Overlook Manor House

Here follows an excerpt from the 1970 Fairfax County Master Inventory of Historic Sites which contained entries from the Historic American Buildings Survey Inventory:

Overlook, once called Benvenue, was built about 1850 on land overlooking Gunston Cove and the Potomac River which was originally part of George Mason's Gunston Hall tract. It is a two-story hipped-roof clapboard structure with an open porch of the land front and a two story screened porch on the river front. Wings were added. A terraced, formal, walled, Italian-style garden was established on the north side of the house by former owner Mrs. Mary Tousey Wigmore. She also added interior hand-carved cornices patterned after William Buckland's work at Gunston Hall, and had cypress floors laid. One of the upstairs bedrooms has elaborately designed plastered ceilings.

Sheep and cattle are raised on the property.

The house was purchased by author and playright Paul Wilstach in 1911. He was the author of "Potomac Landings," "Tidewater Virginia," and other books on the area and for a time was associated with author Richard Mansfield as a play reader and assistant business manager.

The present owner, Mrs. Thayer, gave the Commonwealth of Virginia a perpetual easement on the property, which provides that the tract will forever remain in its basically undeveloped state.


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Here follows an excerpt from the official George Mason blog:

The Colonial Plantations of George Mason
by Robert Morgan Moxham

Overlook was in earlier years called Benvenue. The estate was separated from the Gunston Hall tract in 1872, but the dwelling is of 19th century vintage and probably was built after the Civil War as it does not appear on military maps of the period. One may speculate that the site George Mason IV selected for Gunston Hall was dictated by the fact that Newtown plantation house still stood on (some would consider) the only other desirable building site in the neighborhood, which further supposes that Newtown existed at least to 1755. There is no remaining sign of Newtown though no serious search for it has been made.