Seminary Hill (off Seminary Road, near St. Stephens Road)

The hilltop south of Old Leesburg Road has been three places. In September 1856 the twenty-seven-year-old banker Arthur Herbert Person Arthur Herbert b. 1829 · d. 1919 Co-founder of Burke & Herbert Bank (1852), Confederate officer in the 17th Virginia Infantry, and longtime master of "Muckross" on Seminary Hill. Born at Carlyle House; died on the … ^[1] Source 1 DAC, 'Arthur Herbert — Muckross,' 2020 Website bought 57¼ acres of the parcel previously called Stump Hill from Elizabeth and Catherine Thompson, paying with one Alexandria home and lot, nine hundred dollars in cash, and three thousand dollars in Orange & Alexandria Railroad bonds (Fairfax County Deed Book Y-3, page 63). Herbert renamed the estate “Muckross” after the Herberts’ ancestral seat in County Kerry, Ireland. The first house was short-lived. After Federal forces occupied Alexandria on May 24, 1861, and in the panicked weeks following the Union defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run, the U.S. Army broke ground on Fort Worth on September 1, 1861, building it partly on the seized Vaucluse plantation tract of the Fairfax family, and in July 1862 demolished the original Muckross house entirely to clear sightlines for the earthwork — a destruction The Southern Churchman reported in its July 1862 pages. Fort Worth was a constituent earthwork of the broader Defenses of Washington ^[2] Source 2 LOC, Civil War Defenses of Washington Government record : a 463-yard perimeter with capacity for 25 guns, including one 100-pounder Parrott rifle, two 30-pounder Parrotts, and seven 24-pounder siege guns ^[3] Source 3 Wikipedia, "Fort Worth (Virginia)" Website . From one of the highest points west of the city the fort commanded the Orange & Alexandria Railroad, the Little River Turnpike, and the southern approaches to Union-occupied Alexandria, with sightlines down to Cameron Run and Hunting Creek. The first garrison was Col. J. Howard Kitching’s 6th New York Heavy Artillery, which moved up from Fort Albany on Thanksgiving Day, November 27, 1861, and held the post until transferring to Fort Blenker on January 17, 1862. Kitching’s later regimental memoir describes the garrison’s arrival in harsh, unfinished conditions: troops camped in muddy tents outside the earthworks through freezing winter weather, swapping artillery drills for axes and shovels and finishing the construction of the fort themselves ^[4] Source 4 J. Howard Kitching, "More than a Conqueror" (1873) Book ^[3] Source 3 Wikipedia, "Fort Worth (Virginia)" Website . The Vaucluse tract appears in this record on both ends: the Federal government seized it from the Fairfax family in 1861 to build the fort, and Herbert reacquired thirty-nine acres of the surviving Vaucluse parcel from the family’s heirs in 1877 (see below).

The Silvey episode (1864–1866)

In July 1864 the Federal government seized the Muckross tract under the Confiscation Act and sold it to Maj. William Silvey Person Maj. William Silvey d. 1875 Union Army major and West Point Class of 1849 graduate; held title to Alexandria's 1864-66 after the Federal government seized it from under the Confiscation Act. Postwar … , a Union Army major then serving as General Superintendent of Volunteer Recruiting, for just one hundred twenty-five dollars. The transfer is a brief, deeply unequal moment in the property’s record: a Confederate officer’s confiscated estate auctioned at a fraction of its prewar value to a Union officer who held the title for less than two years.

On April 8, 1866 — eleven months after Appomattox — Major Silvey and his wife Isabella sold the property back to Herbert for sixteen hundred dollars. Herbert rebuilt across 1866 and 1867, setting the new house partially atop Fort Worth’s powder magazine; the magazine’s solid-masonry casemates served as cellars, a quiet record of the war preserved in the foundations. The visiting memoirist Mrs. Burton Harrison described the postwar hilltop as Herbert returned to it: the crest of the hill bare of dwelling, trees, and fences, with the fort’s casemates the only structures left standing ^[5] Source 5 Mrs. Burton Harrison, Recollections Grave and Gay (1911) Book .

Land acquisitions across forty years

Herbert added to the rebuilt estate steadily across the decades that followed — four documented acquisitions across the 1869 to 1901 span growing Muckross from its original 57¼ acres to a final 115.56-acre estate:

• October 1869 — two acres plus an access road from Duke Street (FFX DB K-4, P. 261).
• October 23, 1877 — thirty-nine acres acquired from Vaucluse heirs (FFX DB V-4, P. 349–354); the heirs retained seventy-eight acres of the larger Vaucluse tract.
• May 1895 — three acres along Old Leesburg Road (FFX DB V-5, P. 269); the earlier residence on the parcel served thereafter as the gate house to Muckross.
• November 1901 — fourteen and 83/100 acres from Strawberry Hill Farm (FFX DB I-6, P. 154).

Herbert lived at Muckross with his wife Alice Gregory and their five daughters until his death there on February 23, 1919 ^[1] Source 1 DAC, 'Arthur Herbert — Muckross,' 2020 Website .

The estate stayed in family hands through the early twentieth century. The parcel itself was originally Fairfax County land; Alexandria annexed the Seminary Hill area in the 1950s, which is why a Civil War fortification site sits inside the modern city limits today. The tract was finally subdivided in 1970 for Seminary Ridge, a residential development whose street grid preserves the fort’s memory in the residential street name “Fort Worth Avenue” nearby — though the avenue does not lie on the actual earthwork footprint. The Civil War historical marker now sits on St. Stephens Road west of North Garland Street ^[6] Source 6 HMDB, Fort Worth historical marker, Alexandria, VA Government record , the closest public record of the hilltop’s wartime role. The powder-magazine cellars are gone; the hilltop’s commanding view of Cameron Run and Hunting Creek — the reason Federal engineers chose it in 1861 — remains.

Among Seminary Ridge children of the 1950s and 1960s the property was known as the “Moss Mansion” — a neighborhood corruption of MUCKROSS engraved in the pillars that flanked the entrance from St. Stephens Road. A reminiscence shared in 2024 on a public Alexandria Facebook page describes the property in its final years before demolition: terraced gardens bordered by ancient boxwoods large enough to climb inside, decaying outbuildings holding dog skeletons (or so the children believed of the rumored “Dr. Moss”), and a water tower in the valley that would become upper Fort Williams Parkway. By the writer’s freshman fall in college the hillside was “totally stripped bare, with nothing but clay and concrete to be seen” ^[7] Source 7 Public Facebook reminiscence shared by Michael Guiffre Fannon, 2024 Oral history . The transition from Italianate country house to suburban subdivision had the suddenness of a single season; almost no on-site documentary record of the rebuilt 1867 house survives.

The contemporary residential address 4007 Moss Place, in the post-1970 Seminary Ridge subdivision that replaced the estate, is sometimes marketed under the historic “Muckross” name. No primary-source evidence at the Alexandria Library Special Collections has yet established that the structure currently at 4007 Moss Pl is fabric of the 1856 Herbert house; pending further research, this site treats that address as name-bearing, not house-bearing. ^[8] Source 8 Alexandria Library Special Collections Manuscript