Woodlawn Friends Meeting House Cemetery

Here follows an excerpt from the Fairfax Genealogical Society website:

WOODLAWN FRIENDS MEETING HOUSE CEMETERY
behind the meeting house at the intersection of Woodlawn Road and Richmond Highway
Fort Belvoir, Virginia USA

Original Information from Volume 5 of the Gravestone Books

Woodlawn Friends Meeting House Cemetery is located behind the meeting house at the intersection of Woodlawn Road (Route 618) and Richmond Highway (Route 1). The meeting house faces Woodlawn Road and is in a small stand of trees. The building sits away from both thoroughfares, almost unnoticed at the busy intersection. A sign just outside the trees announces:

Woodlawn Friends
Meeting for Worship
11 a.m. every Sunday

The meeting house and cemetery are situated on just over two acres of land which was once the Dogue Run Farm on George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate, according to a 1969 Historic American Buildings Survey Inventory. Washington presented the property to his step granddaughter and ward, Eleanor Parke Custis and her husband Lawrence Lewis (Washington’s nephew) as a wedding gift. The Lewises named their home “Woodlawn Plantation.” The house stands nearby and is open to the public.

The Lewis estate sold the land in 1848 to Troth & Gillingham, an organization of Quakers who planned to “divide the land into small farms and work them with free labor,” according to the inventory. In about 1850, Chalkley Gillingham donated a portion of his land to the Society of Friends for use as a meeting place, a transaction formalized by an 1857 deed.

The meeting house, built in 1853, is beautifully preserved and had a fresh coat of white paint when a surveyor visited the site in the fall of 1997. The building and cemetery are surrounded by trees and shrubs and old oaks shade the area. Graffiti scratched into the clapboard by Union soldiers camping at the site during the Civil War has been preserved on the front porch. (The words and initials were copied by surveyors and are included at the end of the cemetery survey.)

Most of the Quaker land was taken by the government when the military base Camp A. A. Humphreys was established on the west side of Woodlawn Road during World War I. The meeting house survived, but is now completely surrounded by the base which was renamed Fort Belvoir in the 1930s. Although area maps show the meeting house as a part of the base, signs are posted at the site warning:

Private Property
Off Limits

The small cemetery at the rear of the church is very well maintained. It was surveyed in 1922, twice in 1997, and rechecked in 1998. The survey begins with the northernmost row, with the gravestone nearest the meeting house. Some gravestones face north and some face south. The Society of Friends follows the practice of numbering rather than naming the months of the year. In keeping with this tradition, we have listed dates inscribed in this format as they appear on the gravestone.

While searching for the Mary Wanton (sic) gravestone listed above, the 1998 surveyor found a dirt mound a few yards into the woods, to the west of the cemetery, with four gravestones standing upright in the mound and other gravestones and pieces of gravestones embedded around the sides of the mound, including the gravestone for Mary Wanton. The gravestone for Geo. S. Hough stands behind the mound at a 12 o’clock position with three other pieces of stonework placed symmetrically around the mound.

Inquiries revealed that the gravestones had been brought to this site from the Quaker Cemetery in the City of Alexandria. A detailed history of the Alexandria site may be found in Volume 3 of Wesley Pippenger’s Tombstone Inscriptions of Alexandria, Virginia (1992).

According to this account, the Quakers established a graveyard near what is today the intersection of Washington and Queen Streets in Old Town Alexandria. The Friends used this site for many years, but by the early 1900s, the area near the cemetery was used as a children’s playground. In 1937, the main branch of the Alexandria Public Library was constructed at the site with the understanding that the graves would be undisturbed, according to Mr. Pippenger’s research.

Wesley Pippenger surveyed the nine extant gravestones at the site in 1992 and compared his findings to two earlier surveys, as well as the Quaker records. In his publication, he lists over fifty inscriptions from gravestones which once stood in the Alexandria Quaker Cemetery.

Shortly after his survey, work began at the site to enlarge and improve the public library. The gravestones and gravestone fragments were collected and removed to the grounds of the Woodlawn Friends Meeting House where our surveyors found them arranged together in the woods. Human remains discovered during the construction of the new library were reburied in the garden of the library with the Woodlawn Friends in attendance, according to one of the librarians.

Geo. S. Hough
d. 1st month 19, 1847
aged 63 yr
(standing west of mound)
William Stabler
(standing on top of mound) 1852
Mary Stabler
(standing on side of mound) 185[3]
Harriet Stabler
d. 7th month 25, 1847
aged 17 yr
(embedded in side of mound)
Phineas Janney
(standing on top of the mound) 1852
James H. Miller
d. 9th month [2]6, 185[4]
aged 1 yr, 2 mo, 18 dy
(standing on side of mound with footstone: J. H. M.)
Susan Fawcett
d. 1st month [ ]
wife of Willis Fawcett
(top piece of gravestone embedded in side of mound; according to Pippenger, Susan Fawcett died 1st month 20, 1852)
Sarah Ann Hewes
daughter of Abram & Rachel Hewes
(broken gravestone embedded in side of mound)
......of......[ ]kins......1852......of age
(piece of gravestone lying on side of mound; perhaps part of gravestone for Mary A. Deakins who died 21 June 1852 in the 28th year of her age, as per Pippenger’s list)
Footstone: H. D. B.
Footstone: J. J.
Footstone: J. [R].

When surveyors returned to double-check a gravestone in late spring 1998, they found two additional gravestones fragments in the mound near the gravestone and footstone for James H. Miller. These names do not appear on the list of inscriptions complied by Wesley Pippenger.

Hazel Rogers
Bernard Francis

Graffiti on the meeting house clapboard was copied by the 1998 surveyors as follows:

1st Mich Cav H. T.
A JMO
W. Long Manayunk PA AH
A. W. Hepburn PA EB
a P carved above a cross

No Updates from Volume 6 of the Gravestone Books