133
North Fairfax Street

The bank, 1792–1834

The Bank of Alexandria was chartered by the Virginia General Assembly in 1792 — the first chartered bank in the Commonwealth of Virginia ^[1] Source 1 Wikipedia, "Bank of Alexandria (Alexandria, Virginia)" Website . Its permanent banking house, the three-story Federal-style brick building that survives today at 133 North Fairfax Street, was completed in 1807 on the southwest corner of North Fairfax and Cameron Streets.

George Washington Person George Washington b. 1732 · d. 1799 Planter, military commander, and first President of the United States. Master of Mount Vernon from 1761 until his death in 1799, and a regular presence in Alexandria, which he … banked here from the institution’s founding in 1792 until his death at Mount Vernon in December 1799 — a seven-year customer relationship that began when Washington was a Virginia planter, continued through both terms of his Presidency, and closed with the settlement of his estate.

The bank failed in 1834, a casualty of the financial turbulence that ended the second Bank of the United States and rippled through the country’s state-chartered banks.

The Mansion House Hotel and Hospital, 1848–1865

In 1848, the Alexandria businessman James Green purchased the empty banking house and converted it to a hotel — the Mansion House Hotel ^[1] Source 1 Wikipedia, "Bank of Alexandria (Alexandria, Virginia)" Website . In 1855 Green tripled the hotel’s size by adding a four-story wing that ran north across the front lawn of the adjoining Carlyle House, consuming what had been the eighteenth-century mansion’s open forecourt. That enlarged building — original bank at the south end, 1855 hotel wing extending north along Fairfax — is the Mansion House visible in the Civil War-era photographs.

Federal forces occupied Alexandria in May 1861. By early 1862 the U.S. Army Medical Department had requisitioned the Mansion House Hotel as the Mansion House Hospital, one of more than thirty Union hospitals operating in the occupied city. The hospital ran from 1862 through the war’s end in 1865.

Among its short-tenure nurses was Louisa May Alcott, who served at Mansion House Hospital for six weeks beginning in December 1862 before falling gravely ill with typhoid pneumonia and being sent home to Concord. Her hospital letters, edited and published in 1863 as Hospital Sketches, drew directly from the wards of this building and made her name nationally a year before Little Women. More than a century and a half later, the PBS series Mercy Street (2016–2017) set its drama in this same building, bringing the Mansion House Hospital story to a new audience.

Demolition and survival, 1968–present

The 1855 hotel expansion was demolished in the late 1960s as part of the City of Alexandria’s restoration of the Carlyle House, re-opening the historic Carlyle forecourt that had been buried under Green’s hotel for more than a century. The original 1807 banking house survived intact at the south end of the parcel and is what occupies the corner today — its three-story brick mass, balustraded roof, dressed-stone window heads, and stone base, photographed here in June 2014.

The building was listed on the Virginia Landmarks Register on April 17, 1973 and on the National Register of Historic Places on June 4, 1973 (NRHP reference number 73002202) ^[1] Source 1 Wikipedia, "Bank of Alexandria (Alexandria, Virginia)" Website .