Waterford Fair

77th American Crafts & Historic Homes Tour

Friday Homes

Bank House Property

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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 is open through the courtesy of the current owners Julia and Samuel Thompson.

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Walker-Phillips Property

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This house has had few owners during its nearly 200-year history.  It was apparently built shortly before 1820 when David and Elizabeth Janney, members of the Society of Friends (Quakers), sold it to fellow Quaker farmer and merchant Isaac Walker (1781-1851) for $350. After his death, Walker’s widow, the former Susan Talbott, lived here until her own passing in 1872. Two years later her executors sold it to Elizabeth Janney Sidwell Phillips (1827-1913).  Elizabeth, the widow of Thomas Phillips (1813-1865), helped run the family farm, today’s “Phillips Farm,” with her four sons.  The Phillips farm adjoins the property at the rear and has been protected in perpetuity by the Waterford Foundation.

Elizabeth Phillips left the house to her son Arthur when she died in 1913. He sold it to Peter H. Carr (1843-1922), a veteran of the Confederate Cavalry and the first non-Quaker owner. In 1941 Carr’s commissioners sold the house to local dairy farmer Ernest M. Edwards. Sarah Holway bought it from Ernest’s descendants in 2014.

The Walker-Phillips House is open courtesy of Sarah Holway and Matt Rasnake.

 

Pink House Property

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In 1825, Lewis Klein opened this building as a tavern. He had purchased the lot from Quaker William Hough a decade earlier for $80. Like many of its neighbors on Main Street, it was designed for mixed use—a store or other business on the ground floor 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 first telephone to the village in 1884 and charged customers ten cents to call the railroad depot at Clarke’s Gap, three miles distant. In the early 20th century, a side addition was used as a barbershop. 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, locally-made brick; it has been repainted in other shades since. In more recent years, the Pink House has been 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 well into the 20th century. A town hall and informal auditorium occupied the loft area of a large stable on the site. One of these shops stood where the new stone kitchen now stands. That building served briefly as a residence. During an exceptionally rainy period with water pouring down the hill behind, a tenant joked, “I have the most modern house in Waterford— running water in every room!”

The previous owners, Dr. and Mrs. Charles Anderson protected the Pink House with the gift of an easement to the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.

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

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Jacob Mendenhall

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15620 Second Street

Quakers Jacob Mendenhall (1788-1822) and his wife, the former Beulah Thomas, were “received on certificate from Baltimore Monthly Meeting” in 1813. The couple immediately settled into their new village, buying two quarter-acre lots from the estate of Mahlon Janney in 1814 for $97.25 and constructing the house shortly thereafter.  It was built of locally made brick and has two front doors, a feature more commonly seen in Pennsylvania.

As a new member of Fairfax Meeting in 1815, Jacob served on a meeting committee to establish a school for Quaker education and became headmaster that year. One of his students, Noah Swayne, later achieved prominence when appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by Abraham Lincoln in 1862.

Mendenhall and Isaac Walker owned and operated a store in Waterford from 1816 to1819. Mendenhall was a stockholder and cashier of the first bank in Loudoun County—also in Waterford—where he was responsible for day-to-day operations. Jacob served as clerk of Fairfax Meeting.

Jacob’s only child, Hannah, who inherited the house after her father died in 1822,   operated a school in the large first-floor room in the 1830s. She married Lewis D. Worley, postmaster of Waterford, in 1838. One of their daughters, Susan Worley, taught at Frying Pan Road School in Fairfax County and boarded at nearby Sully Plantation.

In 1867 the Worleys sold the house to Rachel Steer, who made it her home for 20 years. Rachel (1814 –1912) is buried in the Quaker Cemetery.

In 1896 the house was conveyed to the Methodist Church and was used as a parsonage for almost 50 years. The brick kitchen wing burned in 1915 and was replaced with a larger frame addition.

The most recent addition (to the rear of the house) was completed in 2009.

The Jacob Mendenhall House is protected through a preservation easement to the Virginia Historic Landmarks Commission.

The Jacob Mendenhall House is open through the courtesy of Bob and Judy Jackson.

Talbott’s Tavern

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40162 Main Street

Talbott’s Tavern is part of what is informally called “Arch House Row.” These four residences have undergone considerable change since the early 19th century: Interior partitions have been  adjusted as families intermarried, sold and resold portions, or adjusted to suit their own tastes or  needs. Doors, windows, porches, balconies, siding, even gables, all have changed over time.

Edward and Leroy Chamberlin, brothers from early Waterford families began their extensive restoration efforts in the village with this block of buildings in the 1930s. Joseph Talbott, Jr. purchased the earlier stone portion in the early 1800s, added another story in brick (some of which is now covered in clapboard), and tied it into the stone Talbott House to the south. Talbott and William Paxon (Talbott’s backer) were granted an “ordinary” license and were open for business in 1808.

Joseph Talbott, Jr. was born in Waterford in 1774 to a Maryland Quaker family, but was dismissed in 1796 “for joining in light company, frolicking and dancing.” By 1801 he further blotted his record by marrying a non-Quaker and owning or employing a slave. He eventually sold the successful business to Presbyterian Nathaniel Manning for $5600 and set up a new hotel in Frederick, Maryland.

The Loudoun Company, Loudoun County’s earliest bank, was formed here; the trustees later moved it across the street to 40149 Main Street, which had a cellar vault. This has also been the site of the auctioning of some slaves about 1820. The village was founded by Quakers, but enslaved African Americans lived in town and on surrounding farms alongside their free neighbors. The hotel/tavern went through a series of owners and businesses over the years, including a butcher shop and grocery store—Charlie Divine the shoemaker lived and worked here.

The Loudoun Hotel was the last commercial enterprise here in the 1920s, before being purchased by the Chamberlin brothers who renovated the structures and returned them to residential use.

Talbott’s Tavern is open through the courtesy of Laurie and Wells Goddin.

Trouble Enough Indeed

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Trouble Enough Indeed was brought to Waterford and reconstructed from 1970 to 1980 by William and Carol Hunley.

Visitors to the Waterford Fair in the early 1970s enjoyed watching Trouble Enough Indeed take shape from the components of two log homes ca. 1850 and 1886 from Lewisdale in Montgomery County, Maryland, and an 1876 frame house from Mathews County, Virginia.  Located about three miles apart at Lewisdale, the log houses were tobacco farm houses.  The name comes from the registration of the front wing of the house in the Montgomery County deed book.

The house has been featured in Parade Magazine, in the Washington Post and on NPTV.  It has been a frequent subject for painters and passing photographers.

The log houses were dismantled and every log, stick, stone and brick moved to Waterford, cleaned and returned to its original place in the house.  Even the nails were reused.  The log construction is German “V” notch and logs were stacked one on the other with no fastenings except in the top ring of logs on which the roof rests.  In addition to the log houses and the frame house, artifacts from many well-known buildings are built into the fabric.

The dining room fireplace contains the brick from the log house, and on one side there is a brick from the old church at Jamestown.  One the other side, there is a brick from Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg.  The handmade bricks each show the print of the brick maker’s thumb from being turned when drying, and several contain cat and deer tracks made while the bricks were still soft.  The long-leaf pine heart flooring and the dining room ceiling beams were salvaged from the Carlyle Apartments that were built in 1819.  Many of the doors, windows and replacement timbers were salvaged from the house built in 1876 by William S. Hunley, shipwright, farmer and oysterman, at Retz in the Kingston Parish Glebe in Mathews County, Virginia.  Several of the doors were made in the family shipyard and are fastened with boat nails.

Trouble Enough Indeed is open through the courtesy of  the current owner Margo Noel.