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Arlington History: Queen City

On Monday, Sept. 19, 2011, The Virginia Room's Arlington Reunion History Program will host a community discussion on "Queen City," Arlington's black community after Freedman's Village and before the Pentagon, at the Central Library Auditorium, from 10:00 am - 12:00 p.m.

The original residents of Queen City were descendents of the residents of Freedman's Village, which had been established by the federal government during the Civil War as a home for displaced/freed slaves. A tightly knit African American community, Queen City was particularly focused on providing education for its children and was described by George Vollin, a former resident, as "a real happy, solid community."  

The neighborhood eventually disappeared when residents were displaced in 1941 as construction on the Pentagon and surrounding roads began:

"Queen City was not razed for the Pentagon building, but the overall Pentagon project. In order to accommodate the large number of individuals who would be commuting to and parking at the Pentagon on a daily basis, extensive accommodations had to be made for the automobile.

The cloverleaf highway structure, which the Columbia Pike feeds into and is found to the west of the Pentagon, remains the exact location of Queen City. Therefore, Queen City was destroyed for Pentagon's needed transportation corridor, which eventually would come to include over thirty miles of highways and ramps, including twenty-one overpasses."

-Claire Burke, Arlington's Queen City, p. 21

If you can't make it to the program, and would like to learn more, you can visit the Virginia Room, where the local history archive includes Arlington's Queen City, by Claire Burke.

 

If you missed this talk, the Ballston-Virginia Square Patch sent a reporter to the program, and published an excellent recap of the event.

 

From Our Back Pages: Homes of Character

Brumback Realty Company of Clarendon
Country Club Hills

Brumback Realty Company of Clarendon, founded by a father with six sons, was a builder in Country Club Hills, in 1928-29.

Country Club Hills was developed from 126 acres of beautiful hills and wooded land, from the old Civil War era Grunwell estate, and commanded a view of Washington, D.C. One of their architects was A.F. Thelander, who designed and built his own home in Country Club Hills at Rock Spring Drive and Avondale Avenue, facing the Washington Golf and Country Club.

The English Tudor, Colonial, and Spanish style homes combined brick and stone and included two car garages, variegated tile roofs and copper gutters and flashing. The first 15 homes sold for an average of $20,000 in 1929.

The Virginia Room has some photos from Brumback Realty showing tastefully furnished interiors and the distinctive exteriors of homes that are still admired today.  

You can read more about Country Club Hills on Our Back Pages.

Homes of Character

Brumback Realty Company of Clarendon, founded by a father with six sons, was a builder in Country Club Hills in 1928-29. Country Club Hills was developed from 126 acres of beautiful hills and wooded land from the old Civil War era Grunwell estate and commanded a view of Washington, D.C. One of their architects was A.F. Thelander, who designed and built his own home in Country Club Hills at Rock Spring Drive and Avondale Avenue, facing the Washington Golf and Country Club.  The English Tudor, Colonial, and Spanish style homes combined brick and stone and included two car garages, variegated tile roofs and copper gutters and flashing. The first 15 homes sold for an average of $20,000 in 1929. The Virginia Room has some photos from Brumback Realty showing tastefully furnished interiors and the distinctive exteriors of homes that are still admired today.

The Virginia Room has a copy of Arlington Historical Society’s 1987 driving tour of Brumback Homes in Country Club Hills, Woodlawn, Woodmont, Lyon Park, Lyon Village and some individual streets.  The driving tour includes a quotation from Keith A. Brumback, President of Brumback Realty, Inc.  about the Burmback Policy of Doing Business:  “In my opinion, one of the most important and worthwhile lines of work any individual can undertake is that of providing families with attractive, comfortable homes in which all the joy of home-ownership can be experienced, without financial strain or worry on the family, and at the lowest possible price consistent with sound construction methods and good business practice.”

A Virginia Room Oral History interview of George and Frances Brumback provides more information on the Brumback Realty Company, the building of Country Club Hills and Mrs. Brumback’s career as a teacher at Cherrydale and Woodmont Elementary Schools.

What about you?  Do you live in a Brumback home?  Do you have any photos of your home and neighborhood? The Virginia Room wants to know.

When Arlington Did the Right Thing

"The time is always right to do the right thing."
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

On August 28, the 48th anniversary of the "I Have a Dream" speech, the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial will be formally dedicated in Washington D.C. Located in West Potomac Park and flanked by the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, the addition of the King Memorial creates a monumental trifecta of leadership and inspiration.

From left, seventh graders Gloria Thompson, Ronald Deskins, Lance Newman and Michael Jones enter the previously all-white Stratford Junior High on Feb. 2, 1959. Courtesy of Michael Jones.

As a child of nine in August of 1963, I had little knowledge of the man whose eloquence and personal courage undergirded a movement. I had no knowledge of the civil rights movement itself. African-Americans were just not a part of my everyday experience. Just as it is often observed that there are two Virginias, in 1963 there were two Arlingtons: the well-to-do, predominantly white North Arlington and the less prosperous, racially mixed South Arlington. It was a distinction that was more than just directional. There were few students of color in my elementary school, Stewart-Tuckahoe, when I attended from 1960-1966--a fact consistent with the 1960 Census, which reported only 7,063 foreign–born persons or 4.3 percent of the County’s total population.

High View Park in North Arlington and Arlington View and Green Valley (Nauck) in South Arlington were all that remained of the County’s African-American communities. High View Park, known in my day as "Hall's Hill," was a neighborhood not far from where I grew up. It epitomized the less prosperous and segregated Arlington: an enclave of substandard housing and dead-ended, unpaved streets that for much of its history had been literally walled from the white neighborhoods it bordered by a series of 7-foot fences.

The year of King’s speech, the Arlington Planning Commission established a committee to study how best to maintain residential neighborhoods, a study that led to the creation of the Neighborhood Conservation Program. On Feb. 13, 1965, the County Board approved a Neighborhood Conservation Plan for High View Park hailing the tireless efforts of the residents who spoke up for their neighborhood’s civic rights. Abraham Lincoln, whose 156th birthday was celebrated the day before, would have been proud.

As significant as this moment was in Arlington's pursuit of racial parity, it was but the latest example of the County’s black and white residents working together for common cause. A few years earlier, some of the High View Park champions--E. Leslie and Dorothy Hamm and Peggy Deskins – had joined Edmund and Elizabeth Campbell and others to face down Sen. Harry Byrd’s "massive resistance" and integrate the County’s schools.

The Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision to end school segregation "with all deliberate speed" rocked Virginia to its core in May 1954. The "political museum piece" that was Virginia, as characterized by political scientist V.O Key in his classic, "Southern Politics in State and Nation" [1949], was stuck on the horns of a dilemma, caught between the moral imperative to do right by Virginia and remain segregated, or to do the right thing. It was an issue that pitted being a Virginian against being an American. Arlington, having evolved from a bedroom community in the shadow of the nation's capital to a thriving, socially progressive community of residents whose political views were markedly different from those of the rest of the state, found itself at the center of the fight.

By 1956, political passions were running high in Richmond as "massive resistance" to the High Court's mandate was gaining momentum, giving rise to a plan to prevent any integrated schools from receiving state funds and authorizing the governor to order any such school to close. Meanwhile the NAACP was filing lawsuits across the state to force integration, including a suit brought on behalf of 15 African American and white parents and 22 students in Arlington.

The case was named for Clarissa S. Thompson, an African American student who wanted to attend Arlington's all white Washington-Lee High School instead of the all black Hoffman-Boston. After hearing oral arguments, Alexandria Federal District Judge Albert V. Bryan, who only four years before in writing the opinion in the original Prince Edward County school integration case* stated that racial segregation caused no hurt or harm to either race, ordered that the schools in Arlington be desegregated. Suits and countersuits ensued--deliberation without speed.

Finally, on Jan. 19, 1959 (birthday of Virginia native son Robert E. Lee), the state’s Supreme Court of Appeals, by a ruling of 5-2, overturned the Virginia legislature's "massive resistance" laws and its threat of schools closures, declaring them in violation of the Virginia Constitution. The issue of school integration had assailed Virginia’s traditional political culture, a culture that was oligarchic, parsimonious, suspicious of "big" government, discouraging of public participation in the affairs of state, obeisant to the way things were. Throughout the long, slow march to integration in Virginia, rhetoric trumped reason; fear mongering triumphed over fairness; delay prevented "deliberate speed." Traditional Southern values were pitted against unwanted northern influence--ideologues against pragmatists.

The press, too played a powerful role on both sides of the integration issue. For every Richmond News Leader editorial that intrepidly egged on the resisters, editorials in both the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot and The Washington Post and Times Herald, penned by Lenoir Chambers and Robert Muse, respectively, eschewed moral turpitude and urged action and acceptance.

Virginia fought the law, but the law won. On Feb. 2, 1959, Ronald Deskins, Michael Jones, Lance Newman and Gloria Thompson (sister of Clarissa) entered Stratford Junior High School, splitting a phalanx of approximately 100 helmeted Arlington police officers who were Little Rock-ready with gas grenades, masks and batons. Their walk to school irrevocably changed Virginia although at the time, they were unaware of its historical significance.

Years later, reminiscing at a panel discussion with 500 students at Stratford Junior High (now H-B Woodlawn), the four understated their roles on that important day citing their parents and other community leaders – blacks and whites -- as the true heroes of Arlington’s integration story. The integration of Stratford was but the first of many small steps toward integration. It would still be years before black and white children could sit alongside one another at drug store counters and drink Cokes, attend dances together, or compete on the same sports teams.

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* Prince Edward County Public Schools chose to close rather than integrate and remained closed from 1959-1964. It was the only county system in the country to do so.

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The material for this story came from the archives of the Arlington Public Library's Center for Local History. The attached bibliography will help interested readers learn more about these important events in Arlington’s history.

VA Room Oral Histories about Desegregation

  • Series 3, no. 26 Edmund Campbell
  • Series 3, no. 48 Dorothy Hamm
  • Series 3, no. 110 Ray Reid
  • Series 3, no. 112 John Robinson
  • Series 3, no. 061 Theda Henle

DVD:

Segregation/Integration Collections in the Arlington Community Archives

  • RG 7: Arlington County Public Schools
  • RG 7B: Hoffman-Boston High School Records
  • RG 9: Records of Citizen’s Committee for School Improvement
  • RG 18: Personal Papers of Barbara Marx
  • RG 19: Personal Papers of Elizabeth Pfohl Campbell
  • RG 69: Arlington County Public Schools: Desegregation Materials (copies culled from RG 7)

Vertical Files:

  • 5 Folders containing clippings, articles, memos, reports, etc. relating to desegregation

Books:

 

From Our Back Pages: The Chain Bridge


The first bridge to cross the Potomac in the Washington area was constructed in 1797 when Georgetown merchants built the “Falls Bridge” at the “Little Falls.”

The bridge was built to replace ferry service and was primarily used to drive cattle across to the Georgetown auction markets after the cattle had drunk heavily at Pimmit Run.

There have been eight bridges built on this site.  The original one was a covered wooden structure that collapsed in 1804, and the second was destroyed by floods after only 6 months. In 1810, a third bridge was constructed that was truly a “Chain Bridge,” the name by which all subsequent bridges have been known.

Read more about how the Chain Bridge got its name on Our Back Pages

The Chain Bridge

The first bridge to cross the Potomac in the Washington area was constructed in 1797 when Georgetown merchants built the “Falls Bridge” at the “Little Falls.” 

The bridge was built to replace ferry service and was primarily used to drive cattle across to the Georgetown auction markets after the cattle had drunk heavily at Pimmit Run.

There have been eight bridges built on this site.  The original one was a covered wooden structure that collapsed in 1804, and the second was destroyed by floods after only 6 months.  In 1810, a third bridge was constructed that was truly a “Chain Bridge,” the name by which all subsequent bridges have been known.  Two chains were made from four-foot links of wrought iron and suspended from massive stone towers at either shore.  The bridge itself was 136 feet long and 15 feet wide.

This was a toll bridge which reported $9,000 in collected tolls in 1810.  Tolls, thought to be high, were:

  • Four Horse Carriage: 1 ½ dollars
  • Two Horse Carriage:  1 dollar
  • Four Horse Wagon:  62 ½ cents
  • Two Horse Wagon:  37 ½ cents
  • Gig:  36 ½ cents
  • Man: 6 ½ cents

It was a relatively low bridge, and floods were a continuing problem.  The third, fourth, and fifth structures were all swept away by high water.

The present Chain Bridge, a simple continuous steel girder structure, was built in 1939 with a vertical clearance between the bridge and the river of 45 feet.  Nevertheless, in times of severe flooding, such as that experienced during Hurricane Agnes in 1972, the water level was so high that it became within a few feet of the bridge’s floor.

 

Do you remember Chain Bridge during the 1972 flooding?

 

Arlington Heritage: Eleanor Lee Templeman

Much of what we know about the history of Arlington County is due to the work of Eleanor Lee Templeman, photographer, local historian, and author of several books on the history of the area.

Templeman, although born in 1907 in Washington DC, grew up in California. She moved back east to attend the Critcher School of Painting and Applied Arts, where she graduated in 1929. She subsequently worked as an artist and illustrator for the American Automobile Association and the US Geological Survey.

However, Templeman’s real passion lay in local history. She was a descendent of Richard Bland Lee, uncle to Robert E. Lee, and served as Secretary, Genealogist and Historian of the Society of Lees in Virginia at various points between 1947 and her death in 1990. She was heavily involved with the fights to preserve Fort Marcy, Fort Ethan Allen and Sulley Plantation, and at the time of her death was working with groups to preserve Abingdon Plantation, which is located on Reagan National Airport grounds.

It is Eleanor Lee Templeman’s bibliography, however, that has had such an effect on local historical research. Templeman was constantly writing articles on Arlington and Northern Virginia history for a variety of historical publications, co-authored Northern Virginia Heritage and was the sole author of Arlington Heritage: Vignettes of a Virginia County (seen above). Templeman did the majority of the photography for both books; these photographs are an invaluable resource, documenting important structures, roads, cemeteries and even large trees as they stood in the 1950s and 1960s, when Arlington was undergoing major development. Meant as a “then and now” type of book, her “now” has turned into our “then”.

Templeman was rewarded for her efforts with awards from Marymount University in 1975 and the American Association for State and Local History in 1983. She was the Organized Women Voters of Arlington’s Women of the Year in 1966. Here in the library, the Virginia Room holds multiple copies of Northern Virginia Heritage and Arlington Heritage, and the Arlington Community Archives has PG 900, her photographs from both books, and RG 23, her research and clipping files.

Altha Hall "It’s All in a Name"

Altha Hall

Altha Hall was originally built by a gentleman from Fairfax named Andrew Adgate Lipscomb II (born 1854), who later became Assistant District Attorney of the District of Columbia during President Grover Cleveland’s administration.

In 1886, not long after marrying his wife Lamar Rutherford, Lipscomb ordered construction in Arlington for a mansion to be modeled after one that had been long admired by his wife, a resident of Athens, Georgia. Actual Georgia pine was shipped by rail and used for the paneling and also for the forty-foot pillars, while hardware and fixtures from a castle in England were used on the front doors. Fine Italian marble was used to build the fireplaces and crystal chandeliers from Europe were also procured.

The Lipscombs moved into their mansion in 1889, having named it “Ruthcomb” as a composite of their names, Rutherford and Lipscomb.

After the death of Mr. Lipscomb, the property was sold in 1905 to Mr. and Mrs. Thaddeus Matthew Tyssowski of Washington. She was the former Alice Walton Green of Lewinsville, Virginia. Emulating the previous owners, the new occupants renamed the home “Altha Hall”, a combination of their names, Alice and Thaddeus. Mr. Tyssowski was a successful businessman and insurance company executive and his son, Colonel John Tyssowski, married Catherine Woodward. John later became Chairman of the Board of Directors of Woodward & Lothrop.

In 1921, the Tyssowski family sold Altha Hall to Dr. W.S. Benedict, who lived there for 14 years before moving to a country estate near Sterling, Virginia. The hall was then leased by Tyssowski to Miss Anna Payne, who held a nursery school and kindergarten there. The property was then sold in 1957 to a group of real estate investors who had the property rezoned from residential, in hopes of turning it into a potential apartment house site. During this time, the house was occupied by the Lentz family until its destruction in 1959.

Further information about Altha Hall can be found in the excellent book “Arlington Heritage: Vignettes of a Virginia County” by Eleanor Lee Templeman, which is available for checkout here at Central Library. The photograph above is from the booklet “A Brief History of Alexandria County, Virginia,” published under the auspices of the county Board of Supervisors, of which early area activist and official Crandall Mackey was a member.

What About You?

Do you remember Altha Hall? Did you ever visit the property? We want to hear from you!

 

Take Me Out–Summer Dreams of Fields

Baseball became a part of my life on a cool evening in the late summer of 1960 at Griffith Stadium in a game between the New York Yankees and the Washington Senators. The Yankees won. And from that evening on, I was hooked on both baseball and the Yankees.

In the months before my 10th birthday in June 1964, my father smoked enough Phillies cigars to collect a Mickey Mantle Big Leaguer Rawlings baseball mitt for my birthday present. When I opened the box it arrived in, and saw it nestled there among tissue paper and a color, "autographed" photo of Number 7, I could not have been more thrilled.

Finally, my own glove to fit my hand--not a battered hand-me-down cast off by the neighbor boys. For the next several months, I lovingly seasoned it with a little Neatsfoot oil and scores of games of "hotbox" (aka pickle). By the following spring I was ready to be called up to the newly formed Arlington-Fairfax Savings and Loan softball team for pre-teen girls, one of a dozen or so teams that comprised Arlington’s Pigtail League (as differentiated from the Ponytail League for older girls), and administered by the Better Sports Club of Arlington, they of the "Better Sports Today, Better Citizens Tomorrow."

We were "coached" by a willing neighborhood mom, a sports naïf whose children were dragged to practices and left to whine "can we go home NOW?" from the bleachers while we tried to turn two and shag fly balls.

I played shortstop with a wicked side arm that more than once pulled our leggy first baseman off the bag. But when the 6-3 worked, it was sublime. (Hitting was another story. It was not for nothing that I earned the moniker "good field, no hit.")

Over several blissful weeks, on unforgiving elementary school ball fields and Barcroft fields under the lights, we scratched out a 3-10 record, playing less like New York’s baseball finest, the Yankees (locally, that honor fell to the Conklyn’s Florist team) and more like the hapless, expansion Mets. And I couldn’t have cared less. I was doing what I loved to do.

As another June rolls around (and another birthday, too), it's hard not to think of lessons learned both on and off those dusty fields of dreams. So here's to Mrs. Miller, Kay, Kim, Debbie, Barbara, Mimi, Baby Ruth, Janis, Nancy, Jane, Gayle, Carol, Ginny, Linda, and all the rest of the girls of summer who taught me teamwork, humility and how to take joy from a game well played regardless of the outcome.

Arlington Public Library has a terrific collection of DVDs and books that celebrate our national past time. Here are just a few of our favorites.

What are yours?

DVDs:

  • A League of Their Own -- “There's no crying in baseball.”
  • The Natural -- Robert Redford meets Bernard Malamud. Gets better with each viewing.
  • Eight Men Out -- The Black Sox scandal of 1919. Now some folks think the 1918 Series was thrown too.
  • Bull Durham --“I believe in the Church of Baseball."
  • The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg (documentary) -- A true mensch. My late father’s favorite player on his favorite team, the Detroit Tigers.
  • The Pride of the Yankees -- “Today, I’m the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” The Babe plays himself.
  • Baseball: Tenth Inning -- The right stuff from the Ken Burns docu-factory.
  • Sugar -- A film about a ballplayer but much more.

Books:

Central Library Goes Solar

Beginning the first week of June 2011, Arlington County’s Department of Environmental Services will install solar panels on the roof of the Central Library to help reduce the facility’s "peak demand" energy usage, offset a portion of its electricity consumption, and ultimately save money.

The 60-kilowatts solar photovoltaic system will consist of 250 solar panels on the roof of the Central Library, in order to:

  • Collect sunlight during all seasons
  • Offset a portion of the building’s electrical consumption
  • Save approximately $14,000 in energy costs annually
  • Reduce the County’s CO2 emissions by about 100,000 pounds annually

As part of Fresh AIRE (Arlington Initiative to Reduce Emissions), the new solar photovoltaic system will contribute to Arlington’s goal to reduce the County government greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent by 2012. Central Library is an ideal facility for a solar photovoltaic system, due to its large, flat roof that can easily collect sunlight, coupled with previous AIRE energy efficiency improvements.

This project is funded entirely by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009, through the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant (EECBG) program administered by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Impact on Library Service:

  • The work will have little to no impact on access to Central Library or its services.
  • Construction is scheduled to begin in early June and will take approximately two months to complete, weather-permitting.
  • During the work, ten parking spaces in the north parking lot will be used for a six week period for storage and staging.
  • If additional parking spaces are needed, patrons will be given as much notice as possible.

Energy Improvements at Central Library

With one of the largest public library collections in Metro DC, Central Library runs the typical heating, cooling, ventilation (HVAC), lighting, and water heating equipment associated with a commercial building, as well as a robust public access computer center and office equipment for staff use.

A series of adjustments and retrofits to Central Library’s building systems over the last decade have:

  • Cut electricity consumption by 38 percent from 2000 to 2010
  • Saved over $90,000 in avoided electricity costs
  • Prevented nearly 580 metric tons in CO2 emissions - the same as taking 400 cars off the road or planting nearly 15,000 trees.

For more information about the solar panel installation, please contact Viswanadhan Yallayi at 703-228-0755 in the Arlington County Department of Environmental Services.

For details about Fresh AIRE and Arlington’s efforts to improve energy efficiency in County facilities, please contact John Morrill at 703-228-4426. Or visit http://www.arlingtonva.us/ and search “central library solar panels.”



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