Oil on panel, Carlton Fletcher, 2001

I’ve been engrossed with Bradley Gernand’s A Virginia Village Goes to War: Falls Church During the Civil War for the past couple of weeks. Even though it’s about my adopted hometown, this entire area has changed so much over the past 140 years that it’s a real challenge to find some of the places named and extant buildings. The other night I searched for the Dower House at 1157 Swinks Mill Road in McLean. I found it, but it’s hidden from street view by a thicket of trees. There’s no historical marker, either; hell, the neighbors probably don’t even know about its history (it was owned by the sister of the owner of a hotel in Alexandria, who became the first civilian casualty of the Civil War when he shot a Union officer who had ripped down a secessionist flag from the hotel, and was shot in turn by the the officer’s men).

There is, however, an interesting house down the road from it (at the intersection with the Georgetown Pike), which, amazingly, I found captured in this painting. It looks ~1850s-ish, but possibly uninhabited; I didn’t even see a street number. And it was painted the most interesting color, as you can see from the painting. Suffice it to say that even in its dilapidated state, it had infinitely more character than the sprawling mansions that have popped up in the area.