9000
Richmond Highway

On 22 February 1799, 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 … carved a 2,000-acre parcel from the Dogue Run quarter of his Mount Vernon estate as a wedding gift to his nephew Lawrence Lewis Person Lawrence Lewis b. 1767 · d. 1839 Nephew of George Washington and husband of . Built on land carved from the Mount Vernon estate by Washington as a wedding gift in 1799. and his wife’s granddaughter Nelly Custis Lewis Person Nelly Custis Lewis b. 1779 · d. 1852 Granddaughter of Martha Washington, raised at Mount Vernon by George and Martha after her father's death. With her husband Lawrence Lewis she built on land carved from the Mount … , who married that same day. The tract — bounded by the upper reaches of Dogue Run and rolling south toward the Potomac watershed — was intended to anchor the young couple in the Washington family’s circle on land Washington himself had long farmed. ^[1] Source 1 Mount Vernon Ladies' Association archive Manuscript

Lawrence engaged William Thornton, the gentleman-architect responsible for the original design of the United States Capitol, to draw plans for a brick Federal-style country seat suited to the family’s standing. Construction began around 1800 and the house was completed in 1805, yielding a five-part Palladian composition — a central two-story block flanked by hyphens and dependencies — executed in locally fired brick. ^[1] Source 1 Mount Vernon Ladies' Association archive Manuscript

The Lewises occupied Woodlawn from its 1805 completion until Lawrence’s death in 1839. Four of their children survived to adulthood at the plantation, and Nelly Custis Lewis maintained an extensive correspondence with her Washington and Custis kin from the Woodlawn drawing room. Those letters survive in manuscript collections at Mount Vernon and constitute one of the most important first-person archives of early-republic plantation life in the Washington circle. After Lawrence’s death Nelly left Woodlawn permanently, lived with relatives at family seats in Virginia, and died in 1852. ^[1] Source 1 Mount Vernon Ladies' Association archive Manuscript

Across its operating decades Woodlawn ran on enslaved labor. Estate inventories and household accounts preserved in the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association archive document dozens of enslaved men, women, and children held in the Lewis household — field hands working the Dogue Run acreage, domestic workers in the mansion and dependencies, and skilled craftspeople whose labor sustained the household economy. Specific names survive in the manuscript record but are not exhaustively catalogued here; the population counts alone establish Woodlawn as a site of chattel slavery across its operating decades. ^[1] Source 1 Mount Vernon Ladies' Association archive Manuscript

After the Lewis family departed, Woodlawn passed in 1846 to a consortium of Quaker and Baptist purchasers, including Paul Hill Troth, who undertook a deliberate experiment in free labor on land that had until recently operated under slavery. For a brief period in the mid-nineteenth century the plantation was run as a free-labor demonstration farm by Northern Quakers — deliberately framed as a free-labor demonstration project on the same Dogue Run acreage that had supported chattel slavery a generation earlier. The experiment was modest in scale and brief in duration, but it represents one of the few documented antebellum attempts to convert a Virginia plantation to free-labor agriculture in situ. ^[2] Source 2 Office of Historic Alexandria walking-tour materials Website

Woodlawn became a property of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1957 and opened as a public house museum. ^[3] Source 3 National Trust — Woodlawn Website In 1964 the Frank Lloyd Wright Person Frank Lloyd Wright b. 1867 · d. 1959 American architect, founder of the Prairie and Usonian schools. Designed the Pope-Leighey House (1940), now relocated to the parcel in Alexandria. –designed Pope-Leighey House ( 9000 Richmond Highway Place 9000 Richmond Highway Usonian house built in 1940 for journalist Loren Pope; relocated to the parcel in 1964 to escape Interstate 66 construction at its original Falls Church site. ) was relocated to the Woodlawn parcel from its original Falls Church site to escape Interstate 66 construction; the two house museums share grounds today. The juxtaposition — a 1805 Federal plantation house and a 1940 Usonian middle-class home a short walk apart — is one of the most unusual single-parcel architectural pairings in the National Trust’s portfolio. ^[3] Source 3 National Trust — Woodlawn Website

Woodlawn operates today as a public house museum on Richmond Highway south of the City of Alexandria proper, sharing its parcel with the relocated Pope-Leighey House. Visitors arrive via the Mount Vernon Memorial Highway corridor, a short drive north of Mount Vernon itself. The property is listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP reference 70000789, listed 1970-12-23) and designated a National Historic Landmark. ^[4] Source 4 Woodlawn Plantation NRHP Nomination Government record ^[5] Source 5 Woodlawn NHL summary Government record