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Gorhamville (Site)

GPS Coordinates: 38.7651189, -77.1578846
Closest Address: 6273 Alforth Avenue, Alexandria, VA 22315

Gorhamville (Site)

These coordinates mark the site of several Gorham family homes built along Gorham Lane. Today, no visible remains exist.

Here follows an excerpt from the Fall 2013 edition of the "Franconia Legacies" newsletter published by the Franconia Museum:

Howard and Ethel Gorham, Beulah Road Residents
Written By Ethel Virginia Adams Gorham

I was born on St. Asaph Street, in Alexandria, Virginia, on April 6, 1929. My mother, Mildred Pettit Adams, was born in Accotink, Virginia, in 1906, and my father, Mark Adams, was born in Arlington, Virginia, in 1903. I was one of nine children, and there are only two of us left now. We were all christened Episcopalian at the historic Christ Church on North Washington Street in Alexandria. We attended regularly, and my sisters and I sang in the choir.

I attended school in Alexandria, and graduated from George Washington High School. When I was 14 years old, I met Howard Gorham. He was visiting his brother, George, who lived next door to my family. Howard had just gone into the Army, because of World War II. I used to play with his brother’s children. I was just a kid myself, and he was, too.

Howard's father, Daniel “Lee” Gorham, and was born in Accotink, Virginia, around 1883, and his mother, Annie E. Taylor Gorham, born in Springfield, Virginia on April 10, 1889. Howard was one of 15 children. Lee Gorham worked for Fruit Growers Express in Alexandria, up on Telegraph Road. This company leased refrigerated railroad cars for transporting produce long distances around the country. The area is now townhouses, hotels and other businesses, but it was the railroad there in those days. A lot of the older men from Franconia worked for Fruit Growers Express. Clarence Gorham, Howard’s brother, also worked there. Lee and Clarence used to ride to work with some of the other Franconia men that worked for Fruit Growers Express. They worked for Fruit Growers until they retired and died.

When I was 16, and right out of high school, I took the Civil Service test. World War II was going on, and I went to work in the Pentagon. Construction of the Pentagon was finished in April 1945, and I started working there in July 1945. When I first went to work there, I worked for the Adjutant General's Office. We used to correspond with Fort Belvoir. At first I was a file clerk, and then I was in a secret area where we were making files and encoding data on the papers about the boys that were killed overseas. The papers would come in and we would have to fill those encoded papers out, but we weren't allowed to tell anyone. When I first went to work there they had these interpretive machines where all these cards had to be run through these machines. I had never seen one of those machines in my life before I went to work there.

I worked at the Pentagon for a little over a year, and I really loved it. Then when the war ended, I was laid off during a Reduction in Force. By that time I had gotten married, and was going to have a baby. Also, I didn’t have any means of transportation, so I never tried to go back. I still have my badge that I wore to get through the gate at the Pentagon, and it’s got my name and picture on it. I was supposed to turn it in, but I liked the picture and wanted to keep it. I have given it to the Franconia Museum to display, since it is an artifact.

Soon after I met Howard, he went off to war for two years. I was 16 years old when he came back home. When I was 17 years old, we got married on June 17, 1946. When we were first married, we lived in an apartment in Alexandria for 3-4 months. In November 1946, we moved to Franconia to a one-room house on Beulah Road.

A lot of the young people had gotten married around the same time, right after the war when the boys had come back home. Then they all started building their houses around the same time, and raising their families.

Howard's father gave us an acre of land, and we started building our house. We started out with two rooms. We went from an apartment, to one room, and then to two rooms with one child. We eventually had four children, and we built another room each time we had another baby. We ended up with five rooms, a bathroom, and a utility room.

Like so many of the young couples on Beulah Road at that time, we built our house ourselves, living in the house while we built it. For a time we had no water, no bathroom, not even any heat. We just kept at it as we worked our way up.

I had lived in the city all my life, and we always had indoor plumbing and running water. But as we were building our home, I had to wash clothes on a wash board, using water that I carried into the house, and heated. I never felt bad or embarrassed about it, but I did get tired of it. It made a woman out of me!

Howard and I never had a mortgage. We built onto the house as we could afford it, never going into debt. I remember when Howard found a picture window frame in a dump. It was in very good shape, so he cut it down to the size we needed, and then covered it with pasteboard. Each week he bought a new window until he had them all installed.

Mr. Gorham also gave Flemmie land on the front of his property, and gave Clarence land beside Flemmie, also on the front. He gave Eddie land on the back, with our land in between that of Clarence and Eddie. We were all building our houses at the same time, and were all living the same way – living in our houses as we built them. We were all raising our children at the same time, and all had gardens to help feed our families. At that time it was permissible to raise farm animals, and so we also raised hogs for food. There was a hog pen behind where Beulah Baptist Church was, and there were apple trees all along there.

The kids and I used to pick blackberries right there on Beulah Road, across from Brother Schurtz's house, where the old house used to be, and all out in back of my house. We went out there and picked the blackberries, and I used to make jam and all kinds of stuff. It was country back then.

Beulah Road was a narrow two-lane rural country road, and most of the people in the area lived in the same way. The houses along Beulah Road were spread out, and the area was heavily wooded. Most of the road had trees on both sides that leaned over the road, creating a sort of canopy of leaves.

Fleet Drive was a narrow dirt road, and Hayfield Road was a gravel road, badly rutted in washboard fashion. Any speed at all could bounce your vehicle right off the road into the ditch. Hayfield Road began where present-day Manchester Lakes Boulevard begins, going east off of Beulah, and then winding around southward and downhill, winding down to Telegraph Road, as it still does today. My father-in-law told me that his parents were buried on the hill at Hayfield Road, but he didn’t know exactly where. They died when he was very young. There was also supposedly a Rogers family burying ground on Hayfield Road, in the vicinity of where the IHOP is located today. Hayfield High School is built on a site that was marked as “Unknown Cemetery” on a Fairfax County map, and articles were published in local newspapers when skeletal remains were found while excavating in preparation for building the school.

Besides giving land to his children, Mr. Lee Gorham also donated land to be used for Beulah Cemetery, as well as for the building of the original Beulah Baptist Church.

His brother, Tom Gorham, owned land just south of Lee's land, on the opposite side of Beulah Road. Tom Gorham gave land to his children to build their homes, just as Lee Gorham had done for his children. The dirt road that led back to the homes of Tom Gorham's family was originally named Gorham Lane (later changed to Alforth Avenue when the townhouses were built). Because this area of Beulah Road was inhabited mostly by the families of the children of Lee Gorham and Tom Gorham, it was called Gorhamtown or Gorhamville by the local residents.

I wanted my children to go to church and learn about Jesus. I went to Christ Church for a long time, but when I moved to Franconia, I had no transportation to take them to an Episcopal church, so I sent them to Bradley Rogers' church, just a short distance up Beulah road from our house. It was called the Bethel Full Gospel Tabernacle. At the time they called it holy-roller, then it changed to Free Will Baptist or something like that, and my children came up with that religion. So as long as they knew about God and Jesus, I didn't really care what religion they were. The church changed again, and it is now Mount Calvary Community Church.

ABOUT ME

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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