Occupancy

Nearly 15 months to the day following the first email to our friends at Thoughtful Development - and 140 years after the original house was built - we moved into Larner-Jones House.

Perhaps Tan?

It was a little bit uneventful given how much remains to be done, but a milestone nonetheless. We have talked to many people who have spent more than 15 months just looking for the right property in the Falls Church market, so with perspective we can say that we have moved quickly. That doesn't keep passersby from still wondering what is going on, or occasional visitors to consider carefully (from the outside) whether or not they should enter.

Still, things are coming along. The siding has gone up on 3 of the 4 sides of the new addition, and exterior painting has begun. When it came out of the box the siding was a tan color, which prompted a neighborhood debate (or so we hear) on whether or not we were going to change the color of the house from its distinctive deep red. While test painting a few interesting patches of purple or yellow might have been entertaining, we have been planning to keep the house the same color since we bought it. As can be seen from the picture above, the screen and back porches have been added, although finish work remains on both.

Cabinets Installed

The kitchen is mostly completed, with the cabinets going in this week. As with any kitchen install, there were inevitable problems with the cabinets. The drawer fronts were incorrect (although correctly ordered), and at least one cabinet needs to be re-ordered at a different configuration. The quarter sawn oak flooring in the kitchen and family rooms is in and finished, and looks great. Of course, that is a neat trick to pull off given the juxtaposition of our kitchen flooring to 1850s antique heart pine in the old house, which is simply fantastic following a sanding and merely a clear finish on top.

New House Bathroom

Old House Bathroom

We also have fully functioning bathrooms, with the girls' baths being first to have been completed. Both are nice and unique, and the girls wasted no time moving in to them. Coupled with eye-catching paper blinds on loan to us by the window treatment store, the bathrooms are in service without getting that fishbowl feeling. In the bathroom that was converted from a small bedroom in the old house (at right), you still get a feel for old house construction. The ceiling lines look like they were put in place by a Friday night carpenter, and if one gets the sense he or she is walking downhill from one side of the room to the other, it is not imagination. New beams can do only so much.

Stuck!

Cool Newel

An interesting side effect of living in a house under renovation is the ups and downs of the myriad challenges that pop up during the work. One of the more entertaining episodes was watching the finish guys wrestle with a 1-piece, 8-foot-long vanity for the master bath that simply was not going to go through the portals into said master bath (at left). After taking out an already-finished doorway including the drywall and framing above it, victory was achieved. On the other hand, watching the stair guys work their magic to make a modern handrail merge into an antique newel post was quite impressive.

Old House Bedroom

New House Bedroom

The upstairs is virtually complete, and the bedrooms have turned out very nicely. Each is different, from the bedroom in the old house with its original flooring and windows (at left) to the fantastically coordinated bedroom in the new part of the house (at right). With the completion of the kitchen (for the most part), the bedrooms, bathrooms and laundry room, we have the ability to do most things required for modern civilization. A big next step will be countertops in the kitchen and master bathroom, so that plumbing can be hooked up, we can clean dishes, and we can stop borrowing sinks in our girls' bathrooms. Which everyone will appreciate.

There is still quite a bit to do, and hopefully we can make rapid progress on the finish work that remains. For example, the basement is far from done, and each football weekend that passes without a functioning media room is mourned appropriately. Every visitor's favorite question is "when do you expect to be done?", to which we merely smile and remember when we thought it was that simple.

Now if we could just get rid of that tarp...

Vintage

Our last two posts chronicled the attempt to use physical evidence at the house and written records from a variety of sources to pin down the construction date of Larner-Jones House. When we started the process, we had no reason to doubt the supposed 1852 construction date. However, by the time we got through most of the written records we could dig up, 1852 was looking less likely to be the answer.

Ultimately, we came upon four sources of written records that, together, allowed us to come up with the best estimate we have so far. Those four sources of information are the 1970 research of past owners, two maps of Falls Church created by the Federal Government in separate years, and painstaking research by Falls Church historian and author Shirley Camp documented in her book "Past Times Around Falls Church".

Two of the sources establish with near certainty that in 1878, Landin Aldrich occupied Larner-Jones House. The first of our map sources, an 1878 Library of Congress Map, shows a house and a lot clearly labeled "Landin Aldrich" at the corner of what is now Maple and Columbia streets.

Entered According to Act of Congress in the year 1878 by G.M. Hopkins, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress

This close-up zoom of the map (at right) shows the Landin Aldrich property, bounded on both sides by Wells Forbes and to the north by Isaac Crossman's land. Note the "Crossman Chapel" at the corner of Columbia and Fairfax-Georgetown Parkway, now called Lee Highway. The chapel there still stands under the name of "Christ Crossman United Methodist Church". The map also shows the home of Dr. JB Gardner at the intersection of Columbia and Falls Road (now Little Falls Street). This property is once again known as Shadow Lawn, and still stands at the same address.

This map dovetails with the 1970 records research, stating that one of the prior owners was Landin Aldrich. One interesting contradiction in the land records is that the transfer of the property to Landin Aldrich apparently did not take place until 1880, despite obviously being associated with him in this 1878 map. These two data points establish a date by which the house was certainly already constructed - 1878.

The third, and more elusive, data point we discovered was a map made in 1862 by the Bureau of Topographic Engineers, drawn primarily for the purpose of showing the lines of defense around Washington during the Civil War. In the upper right of the image, a small version of the entire map is shown, with the small red rectangle representing the section of the map image below. Noting the details on the extremely zoomed-in version of this map, one gets the sense of the massive effort that must have been undertaken to cover such a wide swath of the Washington area.

It's not what you see, it's what you don't see.

What is notably missing from this map is Larner-Jones House. Falls Road (now Little Falls Street), Great Falls Street and the Middle Turnpike (now Broad Street and Leesburg Pike) are clearly shown. The dotted lines represent a private road that the Osborns built from their house to the far side of the Toll Gate, conveniently allowing them to get produce to market without paying a toll. If Larner-Jones House existed in 1862, it was stealthily hidden somewhere in Cyrus Osborn's orchard.

Taylor's Tavern, c. 1861-1869

Incidentally, the "Fort" on the right side of the image above is Fort Buffalo, known today to everyone in Northern Virginia as Seven Corners. The small defense line labeled "408" above it is near Taylor's Hill and Taylor's Tavern (at right), a Union outpost during the Civil War. Leesburg Pike today has been renamed from "Middle Turnpike", and the Toll Gate represented on this 1862 map is the history behind the name given to Tollgate Way, a townhouse community on today's Broad Street near that location.

This map pretty conclusively shows that LJH was not built yet in 1862, and is likely to be the source used in the 1996 and 2005 official Falls Church documentation on historic structures. Based on these sources, the description in the 1996 survey of "between 1862 and 1878" is the most accurate we have found so far. However, we can do a little better.

The last source we used to refine our dates was the 1981 Shirley Camp book "Past Times Around Falls Church", covering the evolution of the Falls Church area from 1729-1875. In addition to a detailed history on Cherry Hill Farm, the book covers the disposition of land in Falls Church from the original Trammell Patent. It was the last piece of information we needed.

The following excerpts from the book provided the last pieces to the puzzle, since Shirley Camp went to the trouble of deciphering the written conveyances, locating them on the 1878 map, and then also reviewing tax records for personal property. We can trace the house from the 1862 map showing the Osborn ownership of the land:

John Mills Purchases the Land in 1833

Mills to Newton to Harvey in 1844

Harvey to Newton to Osborn in 1846

The Osborns Sell After 19 Years on the Farm

The paragraph above describes the property on which Larner-Jones House now sits. The description matches the 1878 map nicely, with the property bordering Williston Clover's Farm and the 1 acre lot sold to William Kingsley. The book goes on to describe James Sargent's time in Falls Church through the lens of his personal property taxes from 1873:

The Trace is Complete

It is very likely that the property remained farmland until at least 1873 when Isaac Crossman began selling off chunks of Cyrus Osborn's farm that he acquired in 1865. Only two houses (other than Kingsley's) show up on this piece of land by 1878, and the 1877 survey of Landin Aldrich's property was mentioned in the 1970 research we also possess.

The paragraph describing assessments for the Sargent tract in 1874-1875 is interesting because the property carries neither his name nor Buxton's, to whom the property was presumably mortgaged. The property is clearly occupied by Landin Aldrich in 1877-1878, but according to deed it was owned by Wells Forbes from 1875-1880.

Taking all of this information into account, we are fairly certain that Larner-Jones House was built between 1873 and 1875, and occupied by Landin Aldrich until he bought and sold the property 5 days apart in 1880. From there, the chain of ownership is easily followed by the 1970 research, and it paints a picture of interesting owners for another post.

Misdirection

Our previous post covered efforts to use physical evidence in the house to determine its date of construction. Failing to find anything useful, we turned to the surprisingly numerous sources of written records describing the property. Unlike the general date ranges we sifted from the physical evidence we did have, the written records all provide very specific construction dates. Many of them, in fact.

Ghost Not Described in MLS

The initial story we heard during the buying process was that the house was built in the 1850s by a Dr. McDonald, who used the rear entrance and parlor of what will become the new library as a waiting room for his patients. This oral history appeared to pass from the Jones family, as the excerpt (at right) from a late 1960s school essay by one of the Jones boys, recovered from the Mary Riley Styles library (with subsequent edits), would indicate. The essay is a priceless piece of the house's history from one of its residents, and is a microcosm of the attempt to figure out the house's age. In short, it is full of information, some of which might actually be true.

For example, while the year of construction is hard to pin down factually, it is possible that the essay captures the most accurate verbal history available. Up to this point, we hadn't been able to invalidate 1857 (or even 1853) as the construction date, nor can we prove with certainty that the date was 1852 as reflected in several places, such as in the 1981 book "Falls Church Places and People", which cites "1852 or 1853", but without a source.

Not Much of a Choice

There weren't many residents in Falls Church at that time, and nowhere in any of the written histories can one find a "Dr. Macdonald". It is quite possible, however, that whoever owned the property before the Civil War "moved to a safer area", given the strains that the secession of Virginia from the Union put on local Falls Church residents (at left). The only item that appears demonstrably false in the essay is the notion that a Dr. Gardiner lived in Larner-Jones House. Other written records have him living in what is now Shadow Lawn (formerly Whitehall Sanitarium), a block away on Little Falls Street.

The land on which Larner-Jones House sits was originally part of the 248-acre Northern Neck Grant to John Trammell, called the "Trammell Patent", conveyed by Lord Fairfax in 1729. From 1844 through 1875, quite a number of subdivisions, grants, transfers and purchases of land under the Trammell Patent occurred. Identifying the correct parcel from the land records of the time is spectacularly difficult, if not impossible.

To wit, an excerpt from land record research dug out of the library:
------------------------

On 14 June 1882 property was conveyed by William P. Graham to Bettie his wife, for a consideration of $3,000. The property at this time consisted of 6 acres, 1 rod and 23 poles. It was divided into two lots:

Lot #1: Beginning on the northerly side of the Fairfax-Georgetown Pike 132 ft. easterly from the eastern corner of the W. W. Kinsley lot thence along the northerly side of the said turnpike northeasterly 264 ft. to a road; along the westerly side of the road N 21 deg, 51 min W 214 ft., thence south 67 deg 20 min W 264.8 ft, thence south 21 deg 51 min east 208 feet to the place of beginning.

------------------------
Several conveyances in the land records include similar descriptions of the property boundaries, which are tough to decode without a good map. We have been surprised not to find an allusion to the infamous X, the spot!

The first attempt to categorize historic properties in Falls Church appears to have been in 1968. The following image is from the report of one Joseph A. Treehill, dated August 25th of that year:

While the report does not cite its sources, the construction date is identified as 1852. However, the original owner is listed as "Larner" and not "Dr. Macdonald" as we had been led to believe. It is clear from other evidence that Caroline Larner was not the first owner, but 1852 seems to be the construction date of record in this case.

In 1970, an exhaustive effort was made by the city of Falls Church to research its historic properties, including interviews, records research and more. From a lengthy draft report written on Larner-Jones House, the author gives up on tracing the property records, providing instead two possible alternatives for the correct conveyance:
-----------------------

-----------------------
To make matters worse, none of the property records mention whether or not a house came with the land or not anyway. It is only through tax records, housed separately, that one can determine whether there were assessments for buildings. In short, the land records themselves can't be used to prove when the house was constructed, nor can they indicate whether or not a house even existed on the conveyed properties other than in the rare case where a house is mentioned in the conveyance. The 1970 research effort ended without specifying a date of construction.

In 1996, the Falls Church Historic Building Survey was conducted by the city, and a report was written on the house, referring to it both as "Larner House" and "Aldrich/Luttrell/Larner House". Excerpts from that survey follow here:

Without citing the specific sources, other than "Written (HC)", which is not particularly useful, this report pretty clearly states "1862 post", "1862", and "between 1862 and 1878" as the construction dates. All in the same document! Nonetheless, this document was from a commissioned survey of properties, and it got us thinking that perhaps the 1850s were not really the period of construction.

Finally, we also stumbled across the Falls Church Comprehensive Plan, published in 2005. Chapter 9 of the Comprehensive Plan is entitled "Historic Preservation", and covers the city's efforts to protect and preserve its historic structures. In that chapter, the list of all certified buildings on the Falls Church Register of Historic Structures is provided, along with dates of construction.

Listed at #12 is Larner-Jones House, at 329 North Maple Avenue. Other notable Falls Church structures in the list above include The Falls Church (#1) and Lawton House (#8), both on the National Register of Historic Places. The specified construction date of "After 1862" for LJH was another more recent data point indicating that our initial assumptions of an 1852 construction date might be incorrect.

The repeated mentions of 1862 led us to believe that there was a source of information we were missing. Our discovery of that last link, and the background behind the best estimate we have for the vintage of Larner-Jones House follows in the next post.

Clues

What Year was this Built?

How old is Stonehenge?

Conventional wisdom says Stonehenge was constructed sometime between 3000 and 2000 BC, with radiocarbon dating placing some of the early stones at around 2400 BC. But which year, specifically? Without verbal histories passed down through time, detailed written records, or empirical evidence such as construction methods and materials, it is just not possible to say with any degree of certainty.

We have faced a similar challenge in determining the vintage of our house, and what we had assumed to be a simple question has taken months of part-time research and a number of sources of information to come up with a theory. Over the next few posts, we will share the journey, and the conclusions we have reached.

Shoes We Did Not Find

Larner-Jones House isn't as old as Stonehenge, and we probably aren't going to carbon date the floor. Nonetheless, as with many old houses, determining the date of construction isn't as easy as one might expect. When we purchased the property, we took the listing at face value, specifying the year of construction as 1852. It has become clear that the question of its age is far more complex than it seems at first, and the listing is not nearly the only clue as to the actual date of construction.

To begin with, there are a number of empirical features of the house that would in fact support a construction date of 1852. We had hoped to find an old shoe inside a wall during the renovation, which was customarily placed to ward off evil spirits, but we sadly came up empty on that front. Instead we were left with other aspects of the materials and methods which provided some insight into the age of the property.

First, there is the style of the house, being of a simple Italianate country design. As covered in a previous post, the Italianate style was used extensively in the 1850s-1860s, and was arguably the most popular style of the times. Its influence waned a bit after the Civil War, in favor of Stick, Queen Anne and Shingle style designs. From this standpoint, the style of the house would support a construction date of 1852, but by itself really is about as useful as the Stonehenge date ranges mentioned previously.

Old Nails

Second, as has been mentioned in previous posts the house is constructed with a balloon framing technique. This method of construction was introduced in the US in the 1830s, and had become the dominant approach by the 1890s. Another data point that supports the theory of an 1852 date, but not itself a confirmation either. The framing is put together with cut nails, an innovation of the 1820s that replaced wrought-iron nails. The advent of cut nails in fact allowed balloon framing to become emergent over the more complicated timber framing approach, which required a higher degree of craftsmanship. The topic of nail technology is an interesting post on this blog about an old house in Exeter, MA.

Third, as part of our renovation we have restored the original windows that remained in the old part of the house. All of the windows, save one, were of a rudimentary design with slides and pins that would hold them open. One window used the "newer technology" of a weight and pulley system that could maintain a number of open positions without slamming closed. From talking with our window contractor, who sees a lot of old houses, this design of window fits with an 1850s construction period, but, as with the other details, isn't prescriptive. It appears no manufacturers of the era stamped or otherwise marked the windows they made either.

Finally, the most interesting bit of evidence was uncovered when the addition was removed. At the rear corner of the house at the roof line, an old six by six beam was added to support the roof structure. Clearly stenciled on the beam in black paint is the word "Libbey".

It Says Libbey on the Label

This was a relatively cool discovery, because it was about the only thing we could find in the original construction materials that had any sort of labeling. Through the magic of Google's eBook library, we were able to dig up news of a Washington-based lumber company by the name of Libbey in the May, 1918 edition of the Oregon-based magazine, The Timberman.

In addition, there are records in the Library of Congress regarding a historic Georgetown house owned by the Libbey family:

We think it is highly likely that the lumber in our house, or some of it anyway, came from this very lumber company based in Georgetown, which was originally founded in 1829. Certainly interesting, but given that the company was in business throughout most of the 1800s, this "discovery" is not particularly useful in proving any particular construction date either.

Basically, any of the direct evidence we might have gotten from the materials and physical structure itself just isn't very useful in pinning down a construction year for Larner-Jones House. This approach failing us, we turned to any written records or anecdotes we could find to try and pin things down, which is the subject for our next post.