Otis Tufton Mason House

Here follows a newspaper article written about the house's history in the Connection newspaper back in 2007 before the home was moved up the hill:

One House’s History
How ‘significant’ was Otis Mason? The answer may decide his home’s fate.

In winter, when the trees are bare, it’s easier to see the white farmhouse tucked on a hillside above Woodlawn Stables. It’s even easier to miss it.

“Nobody knows it’s here,” says David Koritko, who used to live in the house. “It’s like an untold story.”

A teacher at Woodson High School and a volunteer at Woodlawn Plantation, Koritko is a hands-on explorer of history and archaeology. But when he moved into the old farmhouse at the beginning of 2006, he was excited simply to have found an affordable home surrounded by woods that he and his 9-year-old son Nick could explore.

The house is owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a non-profit preservation organization that also runs the Woodlawn Estate and many other historic properties. For years it had included the house with the property it leases to Woodlawn Stables, which sublet the house to Koritko in 2006. It needed maintenance, and Koritko described spending months cleaning, scraping, painting and sealing windows.

After Nick’s Cub Scout Troop held a picnic at the house in June, they decided to make it their regular meeting place. The environment was ideal for the scouts. “I could immediately lead the boys off to the river and we could do botany, geology sort of things,” Koritko said.

The troop also began learning about history. Koritko knew he was moving into an old home associated with the historic Woodlawn Plantation, but he knew nothing about the man who built and it, and assumed there was little to know. “I’m thinking about this guy as just some weird guy who lived here a long time ago,” Koritko said. “But it’s not true. He was a teacher like myself.”

Otis Mason probably built his home around 1873, according to Susan Hellman, an archeologist working for Fairfax County. Tax records indicate a $100 building on the property in the 1874. Mason was 35 in 1873, exactly halfway through his life. He had graduated from Columbian University (now George Washington) 12 years before and had become the principal of a preparatory school, according to an article published in “The American Anthropologist” in 1908, the year Mason died.

PERSONAL REMINISCENCES OF MASON often focus on his skill as a teacher and a speaker. “He used to walk up the hill [to Woodlawn Baptist Church], because he was a Ph.D. in some capacity,” Koritko said, “and on weekends he would give two sermons until they got a minister.”

In his diary, Taylor Blount mentions going to see Mason lecture or preach seven times between 1872 and 1897. “He delivers a very good sermon,” Blount wrote in 1872.

In 1892 he wrote, “This morning I go to meeting. O.T. Mason preaches today and I go back tonight and hear him again.”

Mason not only delivered sermons at Woodlawn Baptist, he donated the land it sits on. When George Washington’s adopted granddaughter married his nephew in 1799, he carved out 2,000 acres of his property as a wedding gift. They built the Woodlawn Plantation, a mansion that sits across Richmond Highway from Otis Mason’s house. When her husband died, Nellie Custis sold Woodlawn to a group of Quakers who were intent on proving they could run a profitable plantation without slave labor. The Quakers later sold the house to John and Rachel Mason, who had moved from New Jersey. During the Civil War, John Mason gave Otis, his oldest son, 65 acres of land, where Otis would eventually build his country home and donate land for the church.

By the time he built the house, Mason was a fixture of the capitol city’s intellectual life. He had studied “the culture-history of the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean,” according to the “American Anthropologist” article. A “Washington Post” story from late in his life credits this interest in past and foreign cultures to his boyhood interactions with slaves who had arrived only recently from Africa and were waiting be sold in the markets of Alexandria. The article explained that Alexandria’s position as “the Omaha of the human cattle trade” made it “the meeting ground of every species of strange tale and weird superstition in the United States.” After graduation Mason shifted his focus to American Indians. He would go on to catalogue every tribe.

Mason’s interest in the nascent field of American anthropology drew him to a related organization that was also in the process of establishing its own identity: the Smithsonian Institution. He joined the staff of the Smithsonian’s United States National Museum in 1873, the year he built his home near Woodlawn, as a volunteer expert on American Indians, according to a letter from Robert Leopold, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological archives. In 1884, he left the preparatory school and became the museum’s first curator in ethnology.

THE SMITHSONIAN HAD COMPLETED a new museum building (now the Arts and Industries Museum) in 1881, and Mason was given the job of organizing for display, “the great collections piled in confusion in its halls,” as the “American Anthropologist” describes it, more than 500,000 objects, according to Leopold.

Mason’s project of categorizing cultural artifacts transcended the display shelves of the museum. By the end of his career, he had created an entire theory of anthropological study based on his classifications of what cultures made, such as tools, weapons and artwork. He also incorporated a popular European theory into his study of American anthropology, that culture’s evolved from “savagery” through “barbarism” to “enlightenment.” According to Mason, the objects cultures produced are benchmarks of this evolution.

Mason published two groundbreaking monographs in 1884: “Throwing Sticks in the National Museum” and “Basketwork of the North American Aborigines.” He traveled to Arizona to research the latter. In his letter, Leopold credits Mason with writing, “It has been the ruling thought of my life, that the people of the world have left their history most fully recorded in the works of their hands.”

By the end of his life, Mason had become an anthropological icon. In 1902 he was “the most familiar figure in the field of American anthropological science” according to the Washington Post. A story that appeared two years later in the Washington Times, describes him in its headlines as the “Author of Many Important Essays on the Uses to Which Man Has Put the Forces and Materials of the Earth,” and “Elected to Distinguished Offices by His Fellow-Countrymen, and Honored Elsewhere, He is Still Modest and Unassuming.”

STUMBLING UPON THIS FIGURE, Koritko and the scouts began a project of learning more about his life. They also took an interest in his archaeological record. Koritko organized activities like preparing rubbings of the tombstones at Woodlawn Baptist and repainting some of the house’s rooms. He also organized the scouts to help him in a campaign to add the house to the National Register of Historic Sites, because they believed it met one of the register’s key criteria by being “associated with the lives of persons significant in our past.” Koritko and the scouts began seeking help from local experts, like Hellman and Leopold, who wrote his letter in support of the idea. Koritko said he wanted to demonstrate how community resources could be harnessed to save historic homes at a low cost.

But according to Ross Randall, the director of Woodlawn Estates, adding the Otis Mason house to the National Register is unnecessary, because the house is already included under Woodlawn’s National Register status. He also said Koritko bypassed Woodlawn’s resident staff of experts in restoration and archaeology. “What most folks do in an effort to preserve anything to do with Woodlawn is they take advantage of the services here ... That does not seem to have been done in this case.”

Koritko says Woodlawn has neglected the Mason house as an historic site and as a rental property and allowed it to decay. After being contacted by Koritko, the county mandated that the house’s septic system and outdoor electric lines be replaced. Both projects involved extensive digging on the property.

An archaeological survey of Woodlawn Plantation from 2002 calls on the Historic Trust to devote more study to the house, as well as another. “The Trust seems to have viewed these resources primarily in the context of ‘tenant’ houses,” the report reads. “There seems to have been relatively little effort to understand their place in the context of Woodlawn’s history.”

Hellman, the county’s archaeologist, said that her brief examinations suggest the house “is deteriorating a bit,” but stressed the overwhelming expense (usually more than $100,000) and complexity of a complete restoration to historic standards. “I think that’s one reason that organizations like the Trust sometimes delay renovations of older structures. They want to make sure they do it right.”

“It’s something that they have to go into very slowly, very carefully.”

KORITKO’S RELATIONSHIP with Woodlawn Stables and the Trust deteriorated. In early December, the owner of the stables, Joan Mitchell, informed him by letter that when his one-year lease expired on Dec. 31, it would not be renewed. The Trust stopped leasing the Otis Mason property to the stables on the same day, according to Randall, so that it could repair the house’s septic system.

“[The house] will not be neglected,” Randall said. “One of the reasons we have terminated the lease with [Woodlawn Stables] is to study the house in greater detail and make sure that all apparatus are suitable.”

Meanwhile, Joan Mitchell, who owns the stables said she hopes a new tenant will be found for the house. Before renting it to Koritko, she had housed her own employees on the property that backs up to the rear paddocks. Koritko characterized the house as being in severe disrepair when he moved in, and expressed concern that if the house was not protected, the decay would continue. But Mitchell said she’d had employees living there for three yeas before him.

“People were living in the house before he moved in, so somebody didn’t think it was too bad. It’s a farmhouse. Its an old, old farm house.”

“IT SHOULDN’T BE THIS DIFFICULT to try to save something,” Koritko said in a December interview. The difficulty seems to lie in Otis Mason’s nebulous historic status. How “significant” is he? Surrounded by Washingtons, Custises and Lees, a former Smithsonian curator’s accomplishments as an anthropologist and teacher may not be enough to save his house from archaeological triage.

Now Koritko and his son are looking for a new home. The Cub Scouts are hoping to meet at Woodlawn Baptist church. And the Trust is trying to decide what to do with its white farmhouse on the hill above the stables.


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Here follows a short article written by The National Trust for Historic Preservation about moving the house in 2015:

We witnessed something pretty spectacular near our historic site of Woodlawn and Frank Lloyd Wright's Pope-Leighey -- the c. 1873 Otis Mason House was moved from its current site to a temporary location as a result of the widening and rerouting of Route 1. Wolfe House and Building Movers was contracted to lift and move the house some 400 feet, which will remain on the temporary site until the construction of the new foundation and basement is complete.

To relocate the house, soil around and under the building was removed to make room for high-strength steel lifting beams. The beams were positioned underneath the house to support it during the lift and move, and provide stability for the chimneys.

The house was then lifted with jacking towers so that radio remote-controlled hydraulic dollies could be placed evenly under the beams. These dollies are designed to keep the stress levels on the building to the lowest, and again assist with the stability of the structure during the move.

After the dollies were in place the move started. It was a very slow and smooth process that took about two hours to move the house up the hill. After the move was complete, cribbing piles were placed underneath the beams supporting the house allowing it to remain stable in its temporary location, until the new basement is finished and the house can be placed on the final site.


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Here follows a biography of Otis Tufton Mason, from Wikipedia, the free encylopedia:

Otis Tufton Mason, Ph.D., LL.D. (April 10, 1838 – November 5, 1908) was an American ethnologist and Smithsonian Institution curator.

Mason was born at Eastport, Maine, the son of John and Rachel Mason. In 1850, the Masons purchased Woodlawn Plantation, the former home of George Washington's adopted daughter Nellie Custis and her descendants. Otis Mason gave a portion of the property in 1872 to establish the Woodlawn Baptist Church, and preached there for the first four years, until a minister was appointed.

He graduated from Columbian University in 1861, then worked there for 23 years, as principal of the college's preparatory school (1861–84). He first became affiliated with the United States National Museum in 1872, working as a collaborator in ethnology. This in 1884 turned into a full-time position as curator. The Smithsonian had recently built its first purpose-built museum building, the U.S. National Museum building (or Arts and Industries Building). Mason worked closely with George Brown Goode in the installation and reorganization of the museum collections that came with the move into that new building. In 1879 he was one of the founders of the Anthropological Society of Washington, and authored its constitution.

In 1890 Mason was appointed by President Benjamin Harrison to the newly created Board on Geographic Names in Executive Order No. 28, representing the Smithsonian Institution. In 1893 he with Frederic Ward Putnam, head of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, and Sol Bloom oversaw the cultural and anthropological display of the Midway Plaisance at the World's Columbian Exposition. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1899.

As part of his curation work at the Smithsonian, Mason developed the culture area concept. Mason was anthropological editor of the American Naturalist and of the Standard Dictionary. He believed in Gustav Klemm's step-wise evolution of cultures and that technology was a marker of a culture's stage of development.



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Here is a short historical summary of Woodlawn written by Craig Tuminaro, curator of Woodlawn:

Part of Woodlawn’s significance lies in the story it reveals about the evolving history of historic preservation in the United States. It is clear that as early as the 1890s the site was considered an important historical landmark worthy of preservation and even a tourist attraction. Although owners in the early twentieth century altered the hyphens and wings, their changes demonstrate an effort to adapt the house to their lifestyle while maintaining a sense of this historical architectural character. Woodlawn is also nationally significant for its architecture as one of Dr. William Thornton’s surviving domestic designs. Woodlawn is closely associated with George Washington, both as Eleanor Lewis’ benefactor and adoptive father, and for the role it played it in the powerful iconic significance of Washington after his death. The 2000 acre estate was carved out of Mount Vernon, located on a site selected by Washington himself, designed by an architected that Washington selected, and paid for with funds Washington provided. Following the death of Major Lewis and the family's departure in 1839, Woodlawn stood abandoned for a number of years. In 1846 the Lewis family sold Woodlawn to Troth-Gillingham, a ship building company based in NJ, owned by Quakers determined to prove to southerners that one could run a successful business and farm without using slave labor. In 1848 the property was divided between the Troths and the Gillinghams , with the Troths retaining the mansion. In 1850 Paul Hillman Troth and his wife Hannah Maria sold Woodlawn to John and Rachel Mason, who were from Maine. The Masons were Baptists, and founding members of the Woodlawn Baptist Church. Their son, Otis Tufton Mason, provided the land for the construction of the church. Woodlawn was therefore the nucleus of two abolitionist religious communities. The Quaker and Baptist settlements conducted their business operations without slaves and offered schooling, farming and other opportunities to former slaves and free blacks. In 1892 Woodlawn passed out the of Mason family. Some of its later owners included playwright Paul Kester, Senator Oscar Underwood of Alabama, and Secretary of War Harry H. Woodring. In 1949, the Woodlawn Public Foundation purchased the mansion, opening it for tours on April 10 of that year. Through a leasing agreement, the National Trust for Historic Preservation assumed the administration of Woodlawn, its first museum property, in 1951. It was opened to the public on May 9, 1952. Ownership of Woodlawn was transferred to the Trust in 1956. (Much of the foregoing from a history written by Craig Tuminaro, Curator, in 2001.)

Of the buildings closest to the mansion, only the smokehouse to the north of the Mansion, and dairy, necessary, and archaeological remains of the icehouse on the south side presently exist. There are formal gardens to the southwest. To the northwest, the construction of new base housing on Fort Belvoir visually intrudes on the property. Woodlawn encompasses a 126 acre parcel of land, divided roughly in half by United States Route 1-Richmond Highway. The Woodlawn Mansion, situated atop Grey’s Hill, overlooks the Potomac River and Mount Vernon, three miles southeast. A tall clump of trees seen from Woodlawn's second story marks the site of Mount Vernon. Currently the site is accessed by a drive which enters through wooden gates near the north end of the property and U.S. Route 1.