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Clermont Plantation House (Site)

GPS Coordinates: 38.8006497, -77.1135693
Closest Address: 5612 Glenwood Drive, Alexandria, VA 22310

Clermont Plantation House (Site)

These coordinates mark the exact site where the home once stood. No visible remains exist.


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Here follows a history of the Clermont Plantation as published on the Fairfax County Public Schools website.
This history was written for Clermont Elementary School’s 30th anniversary:

Thirty years ago Clermont Elementary School opened. Long ago Indians used this area as their hunting grounds. They stopped here on their annual hunting expeditions to the Blue Ridge Mountains.

There was a prominent Alexandria man, Benjamin Dulany, who owned a summer home in Clermont. His family supported the Torries in the Revolutionary War. Although he didn’t have the same political views as George Washington, they were very good friends. Mr. Dulany had a favorite horse, Blueskin. He gave Blueskin to George Washington as a present. This was the same horse George Washington rode in the Battle of Princeton. Mr. Dulany married a girl from Rose Hill. She was George Washington’s god child. They eloped to his Clermont summer home which was located close to the railroad tracks on Clermont Drive.
Benjamin Tasker Dulany was born in 1752 and died in 1818.

George Mason had a son named John Mason. John Mason helped to build the Potomac Canal and invested in the development of the steamship. When he purchased the Dulany Plantation he named his new home Clermont, after the steamship. The area known as the Gladden Tract was also used by the Indians for hunting and camping grounds. Indian arrowheads and a stone axe have been found in and around the development. The Indians freely roamed the land until the late 1700’s, but after the Revolutionary War the Gladden tract underwent some dramatic changes.

The land was purchased by a family by the name of Stanford. The Stanfords owned not only Wellington Green but also portions of Clermont, Burgundy, and Wilton Woods as well. They established a small plantation and gave their home the name of Burgundy Farm. When Mr. Stanford died he didn’t know which of his two sons to leave his land to, so he solved the problem by dividing the land in half and giving each son half. The eastern portion kept the name Burgundy Farm and the western portion was called Evergreen Farm.

Around 1800 Evergreen Farm was purchased by the Fowles, a merchant family from Alexandria. Around 1870 they built a farm home known as the Evergreen House. In the 1850s Ellen “Nellie” Bernard Fowle was born. On April 19, 1871, she married a former Confederate General, Fitzhugh Lee. Fitzhugh Lee was born in the Clermont Plantation House which once stood in the extreme northern portion of the Clermont Woods Development. Clermont at the time was owned by General John Mason, the son of George Mason.

Fitzhugh Lee (1835-1905). Fitzhugh Lee was a Confederate cavalry general in the American Civil War, the 40th Governor of Virginia, and a general in the United States Army during the Spanish-American War.

Fitzhugh grew up on Clermont and at the age of fourteen enrolled in an Episcopal boarding school in Catonsville, Maryland. There he excelled in academics and in 1852 he received appointment to West Point Military Academy. In 1859 Fitzhugh joined an army expedition on the Texas frontier, where he had an encounter with a Comanche Indian. Fitzhugh was wounded and eventually resigned from the Army to offer his services to the Confederacy. He served in the First Virginia Cavalry under General “Jeb” Stuart. He distinguished himself in battle and rose through the ranks quickly. After the war Fitzhugh took a loyalty oath to the Union and became a leading advocate of southern reconciliation with the north. The New York Times wrote on his death:

"There is no man in the South and no man in the Unites States, who contributed more than Fitzhugh Lee to forming, after the division of the Civil War, “a more perfect union."

As time when on, the Gladden tract was sold to the Virginia Concrete Company for use as a gravel quarry. Soil geologists from Fairfax County surveyed the land and took soil samples. It was found that this land was once underwater and was part of the Atlantic shoreline in prehistoric times, long before the age of the dinosaurs. Large quantities of marine clay were found and fossils of prehistoric crustaceans known as trilobites can still be found there, but most important, large deposits of gravel were found in the land. The company concentrated its mining efforts on such other properties they possessed like the sites of present day Manchester Lakes and Kingstowne.

In 1965 Virginia Concrete commenced gravel mining operations in the area. Because the area was experiencing a population boom the housing developments in the area were full of angry citizens who did not want a gravel mine in their neighborhood. The Civic Association of Clermont Woods, Wilton Woods, Ridgeview Estates, Winslow, Burgundy, and Franconia banded together and voiced their complaint to the county. All mining operations were halted in the Gladden Tract after an injunction was imposed.

In 1967 the government purchased the land which was to be the new Clermont School. Clermont first opened at Bush Hill in September 1968 and halfway through the year opened its doors on Clermont Drive.

In 1969 Virginia Concrete Company put the Gladden tract up for sale. Due to the “baby boom” at the time, a concern arose that there were not going to be enough schools in our area to handle the growing number of students. Edison High School had recently been completed but many felt we might need an additional high school. The Fairfax County School Board purchased 40.6 acres of the Gladden Tract along Franconia Road as a future site for the new school. Later, when the population began to level off, there was obviously no need for the new high school, so the land was relinquished from the school system to the Fairfax County Park Authority. The Park Authority built a baseball diamond on it and a soccer field and today you know this piece of land as Clermont Park.


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Here follows an excerpt from Donald Hakenson's "This Forgotten Land" tour guide:

The Clermont house and its surrounding land belonged to the Dulany family in 1785, the Mason family in 1833, and the Forrest family in 1851. Also, Major General Fitzhugh Lee was born on November 19, 1835 at Clermont. Fitzhugh Lee's father was Commodore Sydney Smith Lee, brother of General Robert E. Lee, and the son of Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee. Fitzhugh Lee's mother was Anna Maria Mason, daughter of General John Mason who lived at Clermont. Anna Maria Mason was the granddaughter of George Mason of Gunston Hall. Today, traffic on the Capital Beltway near the Van Dorn Street exit roars through what was once a treasured memory of the most important families inn Franconia.

UNION UNITS CAMPED AT CLERMONT.
On July 27, 1861, Major Henry G. Staples commanding the Third Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment and Colonel H.G. Berry of the Fourth Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment were headquartered at Clermont. As of February 1862, the Clermont house was converted into a hospital that furnished comfortable quarters for fifty or sixty patients of the Sixty-first New York Volunteers. After the Civil War, Mr. James H. Kerr, a gardener for Commodore Forrest at Clermont stated that the Second Vermont Volunteer Infantry Regiment were also camped at Clermont.

BENJAMIN DULANY.
The first known owner of the Clermont Plantation, as it was known then, was Benjamin Dulany, a colorful sometimes sober, sometimes not, gentleman of Alexandria, who used Clermont as his summer home. The manor house was very large with two parlors, eleven bedrooms, and many outbuildings. Dulany's family had been Tories and many had lost all in the Revolutionary War. But Benjamin had been George Washington's friend, though he did not agree with him politically. He had even given George his favorite horse, Blueskin, which we usually see in the General's wartime portraits. Later, he tried, unsuccessfully, to sell Clermont to the then ex-President, George Washington. Ben had married George's godchild, the daughter of Daniel French at Rose Hill, who was living with her widowed mother at Rose Hill when he courted and won her. It is said that the couple eloped out of the dressing room window at Rose Hill and escaped to Clermont. Nevertheless, they were married with Washington's blessings.

However romantically the marriage might have began, it did not continue that way for "Tipping Ben" is best remembered for some of his drinking bouts, in which he did peculiar things. Once, he invited some forty or so guests, and after drinking, decided to teach them the "latest dance from Paris," and proceeded to shoot his gun at their feet. His wife protested, so he locked her in a closet until morning and it is said that she never spoke another word to Ben for the rest of his life.

GENERAL JOHN MASON.
General John Mason, a son of the George Mason of Gunston Hall, was the next owner that can be traced to the Clermont Plantation. John had been overshadowed by his famous father and his famous son, John Murray Mason. He had known George Washington, and other patriots and had participated in the building and operation of the Potomac Canal, remnants of which can still be seen at Great Falls, Virginia.

John Mason's children married sons and daughters of local families. One married a daughter of the owner of Rose Hill, another married General Samuel Cooper of Cameron. One married her cousin, George Mason of Spring Bank (Across Route 1 from Penn Daw), and Anna Maria married Sydney Smith Lee, brother of General Robert E. Lee. Anna Maria came to her father's house in Clermont to have her first baby, Fitzhugh Lee, destined to be the first and only Governor of Virginia to be born in Fairfax County.

General John Mason's slight brush with personal fame came when he accompanied President Madison on his flight from Washington. In the face of British occupation, he wrote the necessary letters that sent Francis Scott Key on his errand of mercy to secure the release of Doctor Beanes. This errand placed Francis Scott Key in a position to view the bombardment of Fort McHenry, which motivated him to write "The Star-Spangled Banner."

COMMODORE FRENCH FORREST.
Commodore French Forrest purchased the Clermont house in 1850 from the Mason family. He was the son of Major Joseph Forrest of Maryland, and Elizabeth French Dulany, a daughter of a former owner of Clermont. Whether or not he bought it for sentimental reasons is not known.

Commodore Forrest had distinguished himself at the age of seventeen, in the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813. Since then, he had acquired other citations for bravery and leadership. There were very few naval officers more highly regarded at the time. But compelled by a sense of duty, he resigned his commission and offered his services to his State of Virginia in 1861. Since his property lay within reach of the Federal Capitol, his resignation meant the confiscation of home and lands, and for himself, a life of exile and poverty. He never again saw his lovely manor house, Clermont.

Commodore Forrest assumed command of the Norfolk Naval Yard, and supervised the building of the Merrimac. When the Merrimac foundered aground in battle, he rowed out under fire, in a light boat, to personally offer assistance. Eventually he rose to be Commander of the James River Squadron, and finally the acting Assistant Secretary of the Confederate Navy.

Meanwhile, his home at Clermont had been taken over by the Union forces as a smallpox hospital, and was subsequently burned. After the war, Commodore Forrest returned to live in one of the outbuildings, perhaps the Overseer's house, until his death in 1866, when the estate passed into the hands of his son Douglas F. Forrest. He died November 22, 1866.

MAJOR GENERAL FITZHUGH LEE.
Major General Fitzhugh (Fitz) Lee, son of Sydney Smith Lee, and nephew of General Robert E. Lee was born at Clermont, near Franconia on November 19, 1835. Fitz Lee made Major General before he attained the age of twenty-eight. Major General Lee was the last Cavalry Commander for the Army of Northern Virginia. After the war, he was elected Democratic Governor of Virginia from 1885 to 1889. Fitzhugh Lee is the only Governor of Virginia who was born in Fairfax County. In 1889, Fitz Lee was commissioned a Major General United States Volunteers and commanded the VII Corps in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. In 1901, he retired as a Brigadier General in the United States Army after having commanded the Department of Missouri for two years. On April 28, 1904, Major General Fitzhugh Lee died in Washington City. He was buried in Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia not far from his friend and mentor Major General Jeb Stuart.

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Award-winning local historian and tour guide in Franconia and the greater Alexandria area of Virginia.

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ADDRESS

Nathaniel Lee

c/o Franconia Museum

6121 Franconia Road

Alexandria, VA 22310

franconiahistory@gmail.com

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