Fairfax County… in their words

Numerous oral histories conducted in Fairfax County document the everyday experiences of residents during the mid-to-late twentieth century. We have highlighted a handful of passages that are relevant to Fairfax County’s housing history below. These oral histories, some of which date from the 1970s, are available at the Virginia Room at the Fairfax County Public Library. Other oral histories can be found at George Mason University’s Northern Virginia Oral History Project.

This oral history with Joseph Beard was conducted by Nan Netherton and Patrick Reed in 1974. The complete transcript can be found on the website for the Virginia Room at Fairfax County Public Library.

Netherton/Reed: What was transportation like in Fairfax County during the 1920s? Was it a real problem for you in getting to high school or to markets?

Beard: Well, since my father moved over to Fairfax County near the Floris Vocational High School, my brother and I could walk to school. We only had to go one and a half miles, and that was a short distance to walk in those days. But Floris Vocational Agricultural High School drew boys and girls from all over the county, who wished to study agriculture and take home economics. There was a long shed built on the grounds of this high school that held eighteen horses. Many of the boys and girls drove on some roads [on] horseback. Two or three of them would come in buggies, and then some of them would board nearby. So, transportation was a problem…. Well, it wasn’t a problem compared with what it is today, because nobody had any trouble getting a horse up and down the road, and there weren’t so many of them that we had traffic jams. Be this as it may, our problems with getting our products to market was not too terrible, because it was the custom in those days to hook a horse to a lone wagon, or, if you had a large load, you’d hook two horses to a farm wagon and haul your milk or your product to a railroad station. And at that time the Washington and Old Dominion Railway ran from Rosslyn, Virginia, to Bluemont, Virginia, up through Falls Church, Vienna, Herndon, Sterling and all up the line. In my early days, I remember during the World War my brother and I used to drive a little black mare hitched to a spring wagon with four ten-gallon cans of milk to the railroad station each morning for a year or so during World War II [NOTE: Probably meant WWI] before we went to school. So, this was customary. Then about 1918 or ‘19, the farmers formed a cooperative and bought two great big General Motors trucks. They had solid tires on them, but the problem was in the wintertime when these big heavy trucks, which would go through the mud because they were of the World War I era build, but the problem was that they would tear up the country roads, which were not paved, so badly that really it was almost impossible for any other vehicle, even with a horse and wagon, to get in and out of the roads. The farmers began during 1918, and along there to gradually become involved with tractors and automobiles and trucks. This was the beginning of that period. Our big problem at that time was the roadways. Of course, as you know Senator Harry Byrd Sr. of Virginia formed a policy that if he was elected governor, he would see to it that the country roads were taken over by the state rather than by respective counties and magisterial districts; and that he would get farm to market roads built. And he did.

Netherton/Reed: That was called the Byrd Road Act.

Beard: This was called the Byrd Road Act, and he was remembered for this as long as he lived. We were quite appreciative of this. The roads at that time, there was a paved road from Alexandria to Winchester known as Little River Turnpike. At about where Frying Pan is today, into Herndon, that was paved, but none of these other roads were paved….”

Netherton/Reed: Can I ask you a question about another organization in the county? Mr. Derr mentioned that at many of the young people’s agricultural fairs in the 1920s often outside groups or organizations were one of the leading attractions, and the Ku Klux Klan was mentioned specifically by Mr. Derr. Do you know anything about the Ku Klux Klan in the county or its activities?

Beard: Well, the Ku Klux Klan: I knew of it, I knew there was such a thing. Of course, I never was a member, but I did attend one or two political rallies in 1927 on what is now the parking lot of the George Mason Annex here, which was formerly the old Fairfax City High School. There must have been fifteen hundred Ku Klux people there that night in support of some issue one way or the other, one of the political organizations.

Netherton/Reed: Would you say then there was much racial animosity in the county? Was this the direction of the Klan’s activities at that time?

Beard: I never saw or heard locally anything that had to do specifically with special racial problems. Of course, you know what they stood for: they were prejudiced in racial situations. It seemed to me that the rallies that I attended… they didn’t even have on hoods or anything. They had on uniforms, white uniforms, but their faces were not covered. I knew who some of them were, because I saw some of my friends there. [It was] more of a political rally at that time as far as I understood….”

Netherton/Reed: Something that kept recurring in the annual reports was the matter of orchards and vineyards. I really am very much interested in knowing when these orchards were planted from the earliest times even by statute in the state of Virginia. Why is it that we have so few, if any left? Was it disease or the suburban impact or what?

Beard: It was the suburban impact. The price of land and the cost of labor were the two things. When I moved to Fairfax County in 1938, there were seventeen commercial orchards that produced apples and peaches and there were eight or ten grape vineyards. They sold these products locally. As urbanization went along, these commercial fruit orchards were replaced by nurseries that grew ornamental plants and shrubs for sale to the suburban homeowners, and of course, the grape vineyards went by the way for the same reason. As a general rule, whenever land becomes twice as valuable for uses other than agriculture, the orchards, the vineyards, and the extensive livestock farming methods have to be replaced, because they’re not economically feasible on that high priced land.

Netherton/Reed: I noticed a term that I didn’t understand. Perhaps you can explain to me, is the term ‘Washington Milkshed’ an adaption of ‘Watershed’?

Beard: Yes.

Netherton/Reed: Is it meant to be humorous?

Beard: No, no. A ‘milkshed’ simply means the community or the area or the limits on which milk is produced and shipped to a certain market. Milk is a perishable product; and in those days there wasn’t the type of refrigeration that we have today, and there were not the highways that we have today. So, therefore, it was usually determined by a rail line or a truck route or some other type of thing. Now since mechanical refrigeration has come into being, and since this is also on farms just as it is out in the transportation business, milk can be kept for a number of hours. That was not originally true. So, it’s usually determined by first, the transportation and communication system, and secondly, the refrigeration system. That’s what determined the ‘milkshed’ in those days. Today, with the transportation being what it is, and the refrigeration being what it is, it’s a question of economics alone….”

This oral history with Oliver W. Besley Jr. was conducted by D’Anne Evans in 1976 in Springfield, Virginia. The complete transcript can be found on the website for the Virginia Room at Fairfax County Public Library.

Evans: Well then, your father farmed with your grandfather?

Besley: I lived with my grandparents. My father was living in Arlington at the time. I lived with my grandparents a whole lot of the time just simply because I enjoyed the farm a lot more than I enjoyed the city, and they enjoyed having me, let’s put it that way. It was years before my father came out to the farm and ran the sawmill, took over for my grandfather, years and years after anything to do with this church [Wakefield Chapel], ’52, ’53, in that area, so at the time we’re speaking of I just lived with my grandparents for different periods. Of course, I didn’t live with them straight through. I might live with them for one school year. For instance, in the second grade, I lived there and then I’d stay there a lot in the summers, vacations and so forth….”

Evans: Well, what kind of farming? You say your grandfather was in the hog farming and the sawmill? What about the other people on the road?

Besley: Everyone has gardens. Grandfather had a very large garden. Everyone raised hay, or in one instance I know of, straw, but then the other people were loggers or mechanics or some, a very few of them, worked for the government, you know, somewhere like Ft. Belvoir, even in those days, but farmers as such. There weren’t many of them, farmers as such, there were one or two along the road. But they all were highly dependent on farming, in other words, like a secondary thing. All of them had cattle and hogs, enough to provide meat for their larder you might say. If they had any extra, they’d market it, of course. All of them had gardens, vegetable gardens and the like; and that would be everybody. You had to have, and then some cattle and some hogs, and then if they had enough land, they had it in hay so that they could have feed for the cattle: hay or corn.

Evans: But mainly they were not in farming as a business?

Besley: No. Not as a primary business anyway. Some of them would have done that if they had a particularly good year, in something just as a sideline, but nobody was… to my way of thinking there might have been one person like that on Wakefield Chapel Road, and that would have been Wallace Monroe, the one person I can think of in farming per se for a living….”

This oral history with Otrich Sharper Costley was conducted by Janey Hofer for the Great Falls Historical Society in 1985. The complete transcript can be found on the website for the Virginia Room at Fairfax County Public Library.

Hofer: Now where did you go to school in this area?

Costley: I did not go to school in this area until I was nearly sixteen years old. The Negroes had no place to go to school when I grew up down in the lower part of McLean. And a lady by the name of Priscilla Payne. She married Richard Payne. I don’t know where she came from, maybe Washington. She was highly educated, and the Negroes had no place to go to school and she opened up her house and taught. And I’ll be frank with you, some winters, not many, but some winters, my daddy wasn’t able to pay for me to go to school. My father moved on his place on Spring Hill Road near Route 7. There’s everything on there now. He sold it, you know. He sold several lots and there were little ramblers built on it before he left over here….”

Hofer: So after you moved to the location on Spring Hill Road?

Costley: Then I went to school at Odricks Corner. Then I was eighteen years old when I came out of that school. And you know, there was no work around here for—in my day they wouldn’t let Negroes work, you know, these people. So, he didn’t want me to do this.

Hofer: He didn’t want you doing maid work?

Costley: Yes, but not heavy work. But anyhow, my mother went into Washington and worked and he and my mother sent my sister to high school. She got to high school.

Hofer: Where was the high school?

Costley: In Washington because there wasn’t no high school out here until they built the Luther Jackson one….”

Costley: The Bostons had property, leaving Church Hill Road. That property right there where they’re building all those great big houses, that was Grandfather’s property.

Hofer: Don’t you wish you had it now?

Costley: No, I don’t. I wouldn’t get none of it no way. No, I don’t wish I had it. It’s too much, you know, to own all that.

Hofer: You’ve lived on this piece of property [for] how long now?

Costley: I’ve lived here, other than living in Washington, ever since 1921. Not right in this house because we didn’t come in this house until 1955.

Hofer: You’re an older settler then in this area? You’ve seen a lot of changes, haven’t you?

Costley: I’ve seen a lot of that.

Hofer: Too much happening.

Costley: Too many buildings. It’s making everything so expensive and what started expensive first too was land, the land taxes where people had great big farms. And I’ll tell you another thing. The farmers didn’t pay their help what they could and the help left here. That had a lot to do with it. The help went where they could get more money. That had a lot to do with these farms going down. If they’d paid the help, they would still have it, you see, but they didn’t want to pay their help nothing.

Hofer: Was your family ever involved in growing vegetables and selling them in Washington?

Costley: My dad had a truck garden as long as he was able and also my daddy was a blacksmith. He shod horses for [the] Madeira School. I knew the lady….”

Hofer: You had quite a bit of land through here.

Costley: Yes, and Uncle Howard—my husband’s brother—bought Uncle Howard’s part, which is nearly five acres and gave it to me, and my daddy gave me the nearly five acres on towards, down on old Bulls Hill that was his. So, I couldn’t keep the taxes up on all of them, you know, after my husband died. But they tell me that two doctors have houses on the one here on Belle View Road. One is right near the road, a brick house, and there’s another one back in behind it there. But that was the most beautiful piece of land. I walked around that land up there and you can look all the way over here on Old Dominion. You can look all over Old Dominion. I wanted my husband to build over there and he said, “No way.” The roads weren’t fixed then. They were just dirt roads. He says, “I have to go to work in the snow and everything and it’s better to build right here.” He did and then when he died, I said, “Lord he did, just like I wanted, a two-story house.” He wouldn’t do that, and everything he did just worked out to be right. Because I wouldn’t have wanted to have been—I was right near his sister. His sister was right there, and she was left like that in later years and went with her daughter in Vienna. But her son lived there a little over two years and then he died. And when my husband died, he meant so much to me. I had my car and he’d get in and carry me where I wanted to go. He had his own but, you know, I wanted him to use my car. And then after he died, I kept it until ’83 and then I sold it….”

This oral history with Judge James Keith of the 19th Circuit Court was conducted by Karen Coleman in 1974, a few years before he retired. The complete transcript can be found on the website for the Virginia Room at Fairfax County Public Library.

Keith: We had one—really two good roads. You could go in over the Chain Bridge, right through Vienna and Langley or you could go in through Falls Church. I think the Alexandria road was all paved then, so you really had three paved roads going into Washington. I remember when I was a boy in Warrenton, coming to Washington, took anywhere from half a day to a day in an automobile. If you made it in four hours, you bragged on it! There were lots of dirt roads. Once you got to Fairfax, the roads were paved. Then, as I grew older the road was paved from Middleburg to Fairfax, and Warrenton had a paved road from Warrenton to Middleburg, so you could drive around that way on a paved road all the way. When I came to Fairfax, the electric car was off, had been abandoned, but they had a little sort of a bus that ran on the rail, and we went, that was a good way to get to and from Washington. Took about 1 ¼ to 1 ½ hours, but it ran fairly regularly. Went from here to Vienna and then through the country to Falls Church and on into Washington. Not everybody had automobiles by a long shot. I was here two or three years before I had a car. We would bum rides. Everyone would sort of gather around in the afternoon and see who was going to Washington and get a ride if you wanted to go in that night. We’d come home on the Greyhound Bus, if you wanted to come home that night. Come out the next morning on the Greyhound Bus.

Coleman: Did you have very much business in Washington, or did most of your business center here in Fairfax?

Keith: All centered here. Nobody had any business in Washington. And there was not a whole lot of commuting. Of course, there always had been some commuting. People went in on the car in the morning and came back in the afternoon, but it wasn’t anything like it is today.

Coleman: What about World War II? Do you have any recollections of Fairfax at that time?

Keith: Yes, I’d been here about five years when World War II came. Fairfax still hadn’t begun to grow. Fairfax was really hit hard by the depression because the money that had been lent on real estate had just been frozen, and every Saturday morning out here in front of the courthouse, people’s property was being sold. Two and three and four and five and six sales every week, of people who hadn’t been able to pay the mortgages on their property. This was beginning to ease off in the late ‘30s because we were beginning to feel the effects of all the programs that Roosevelt had to pump money back into the economy, but the real change came when we began to supply the Europeans with things they needed to get ready for war. One interesting thing is that the tracks on the car lines that went from here to Washington were sold, and I’ve always heard that they were bought by the Japanese and used to make guns and arms. But things were much better in the late ‘30s, and I think people were beginning to be fully recovered from the depression, and of course Washington being near—people never had been really broke in Washington because they had government jobs and Fairfax had benefited from the fact. There have always been a number of people here who work for the government. Of course, anyone who worked for the government during the depression here was like a millionaire. They had their $250 a month, or $150 a month, or whatever they were making coming in regularly and so that was a constant source of income. There had been no great population influx, nothing like that. Fairfax was still around 40,000 people I think in 1940, which is what it was in 1930 and probably what it was in 1948. It really didn’t begin to break at the seams until two or three years after the war….”

The transcript for this oral history with Aileen Wright was conducted by Mary Lipsey for the Providence District History Project in 2007. Wright and her family lived in Merrifield in the 1930s. The complete transcript can be found on the website for the Virginia Room at Fairfax County Public Library.

Wright: Yes, all African Americans. And in Merrifield there weren’t but two there on Gallows Road right on that strip but two white families there and they lived on the opposite side. The other side was all African Americans. And on the other side it was two white families. Do you remember–

Dennis Howard ( Wright’s nephew): Miss Anderson was one of them.

Wright: Right.

Dennis Howard: Gallows Road was the colored line.

Lipsey: Okay, now when you are saying which side, so it’s on the side where the Silver Diner and the First Baptist Church of Merrifield [are located].

Wright: Yes, where the First Baptist Church [is], all along that side that was our side.

Lipsey: Okay.

Wright: The other side was the white side, but I mean we didn’t know any difference. We’d go through Robey’s field, Mr. Robey lived directly across. I mean he didn’t live [there], his home was across further down the road from there. But he had this whole field that he, I think that is where they were doing their hay. I think that was on that field. But he had [water]cress in the fall, and we’d go over there and pick cress….”

Lipsey: Right, right. Well, tell me about growing up in the Merrifield area. What did you do for fun? Chores you might have had or anything like that?

Wright: Okay, it was fun, Merrifield was a close-knit community–I mean we all–if one was hungry everybody was hungry. If one ate, everybody ate, you know, they shared, you know, we did and we were. My family was the first family. I never will forget this either, our family was the first family that had electricity, you know, to come to there. And, ah, none of us had telephones. We didn’t have telephones, not even when we left. We didn’t have telephones. But my family had, or my father was, the first one to have electricity put in. I guess, you know, it couldn’t be because some of them lived right on Gallows Road too. But anyway, and, one of my cousins, one of the Charias(?) told me, said, when they finally got electricity, they said na na na na na. Your electricity is old, ours is new. That’s the way that kids thought. (Both Mary and Aileen are chuckling.)

Lipsey: Right.

Wright: But, um, it was fun. We had swings, and we went on bicycle rides. And the road it was, I guess you would call it tar top, but it wasn’t that. It was hard enough–we skated from 29 on up to Mr. Anderson’s up to his grandfather’s house, which would be at the top of the hill over at Tinner Hill. That’s where we started, right? Called it Tinner Hill, right?

Lipsey: Yeah, now you’re talking about Lee Highway was a tar top or [was it] Gallows Road?

Wright: Gallows Road. We skated on Gallows Road. It was smooth enough and hard enough.

Lipsey: You didn’t have to worry about traffic then.

Wright: No, no. A car would come periodically, and we would have to get off on the side of the road and wait for the car.

Lipsey: So, you came by it naturally. What about chores in the evenings or after school?

Wright: Oh, we had to keep our room clean and, um, wash dishes, and we had slop jars then and we had outside toilets, and you had to be sure they were put out in the morning.

Lipsey: You have to tell people what a slop jar is. That’s when they didn’t use the bathroom in the house and did it in the jar and they had to empty it in the morning.

Wright: That’s right, and you had to wash it out too. You know you couldn’t just empty it, and sit it there.

Lipsey: Yeah.

Wright: Yeah, we had a stick with a cloth tied around it, and then some kind of disinfectant whatever kind they gave you. You had to wash it out and turn it upside down and then let it sit out there till night time. At night, um hum.

Lipsey: Yeah, kids wouldn’t understand.

Wright: No, oh no no.

Lipsey: Did you have a telephone then?

Wright: Now, we didn’t have a telephone.

Lipsey: So, if you wanted to communicate, you talk about going to your Aunt’s house. How did you communicate with her?

Wright: We walked there.

Lipsey: Okay. So, you didn’t call them and say I’m coming?

Wright: No, no.

Lipsey: Indoor water did you have?

Wright: No. We had a well and how else did we get water?

Howard: Spring.

Wright: Spring, yeah, we used to have a spring down in the Pines, but we had wells….”