Lorton Valley Log Schoolhouse (Site)

These coordinates mark the estimated site where the school building stood from ca. 1844-1858, but today no visible remains exist.


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Here follows an excerpt from "The Dixie Pig" blog written by Senator Scott Surovell in 2013:

Lewis Chapel, Lorton Valley. Four Mason Neck men—Joseph Wiley, Richard Trice, John Haislip, and John Reardon—sponsored a log school near the current intersection of Old Colchester Road and Hassett Street in the 1840s on old field land donated by the McIntosh family. It was probably the first schoolhouse in the Mount Vernon area.

A few years later, perhaps in the late 1850s, the community school relocated the school to the site of Lewis Chapel, a Methodist church built in 1857. Now called Cranford Church, it is located at the intersection of Old Colchester and Gunston Roads. That schoolhouse burned in 1876 and the community again opened another on land donated by John Plaskett. Called Lorton Valley, it was located at 9723 Gunston Cove Road. The school added a second room in 1881, with grades one-four studying the Three R’s in one room, and grades five-eight learning geography, history, hygiene, and reading in the other. In 1905, the school’s lead teacher, George A. Malcolm, who was also a Fairfax County deputy sheriff, was mortally wounded by a man who worked at the nearby Lorton railroad station. The assailant had been harassing girls at the school, and shot Malcolm when the deputy went to the station to arrest him. The county sold the building in 1926.

By 1933, the owner converted the school into a residence, with Percy Ruffner, a guard at the DC Reformatory, buying it in 1939 for $2,500. (Ruffner’s great uncle, William H. Ruffner was the first superintendent of public schools in Virginia.) Percy, his wife, and three children, one of whom is still a Mason Neck resident, Sally Spangler, lived in the old school until the 1980s. “One of the classrooms had been made into a living room and dining room, with the second classroom becoming three bedrooms,” Mrs. Spangler explained recently. “The ledges for the chalk were still there.” The building collapsed in the 1990s—“The termites got it,” said Mrs. Spangler—and the land is now owned by a developer.