A House With Two Histories
Woodlawn sits on a rise in Fairfax County, Virginia, just south of Alexandria, VA, and Washington, DC. From the upper floors, you can glimpse Dogue Creek and imagine the view once stretched all the way to Mount Vernon, George Washington's famous home.
Built in the early 1800s as a wedding gift, Woodlawn was meant to embody the promise of a young nation.
It was a large, elegant, and carefully planned Federal-style mansion designed by Dr. William Thornton, the architect who also designed the United States Capitol.
Woodlawn is also a place where two very different versions of American history converge.
In one version, it is the story of a beloved granddaughter married to Washington's nephew, the property handed down as a symbol of family loyalty and national heritage.
In the other version, it is a plantation where dozens of enslaved men, women, and children were forced to work until the mid-19th century, their lives written in inventories and bills of sale.
The tension between these narratives has defined Woodlawn's legacy ever since.
A Wedding Gift of Stone and Timber
In 1799, George Washington began construction of Woodlawn for Eleanor "Nelly" Parke Custis and her new husband, Lawrence Lewis.
Nelly was his step-granddaughter through Martha Washington.
Lawrence was his nephew, the son of Betty Washington Lewis and Fielding Lewis of Kenmore Plantation.
The gift included 2,000 acres carved out of Mount Vernon, along with a gristmill and distillery.
Construction lasted several years, with Thornton's design executed in brick, sandstone, and pine.
The mansion rose as a five-part composition: a central block flanked by hyphens and wings, an arrangement that gave the home balance and presence.
Inside, a wide central hall connected parlors and staircases. Bedrooms occupied the upper floor.
Outbuildings supported the plantation economy, including a kitchen, dairy, smokehouse, wash house, and an icehouse.
The Lewises moved into the unfinished house after Martha Washington's death in 1802.
By 1805, the main structure was complete, its hipped roof and oxeye windows marking it as one of the most refined early Federal homes in Virginia.
A Plantation's Hidden Labor
Behind the elegance, Woodlawn was built and sustained through enslaved labor.
Records show that about 90 enslaved people lived on the property during the Lewis years. Some were from the Custis dower estate, others purchased or inherited.
They worked in the fields, the kitchen, the wash house, and the dairy. They built the smokehouse and hauled ice from Dogue Creek.
Their cabins stood nearby, plain wooden structures that housed entire families.
By the 1820s, the Lewises were facing financial strain. The plantation was not profitable, and to cover debts, they sold enslaved people southward to Louisiana.
More than 40 men, women, and children were separated from their families and sent into the cotton economy.
Nelly and Lawrence's two daughters eventually moved to Louisiana themselves, marrying into planter families there.
Their eldest son, Edward George Washington Butler Jr., would later join the Confederate army and die in the Civil War.
Today, the story of Woodlawn's enslaved people is central to how the site is interpreted.
Inventories and oral histories, along with archeological evidence, are used to reconstruct the lives of those who labored here.
A Quaker Experiment
The era of forced labor ended when Nelly Custis Lewis sold the estate in 1846.
The buyers were Quakers from New Jersey and Pennsylvania, a group led by Jacob Troth and Chalkley Gillingham.
Their vision was radical for Virginia at the time: they planned to divide the estate into smaller farms to prove that agriculture could thrive without enslaved workers.
The Quakers built a meetinghouse near the property in 1851 and began worship there. They planted, harvested, and paid wages to free laborers, drawing attention across the region.
Their presence challenged local norms and offered a living model of abolitionist values.
In 1853, the mansion itself was sold to John Mason, a Baptist who also opposed slavery.
Mason and his wife established a Sunday school at Woodlawn, and his sons went on to found a church and cemetery across from the Quaker meetinghouse.
During the Civil War, Mason's household was known for Unionist sympathies.
Decline and Restoration
As decades passed, Woodlawn changed hands multiple times. The property shrank as parcels were sold, eventually reduced from thousands of acres to a little more than a hundred.
Storms damaged the house, and for a time it sat abandoned.
In the early 20th century, playwright Paul Kester acquired the mansion and undertook a significant restoration.
He added height to the wings and altered the proportions. Later, architects Edward Donn Jr. and Waddy Wood oversaw more repairs and enlargements.
For a while, Woodlawn was occupied by Oscar Underwood, a U.S. Senator who died there in 1929.
By mid-century, the house was again at risk of neglect when Elizabeth Sharpe, a Pennsylvania coal heiress, stepped in to rescue and modernize it.
Her intervention set the stage for the National Trust for Historic Preservation to accept Woodlawn in 1952 as its very first historic property.
A New Partner on the Grounds
Woodlawn became not only a preserved estate but also a symbol of the National Trust's mission.
In 1965, when Frank Lloyd Wright's Pope-Leighey House faced demolition due to highway construction, the modernist home was moved to the Woodlawn grounds.
The two houses, separated by more than a century in style and outlook, now share the same acreage and attract visitors in tandem.
In recent years, the property has welcomed another kind of partner.
The Arcadia Center for Sustainable Food and Agriculture leases land on the estate, turning Woodlawn back into a working farm.
Their programs connect sustainable farming to historic preservation, showing how land can support community while acknowledging its complex past.
Memory and Reckoning
Woodlawn tells two stories at once. For decades, tours dwelled on the Washington connection, the elegance of the architecture, the family portraits.
What was missing was the labor that built it.
About ninety enslaved people lived and worked here. Their names survive in ledgers. Their cabins are gone.
The site has begun to surface that history. In one room, visitors see an inventory where people are listed alongside furniture.
Outside, markers point to where slave quarters once stood.
Nearby, curators now acknowledge the Doeg, the Native people who pushed off this land before it became part of Mount Vernon.
These details do not erase the older story. The bed of Nelly Custis and Lawrence Lewis is still displayed upstairs. But the framing has shifted.
Visitors are asked to hold both truths together: the grandeur of a gift from Washington's estate, and the lives broken to sustain it.
The result is uneasy, and that unease is the point.
What Visitors See Today
Visitors come up the long drive and find a house that looks calm from the outside.
The brick walls are symmetrical, the windows set in even rows, the front door marked by a fanlight.
Inside, the rooms are furnished with what the Washington family left behind and what curators have pieced together.
A narrow bed upstairs belonged to Nelly Custis and Lawrence Lewis.
In a hallway, an inventory lists 90 enslaved people once held here, reduced to first names and numbers.
The contrast is hard to ignore. One room shows portraits and a polished pianoforte.
Another point to cabins that no longer stand.
Step back outside, and the scene shifts again. On one edge of the grounds is a working farm, where rows of vegetables replace tobacco and wheat.
Down a path, the Pope-Leighey House sits with its flat roof and glass doors, Frank Lloyd Wright's version of how Americans might live differently.
What visitors see at Woodlawn is not a single story.
The property carries the weight of privilege and of forced labor, of Quakers who tried a free-labor experiment, of preservationists who refused to let the house collapse.
The quiet around it only makes those layers sharper.
