discarded railroad ties from the defunct Washington and Old Dominion Railroad, hence the playful name. According to a newspaper account at the time, Bentley called it “Old Waod,” pronounced “Old Wood.” The current owners, in keeping with the whimsy of the “Old Waod” name, have dubbed it “Off the Rails.”

Mr. and Mrs. Bentley came to Waterford in the 1940s and raised a family, soon becoming active and loyal members of the non-profit Waterford Foundation. They were tireless workers each year at the annual Waterford Homes Tour and Craft Exhibit, and both served on the Board of Directors. Ruth Bentley wrote a weekly column about Waterford for the Loudoun Times-Mirror through the 1960s. Both worked on other houses they purchased in the village, all the while commuting to Washington, D.C. to work. These houses included their residence, the Hough House at 40205 Main Street, the Lloyd Curtis house on the Big Hill, and the Weaver’s Cottage on Water Street.

This log cabin originally served as storage space for the Bentley’s home on the hill above, but was converted into a home beginning in 1992, and the lower lot was made a separate parcel in 1997. The land on which it is built had belonged to the extensive Hough family who dominated village history—off and on—from this lot from 1801 until the 1940s.

Like many local properties, this lot features extensive stonework which is credited to the late village stonemason Norman Weatherholtz. There are two very large stone retaining walls behind the house, one of which helped to define a flat area for the log building, and the other of which divides the lower lot from the Hough House in back. In the mid-20th century, the Weatherholtz family lived at 40139 Main Street in the “Griffith-Gover House,” and more of Norman’s work can be seen along Main Street in that front garden wall.

The present owners of Old Waod/”Off the Rails” have recently refreshed the interior of the house, and also worked with Allen Kitselman, the original architect for the 1992 house conversion, as well as Rhoads Restoration and the Loudoun County Historic Review Committee to add a third floor with a bathroom and master bedroom. They have also tamed an especially steep and challenging backyard area with additional stonework and new garden areas.

Old Woad/Off the Rails is open through the courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. Frank Davis.