Ownership
of Cleydael and its Restoration:
|
"Neck Quarter",
the 3000 acre plantation that was to become Cleydael, was
purchased by Dr.
Richard Henry Stuart
in 1845 from his neighbor Nathaniel Hooe. It was renamed
Cleydael after Mrs. Stuart's mother's ancestral
home in Belgium.
Initially the
landholding was just an agricultural investment for Dr.
Stuart, already one of the wealthiest landowners in the
county. However, the malaria epidemic of 1849 apparently
inspired him to build a summer home in the woods at Cleydael
to get away from the humidity and mosquitos along the
Potomac where his large plantation house Cedar Grove stood
eight miles away.
|
|
The 1849 epidemic was so bad that the Virginia General Assembly left
Richmond and instead convened in the cooler and healthier atmosphere
at Fauquier White Sulphur Springs. In 1855 work was begun on the
house now known as Cleydael and it was finished in 1859. It was
shortly to become the family's main residence. Having come here for
the summer in 1861 Dr. Stuart decided that it would be safer for his
family to stay at Cleydael during the war, as Yankee gunboats were
patrolling the Potomac. On April 23, 1865, the house achieved its
Warholian "15 minutes of fame" when Lincoln assassin John
Wilkes Booth showed
up on the doorstep of the doctor's office with accomplice Davy
Herold, seeking food, shelter and medical attention.
After the War, the Stuarts
returned to Cedar Grove as their main residence, and continued to go
to Cleydael to escape the heat of summer.
Cleydael stayed in the
Stuart family until 1918. Mrs. Stuart died in June 1888, and Dr.
Stuart died less than a year later, in May 1889. He willed Cedar
Grove to his eldest daughter Rosalie and two other large properties,
Panorama and Green Hill to his second daughter, Margaret.
Cleydael went to his
surviving middle daughter Ada Stuart Randolph Robb who lived here
until her death in 1914, when it passed to William Wellford Randolph,
Jr, her son by her first marriage to Col. Randolph (qv). Mr. Randolph
sold the property to Mr and Mrs. Graham D. Richardson in 1918.
Originally, the Richardson's bought it with a business partner, James
O. Heflin, but Heflin sold out his interest to Richardson the
following year. Graham Richardson ran a timber business and sawmill
on the premises, using Cleydael's abundant forest land. We found in
the attic floorboards correspondence from the 1920s regarding sales
and orders of lumber. Apprently Mr. Richardson had a problem with
lumber being pilfered from the barn. The current barn (in precarious
shape) has a sign written by Mr. Richardson warning people not to
steal the lumber. We hope to save this sign when we demolish and
rebuild the barn.
Lumber from Cleydael was
used for many local buildings, including St. Anthony's Catholic
Church in King George. Mr. Richardson died in 1956 and Cleydael
stayed in the Richardson family until Mrs. Richardson's death in
1976.
After Mrs. Richardson died,
it was then sold to Farmer, Turpin and Mahon of Fredericksburg (a
group of investors) who used it as a rental property. In 1980 a
large-scale property development was planned for the 921 acre site,
with offices, condos, a golf course, airstrip, etc. The developer
held an option on the land at $1.2 million, subject to obtaining
zoning. The scale of the orginally envisaged development would have
required a wholesale re-evaluation of the county's master plan, which
would have taken quite some time to achieve. The fate of the Cleydael
manor house was in doubt as the developer considered using it as a
clubhouse for the golf course but was close to concluding that it
would not work for his purposes and should be torn down. However, the
developer died before final zoning approval could be
given.
To the rescue came Dr. Ed
Veazey, PhD, a retired US Navy captain, inventor, local businessman
and history buff, who put together the Cleydael Limited Partnership
which then bought the property. Through Dr. Veazey's efforts the
house was saved and painstakingly restored and became listed as a
Virginia Landmark and was included on the National Register of
Historic Places. Dr. Veazey did the research required for inclusion
in the National Register, with help from the Surratt Society, and in
the process ended up co-founding the King George Historical Society,
an idea first spawned at an initial organizational meeting at
Cleydael, held during the tenure of the last rental tenants, Mr.
and Mrs. Eldon James, then head of the County's recreation and parks
division.
The house was in bad shape.
At one stage, the floor of the lean-to kitchen collapsed under the
weight of people crowded into the kitchen during a party held by one
of the tenants. A small bathroom had been carved out of one corner of
the dining room, and the wrap around porch had been screened in.
Faint Xerox copies of photographs of the house prior to restoration
suggest that an additional door had been cut into the fireplace wall
of the parlor, going out to the side porch. The outline of where this
door was filled in during the restoration is still visible. In
addition to these repairs and re-wiring and re-plumbing the house,
installing central heat and air, the house also had several rotten
sill plates and had to be lifted so that they could be
replaced.
Reserving a small 12 acre
farm for the Cleydael manor house property, the rest of the site is
being developed on a more realistic scale than the original
developers had planned, and with the area immediately adjacent to the
manor house property now consisting of an "executive homes"
subdivision with lots ranging from 1-9 acres. The Cleydael Limited
Partnership laid out the plat for the subdivision in a way that
surrounded the historic farmhouse with subdivision lots rather than
giving it its own access to Rt. 206. This was because at one stage it
had been envisaged as either a community center, clubhouse, bed and
breakfast or restaurant. While we regret the lack of separate access
to Rt. 206 to reinforce the property's agricultural heritage and
character, the good news is that back portion of the property is
heavily wooded and, thanks to the Easement agreed by Dr. Veazey with
the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, the pasture land in
the front of the property is screened from the subdivision by tall
Leyland cypress trees, thus preserving a "sense of place" despite the
nearby encroachments of the modern world and enabling it to function
again eventually as a small working farm.
The first new owners after
the house was restored were a Mr. and Mrs. Palmer, whose names appear
on the survey. They sold to Richard and Brenda Pollock, who had eight
happy years at Cleydael before selling to Jo-Anne Coe and Kathryn
Coombs in 2002. The Pollocks did substantial work with the gardens
and interiors, furthering the restoration program, which we hope to
carry forward yet another step, with the remodelling of the
unsympathetic and out of scale kitchen wing, and hopefully, the
re-creation of long-lost outbuildings such as the summer kitchen and
smokehouse.
