Falls Church …
in their words

“… When we moved into Falls Church we lived over on the Rice farm. That’s where I grew up. Our house was an old farmhouse on the very site of John Koons’ big stone house just south of Hillwood Avenue, on Shady Lane. That’s where John Koons raised his family or started to raise ‘em.

Our house had belonged to Rices and later to old man Hoskins. Hoskins bought the place from Rice. My dad farmed it for two or three years for Hoskins. Then some man came down from New York to build houses there. Hoskins sold him a lot of lots. There was 81 acres to start with. This was before Eakin. I can’t remember the man’s name. Maybe it was Eakin that sold the land to this old man. He was a fluke. He came here from New York and New Jersey. He was a kind of speculator, and he finally had to get out.

This area is called ‘The Hill.’ Right over there at the end of School Lane is the house where I was raised. My dad and mother bought this lot of theirs while they were working for Hoskins. They paid $150.00. My dad stayed off three days, went to Herndon, and they cut a train load of logs up there in the woods, loaded it and brought it down here to build that house. It was home for squirrels one day and studs in the house the next day. I reckon it was mostly oak—you go down there now and it’s just as hard as steel.

No, it wasn’t a log house. They cut the logs up into boards, 2x4s, 2x6s, and all that. The man who owned the woods up at Herndon had a mill where the logs were cut up.

That’s the house we moved into when us kids were little, tiny fellows. We lived there I and both my sisters got married and got out. We lived there for… I guess we moved there about 1914 right in World War I, when I went out to work for the first time….”

“… Them days, all up and down Broad Street, people dumped all their trash in the bushes along the road. It got miles deep. Across Hillwood Avenue from where Jelleff’s is now used to be a favorite dumping spot. It was a tremendous place. You could stand on the road and look down—it looked like a mile deep. We kids used to go down there and pick over the trash. Nobody realized the danger. We wore no shoes. We’d pull out lamp and book stands and everything…”

“…We all got water out of wells. No streetlights. No hardened roads. Forty years ago, they started to make the roads hard. I remember when you couldn’t even walk in the roads, they were so rough and, in some spots, they had logs a foot in diameter.

One place they corduroyed was the “Methodist Church Bottom,” what is now Annandale Road between Hillwood and South Washington Street. They also corduroyed East Fairfax Street along by the Episcopal Church—Yes, indeedy.

Old man Cook Slade used to haul loads and loads of wood over these roads…. I’d really like to know the loads of wood he hauled over these roads. He was an old man too. He’d go out there and cut and pile wood on his wagon until he could stack it no higher.

He owned land all around him there on Annandale Road in the area before you get to Gallows Road. You went out Annandale Road and stopped by his house and paid him 75 cents and you could cut all the wood that you could haul. All the wood you could pile on that wagon and haul out of there….”

“…Not too many houses have been built recently. Most of these are old houses. At least if they ain’t, they replaced old houses. Where I go to breakfast now—at my daughter’s mother-in-law’s—they lived in the house maybe 50, 60 years and when they got ready to build, they just tore the old house down and rebuilt right on the same spot….”

To read more of Jessie Deskin’s interview, please contact the Falls Church History Room. 

“… My grandmother Galpin died in 1928, while grandfather died in 1929. They were then living at 424 [ East Broad Street]. My mother took care of my grandfather after grandmother died. When he died, she inherited 424. We came out then and lived there, my mother and father, myself, and my brother, Earl, and his wife. I went through medical school from there. I stayed there until I went away to World War II. The family was there until September 1948 when we sold it. We sold it to a colonel in the army. Then someone with a bunch of cats was there for a while. It passed through a number of hands before James A. Hayes bought it. He had a number of tenants before he sold it to Tollgate, Inc. in 1979.

We had two acres with the house lot and the garden. There was also a big two-story barn behind the house. My grandfather kept a horse until his death. He never had a car. He always had a horse and buggy. He drove a horse market wagon to Washington until two or three weeks before he died. It had roll-up canvas sides like the grocery wagons use to have.

The garden was cultivated from the time my grandparents moved there in 1913. The house and the acre the house was on was sold in 1948. Earl had the other acre with the garden. He cultivated it himself for a while and then some friends of his cultivated it.

The house was built in two parts. As far as I can determine, the first part was built just before or during the Civil War and was added to quite some time later. The early foundation was fieldstone, but the additions had poured concrete foundations. The family who sold it to my grandparents were Sullivans. They ran a cemetery memorial business.…”

“… East Broad was a mighty nice street 50 years ago. It was a dirt road. I remember that hardly anyone, except the Rice House, lived between 242 and Seven Corners. I remember Falls Church when it was a decent place to live. You got to know everyone.

The Noland farmhouse was over next to Dulin Chapel at Noland and Broad. It set back a bit, but it faced Broad Street. It looked like a house that jack built with several additions. A little English lady lived there at one time. She was a very good friend of my mother and grandmother. Her name was Mowat. She and her two sons are buried at Oakwood. One of the boys was the town sport. If there was any good fishing in the creek he knew where it was. We called him “Reds.” 

The Nolands rented them a portion of the house. Timothy T. W. Noland, a Baptist Minister, married my mother and father in 1892. It took place on the Galpin farm, in the second farmhouse, which is still there. The first one burned. They were both on the same spot. There was a big bank barn there. My brother Early Milton Westcott burned it down—boys just playing.

My father, John E. Hartman, was a mounted policeman. He had been a member of Company A, 6 ^th Cavalry, chasing Geronimo all over Arizona. They came back to Fort Myer. Then he mustered out. He went into the Washington Police Department where he was a mounted policeman for 42 years. He came to Fort Myer when he was courting my mother. She was then living on the farm with her parents and her sis who later became Mrs. W. J. Westcott….”

“…I have very profound respect for my grandmother and grandfather, particularly my grandfather. If there ever was a saint, he sure was one. He made a very deep impression on me. He was a little man but very strong. Fred Foote used to live at Seven Corners with his two sisters. He used to work for my grandfather. He helped clear a lot of the trees on the farm. He used to talk to me about my grandfather. He said he was one of the strongest small men he ever knew. He told me how he used to cradle wheat, cut wood, and so on. He was a hard worker. 

He kept his market wagon going almost to the day of his death. He would go early in the morning, go down Wilson Boulevard to Rosslyn, cross the river and put his wagon on the market line at Central Market. He cultivated the whole 89 acres. He specialized in tomatoes and corn. 

My brother, Walter, was very interested in horticulture and as soon as school was out, he would head for Falls Church and 424. Grandfather taught him all about agriculture things. Grandfather used to set up a hot house arrangement and get his tomatoes on the market ahead of everybody else. My brother said he formerly used to take a two-horse team and wagon to the city every weekend….” 

To read more of Dr. Clarence Hartman’s interview, please contact the  Falls Church History Room. 

Henderson has been interviewed several times about his life and activism. The excerpt below comes a 1966 interview that is housed at the Virginia Room in the Fairfax County Public Library.  

“…Peculiarly in the South and in my own area white and colored people lived almost side by side. They lived on the same streets. We lived, my grandmother lived, right in the heart of what is now Falls Church, and she had white neighbors all around. But after a while this matter of segregation crept in, and what we feel is a shame now that very few negroes can find homes in Virginia. Even the schoolteachers there, the majority of them have to travel backwards and forwards to Washington, because they can’t get homes. Very few homes are built for negroes by private contractors. Luckily, we’ve just had a Housing Authority passed in Fairfax County, and I’m hoping that it’s going to provide a means by which homes can be built. I would like to see the day when our ghettoes would disappear, when negroes will live where they can manage to get a home. And I think that day is coming. I saw in the paper the other day there are only about three hundred such happenings have occurred in suburban areas. But I think the pace will step up, and negroes who are very much different from what they were years ago when they lacked education and lacked money and lacked everything else. So, I’m hoping that things are going to improve a great deal. We’ve had very fine connections with the white people in northern Virginia. I’ve never believed in the Black Muslim philosophy of negroes all being together. I think the success in this nation has got to be when we work together and forget the differences, many of them, that separate us. So that I’m hoping things are going to improve….” 

“… I don’t believe we’ll get rid of natural prejudices, because most of us have some prejudices based all on rationalizations and not real thinking about them, but I believe we’re going to make a great deal of progress, I say it because of the world situation. We’ve got to in America, it seems to me, show that we are not color-blind to a great degree as we have been in the past, because these people we’re against in the world, in Korea and Indonesia, not the people, but all these people are colored peoples over the world, and they react and use as propaganda the way that negroes are treated here in America. I think the present administration is doing a great deal to ride us of that view. I think that with education, with the younger people seeing things more rationality, that the progress is going to be great. I think, however, we’ve got to break down this housing segregation. We’ve got to make it possible so that people will be judged on their character and not necessarily the color of their skin when they want to move into areas. And I think a lot of the white people in the South, the poorer whites, who have felt this need to feel superior to somebody, they’ve got to change or the younger people in school. Last week I talked to two classes at a white high school in Virginia that were studying the negro, and the reaction of that group was very good. And I think the white people need to know more about the negro than what they usually get. I think the history of the negro is very essential. White people need to know something about the progress the negro has made in America as well as in the rest of the world. I think all of these things are going to make for a much better America….”

To read more of Edwin B. Henderson’s interview, please contact the  Virginia Room at Fairfax County Public Library. 

Julian Ninde Jr. and Sr. were interviewed together in 1973. Excerpts from their interview have been separated for ease of use.

Julian Winde Sr.:

“… I started selling building materials in Northern Virginia in 1920 for Smith and Cline of Rosslyn. My area was Alexandria, Arlington, Fairfax, Falls Church, and a bit in Prince William County. There was a lot of building going on then, with a little slowdown during the Great Depression.

We moved to the little house on the edge of the Crossman farm in 1943. I had a stroke and retired that year. Just before that, we were living on Columbia Pike near Glebe Road. The doctors advised to get where it was quiet, out of the city. Houses were hard to find anywhere [during the war]. There was a Canadian diplomat living in the house who was being transferred to Mexico City.

I knew the Crossmans, and it was through them that we got that house. That’s where we lived when my son was working on the Crossman farm. Jr. was only 5 1/2 -6 years old at that time. We moved there in the spring of the year 1944….”

“… Hard materials, brick, tile, cinder block, cement, mortar, plaster, plaster board, roofing, and such were brought into Rosslyn on the Pennsylvania Railroad. From there, it all went by truck. Later on, it was delivered to L. C. Smith’s yard in Cherrydale via W&OD tracks. When the Pennsylvania Railroad went out [of business] was when Smith bought the warehouse on Quincy Street. Griffith Consumers [Co.] bought out the Smith & Cline place in Rosslyn. The Pennsylvania [Railroad] property [in] Rosslyn later turned into land worth $25.00 a square foot. Of course, the W&OD hauled stuff clear up to Purcellville and Bluemont.”

Julian Winde Jr.:

“. . . I went to Charles Stewart Elementary school. After that, I went to Swanson Junior High and Washington & Lee High School.

The trolley line wasn’t here in ’44, but the W&OD was. There were some buses but not autos. I remember when V-J Day came along. Lee Highway filled with autos that people had stored in their barns because they couldn’t get gas for them. I remember walking down Underwood Street and seeing all those cars. People were celebrating by having a parade, I guess. I never did ride on the W&OD. I walked up and down the tracks. I never rode.…”

“… I started working on the Crossman farm almost as soon as we moved there. I used to get out of school in the afternoon and then I’d walk up the street to the farm. At corn harvesting time, Mr. Crossman generally had a wagon load of corn that had just been cut in the field, hand cut, and hand shucked in the field, and thrown on the wagon by hand. When we got it to the barn, we had to throw it in the crib by hand, and that was usually my job because by that time he had to start looking after the milk cows. During the war, he just had two colored men working for him, so mostly he and his wife looked after 35-40 head of cattle. This was William Crossman II. George Crossman [William II’s father] was dead by that time. Mr. Crossman had that load of corn there. He’d give me a quarter to throw it off and told me to pick out the rottenest corn I found and take it down and feed it to the pigs. And that’s what I would do, until it got dark. Then I’d cut across the field and go on home. That was in November, so it got dark around 5:30 or 6:00 o’clock.

During the summertime, I used to rake hay, tend to the horses, drive the cows to the barn, to and from the lot where they were pastured over on Lee Highway and Quarter Street, on the same side of Lee Highway as the farm. I used to walk the cows through what is now park land where Sycamore Street is. That was mostly woods then. The barns used to be about 300 yards behind the house [on Underwood]. He had two barns, one he kept his horses in, and a dairy barn. Tuckahoe Elementary School was later built on part of the farm….”

“… I was born in 1938. I worked there on the farm from 1944 to about 1950 when he shut down. I worked there from when I was six until I was twelve.…”

To read more of Julian Winde Jr. and Sr.’s interview, please contact the Falls Church History Room.