Where is Wellington?
Homes in the Wellington Civic Association neighborhoods are located between Dyke Marsh and Collingwood Road, nestled between Fort Hunt Road and the Potomac River.
A Brief History of Wellington
The following is excerpted from a brief history of the Wellington neighborhood and its environs by Wellington resident Kevin W.C. Green©
The history of our neighborhood goes back a long way, and, because so much of importance has happened here or nearby, surprisingly much is known about it.
The earliest residents of our area arrived on foot or by water perhaps 10,000 years ago and built simple shelters and small villages on the hills above the river, which they called something that sounded to later European ears like Patowomack. They fished for shad and sturgeon with spears and nets, hunted for bison and deer, and grew corn, squash, and other comestibles in burnt clearings that often still exist as meadows today. They liked living on the hills because here they could keep an eye on any strangers who might come up or across the river, whence danger most often approached. Modern artifact-hunters frequently find arrowheads, oyster middens, animal bones, and other detritus left here by
those original Wellingtonians.
Among the earliest Europeans to record seeing our neighborhood were Captain John Smith and the 14 adventurers who accompanied him in 1608 on his first exploration of the lands and waters north of the new English settlement at Jamestown. They came upriver in a single small boat as far as Great Falls, and in Smith’s journal described stopping to visit with the natives living in a substantial village that they called Assaomeck, one of several villages scattered from north of Wellington to south of Mount Vernon. Smith called these indians Doegs or Dogues—perhaps because of the many dogs that they kept—and noted the locations of their villages on detailed maps of the Chesapeake Bay and its Virginia tributaries.
Wellington’s hills are the chief geographic feature of a peninsula that is bounded entirely by water—on the east by the Potomac, on the south by Little Hunting Creek, and on the west by the meandering course of Spring Branch. This isolated peninsula was known in the early 1700s as Clifton’s Neck. William Clifton inherited it as a descendant of the family of Giles Brent Jr., the son of an indian princess, Kittamaqund, who crossed the river with her family in the mid-1600s from the ancient villages of the Piscataway tribe in Maryland. Brent helped Governor Berkeley’s royalist cavaliers put down Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 and led much of the fighting in the frequent indian wars that punctuated the late 17th century in Virginia. His “final solution” to the indian threat came when a settler named Henn was murdered near Occoquan and Brent’s rangers tracked the alleged killers to the village of Assaomeck, said to have been located at the cove just north of Arcturuson-the-Potomac. The few indians who survived that massacre fled forever, returning across the river to the old Piscataway villages opposite Mount Vernon.
William Clifton owned virtually all of the land from Little Hunting Creek to a point on the river just below today’s stone bridge at Alexandria Avenue. He lived in a cabin close to the river near the small beach about a mile south of Collingwood Road. In 1745, he launched a ferry there to carry travelers to and from Hatton Point, directly across the river. His ferry wasn’t very popular, because it wasn’t on the beaten path. He noted in a 1745 Maryland Gazette advertisement that, although travelers must come a “somewhat greater” distance to his ferry, “as the great River Patowmack is so narrow at this Place and passable almost in all Weather, it justly be accounted the readiest way.” It wasn’t. There is but one reference to Clifton’s Ferry in all of Fairfax County’s 18th-century records: “No sign along road to here,” a traveler on the King’s Highway complained in 1759.
In 1760, Clifton sold his Neck to his nearest neighbor to the south, 28-year-old George Washington (though only after Hollin Hall owner Thomson Mason tried unsuccessfully to top Washington’s bid). In one stroke and relying largely on the assets of Martha Dandridge Custis, the wealthy widow whom he had wed in January 1759, Washington added close to 1,800 acres to his Mt. Vernon holdings—the single largest addition he would ever make to his home estate.
Washington referred ever after to this property as his “Neck Plantation” and he visited it almost daily whenever he was home, fording Little Hunting Creek on horseback at Gum Springs and riding east toward the river on what is now Collingwood Road. Sometimes he turned south on a little farm path (today’s Riverside Road) to visit the seven fields and 1,200 acres of the Neck
Plantation’s largest agricultural operation, River Farm, which stretched along the north shore of Little Hunting Creek on the old Brent property. If he wanted to foxhunt or fish, he continued out to Clifton’s old house, rented after 1762 to Samuel Johnston (or Johnson). Johnston kept the ferry and fared no better than Clifton had, but his spring—which still flows into the Potomac between Waynewood and Fort Hunt Road today‚—was Washington’s favorite place to picnic and watch his slaves seine for springtime shad or, in summer, race boats out in the river. In fact, Johnston’s Spring remained a popular destination well into the 20th century for tourists visiting Mount Vernon via the steamboats that plied the river and stopped regularly at Collingwood.
The northenmost parcel of his Neck Plantation Washington called Walnut Tree Farm, for reasons that remain obvious to arborists today. Washington intended to bequeath the whole Neck to his young nephew, Major George Augustine Washington, and in 1786 suggested that the Major and his new wife, the former Fanny Bassett of Williamsburg, live in the old tenant house at Walnut Tree Farm while building a new home there for themselves. Construction began in the early 1790s on their new house, the core of the structure that we now know as the American Horticulture Society’s headquarters (and erroneously call “River Farm,” of which Walnut Tree Farm was never a part).
By 1792, however, George Augustine Washington had fallen too ill to continue the project. He died in February 1793. George Washington’s private secretary, Tobias Lear, lost his wife, Polly, in July of the same year. That set the stage for Lear’s marriage to the widowed Fanny Bassett Washington two years later. Their wedding gift from President Washington was a life tenancy in Walnut Tree Farm. The Lears resumed construction on the new house and moved in shortly thereafter. In 1795, Lear and Bartholomew Dandridge, another Washington nephew, surveyed the farm. Their simple plat, now in the collection at Mount Vernon, details the perimeter of a property of roughly 200 acres reaching from Collingwood Road north to Alexandria Avenue and from the river to well west of today’s Fort Hunt Road—an area a substantial portion of which we call Wellington today.
Why we call it Wellington remains a mystery, though. Tobias Lear committed suicide at Walnut Tree Farm in 1816, just two years after British warships were forced to battle flaming fire-barges and harassing fire from our very shore after sacking Alexandria and setting fire to the Capitol and the President’s Mansion in Washington (the White House would not be so called until that charring was over-painted). After Lear’s demise, the property reverted to Washington-family ownership. It was sold in 1859 to a pair of Quaker brothers named Snowden, one of whom built a new home on the river and called it “Collingwood,” reportedly after the area of New Jersey from which the brothers had come to Virginia. The other brother, Isaac, briefly occupied the old Lear place and is said to have christened it “Wellington,” though for reasons unknown and despite the fact that the brick home was widely known (and commonly marked on the era’s maps and charts) as “Red House” throughout most of the 19th century.
After living at Wellington and operating a school there for several years, Isaac Snowden sold the house and the fields to its north to a Quaker group called (really) “the Syndicate,” and built a new house for himself, which he called “Riverview,” immediately to the south, though reached via the same half-mile-long driveway—today’s Wellington Road. As did almost all of the farmers in the neighborhood—virtually all of them Quakers from New Jersey after the 1ate 1850s—the Syndicate and the Snowdens raised dairy cattle and shipped their milk by horse-drawn wagon to waiting customers in Alexandria and Washington.
The Snowden brethren were joined by a third brother in the 1880s. William H. Snowden built a house midway between those of his siblings and dubbed it “Andalusia,” again for reasons unknown. He appears to have been interested less in dairy-farming than in development. When he heard that a new road was being planned to carry tourists to Mt. Vernon and back, he replatted his property into streets, blocks, and lots, intending to market it as the new town of Arcturus, named by himself for his pole star. He must have grown giddy when the proposed “National Road from Washington to Mt. Vernon” was realized instead as an electric streetcar line running directly past his property, along what is now tree-lined East Boulevard Drive. He quickly penned
a guidebook full of romantic but frequently fictional reminiscences about the neighborhood, commissioned an artist to illustrate same—her compensation was a buildable lot in Arcturus—and called the collation Some Old Historic Landmarks of Virginia and Maryland, Illustrated, a Hand-Book for the Tourist Over the Washington, Alexandria and Mount Vernon Railway.
The Washington, Alexandria and Mount Vernon Railway operated as many as 26 trains daily from 1894 through 1927, with stops at Belmont (Alexandria Avenue), Wellington (the original Wellington driveway), Arcturus, Herbert Springs, and Snowden (Collingwood). Streetcar service tremendously influenced the history of the area, and for no one more than the dairy farmers whose milk was now carried into town and city quickly and often via rail rather than wagon. Thompson’s Dairy, the neighborhood milk collective located on Sherwood Hall Lane on the original grounds of Hollin Hall, became and remained Washington’s largest milk operation well into the 1950s, largely because of the early impact of the streetcar line.
Nonetheless, the greatest single influence on local history since the publication of Snowden’s guidebook has probably been Snowden’s guidebook. First published in 1894 by Lippincott and later republished seven times by Snowden himself, it was sold track-side for roughly thirty years to tens of thousands of visitors who were, in its folksy pages, introduced to Snowden’s fabulous and romantic tales of “gay cavaliers” who dueled, dallied and dined here amid the “historic highlands” of Wellington—tales that masquerade to this day as “legitimate” history.
Most modern Wellingtonians know that the streetcar line was replaced in our neighborhood in 1932—the bicentennial of George Washington’s birth—by “the boulevard,” the new Mount Vernon Memorial Parkway, which eventually became a segment of the larger George Washington Parkway. The handsome, white-columned streetcar station atop the hill at Alexandria Avenue, originally called Belmont and later renamed Wellington Villa, was succeeded by an equally handsome stone bridge, the highway below it intentionally sunk to ease a long, uphill climb from Dyke Marsh.
Back in 1912, the Syndicate had followed Snowden’s Arcturian lead, selling off its property for subdivision. The focal point of the new community of Wellington Villa—the first of today’s Wellingtons—was a linear park that led downhill from the eponymous station-house to the exact point on the river’s edge that, in 1755, George Washington marked as the northeast corner of William Clifton’s Neck. Among the first houses in this new “streetcar suburb,” one or two of which can still be seen behind newer construction today, were simple wood-framed structures moved via flatcar from a hydrographic station once located just below Collingwood, where the steamships pulled in (and where underwater pilings are still marked as a navigational hazard in contemporary charts of the upper Potomac River).
Other Wellington homes and enclaves followed in the middle decades of the 20th century, especially after World War II. (The Washington metropolitan area’s population doubled between 1930 and 1950 and has since more than doubled again.) With Wellington’s hollows and heights already largely planned if not populated, such postwar neighborhoods as Tauxemont—now listed on the National Register of Historic Places—Hollin Hall, Collingwood, Waynewood, the Stratfords, Villa May, et al came along shortly afterward to accommodate suburbanizing GIs and their clamorous offspring, many of whom, myself among them, continue happily to call Wellington, even unto this late day, home.
– Kevin W. Green