Woodlawn Quaker Meeting House

Here is information about the meeting house that is written on a nearby roadside historical marker:

Woodlawn Quaker Meetinghouse:
The Woodlawn Quaker Meetinghouse was built from 1851 – 1853 by members of The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) who in 1846 purchased the 2,000 acre Woodlawn tract as the means to “establish a free-labor colony in a slave state” (Journal of Chalkley Gillingham founding member of Woodlawn Quaker Settlement).

They left homes in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, where nearby Underground Railroad routes made clear the human cost of slavery and its violation of Friends’ principles of equality and non-violence.

Seeking to uphold Quaker belief there is “that of God” in everyone, the settlement’s spiritual leaders envisioned a community of small farms operating without slave labor as an alternative to Virginia’s plantation culture.

The Quakers’ agricultural practices and employment of free labor succeeded. Their farms, mills, schools, and this meetinghouse established a thriving community, shared with free black landowners and like-minded Abolitionists such as the Woodlawn Baptists.

Throughout the Civil War, Friends continued to worship in this meeting house, even when Union Troops occupied it.

The community remained into the 20th century, guided by Friends’ principles of peace and community service. However, with World War I, the United States Army began to absorb Woodlawn’s farmland, eventually creating Fort Belvoir. This “Quaker Plain Style” meetinghouse today continues as an active place of worship, home of the Alexandria Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends.


<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>
<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>

Here follows an excerpt from the Clio history project website written by Genna Duplisea:

Part of the Woodlawn Historic District listed on the National Register of Historic Places, this one-story building dates to 1851. The Lewis family began selling parcels of land from the Woodlawn plantation in the mid-nineteenth century, and northern Quakers settled there. This change was an interesting reversal, as land once worked by slaves became a community of abolitionists and free persons. The Quaker settlers sought to establish a collection of farms using free labor even in a slave-holding state. During the Civil War the building was used as a Union headquarters, and grew several times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through renovations and additions. The meeting house site also features Quaker burial grounds, and is still in use today.

Chalkley Gillingham, Jacob Troth, Lucas Gillingham, and Paul Hillman Troth, Quakers from Pennsylvania and New Jersey, purchased tracts of land from the Woodlawn Plantation in 1848. Their goal was to establish 50-200 small farms to sell to both white settlers and to African-Americans, including those freed from slavery. Thus the new settlers would work the land using free labor in a slave-holding state. The Troth-Gillingham Company also harvested lumber from this tract of land. Baptist and Methodist families also purchased land in the community.

Northern Baptist John Mason purchased land at Woodlawn in 1850 and his family settled in the mansion, which had formerly been the Quakers' meeting house. The Quakers moved their religious services to several other locations in the area before constructing a new meeting house. The Meeting did not take responsibility for the property until a clear title was ready in 1853.

Quakers erected the southern half of the building in 1851 and the northern section, which doubled the size of the wood-framed structure, sometime between 1866 and 1869. The exterior is wood weatherboard. The single-story building exhibits the Quaker Plain style and has two entrances, originally one for men and one for women. The interior of the meeting house appears much the same as it did in the late 1860s. The hall can be divided with movable partitions -- for example, to divide men's and women's meetings -- and along the west wall is an elevated platform for elders of the congregation.

The community established a burial ground to the south and west of the meeting house around the same time as the building's construction. Over one hundred graves are present. Additionally, in the 1990s the community buried salvaged headstones from Queen Street Burial Ground in Alexandria, which which the congregation was affiliated from 1784 to the 1880s.

During the Civil War, Union soldiers used the meeting house as a headquarters, and some carved their names into the wood surrounding one of the entrances.

At some point in the nineteenth century the community added a deep porch to the meeting house, which was later expanded in the twentieth century to wrap around the building. In the 1970s the porch grew again, expanding to incorporate a new wing to the north of the historical structure. The new wing has a larger footprint than the nineteenth-century structure and is known as the Buckman Room. The meeting house lot is close to Fort Belvoir.

In 1999, flood damage from Hurricane Floyd damaged a historic horse shed, and it was reconstructed in 2008 in accordance with preservation best practices. The National Register of Historic Places recognized the meetinghouse in 2011 on its own and again in 2017 as part of the historic district. The Alexandria Friends Meeting at Woodlawn continues to gather in the building.


<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>
<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>

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

The Woodlawn Friends Meeting House stands on land which once belonged to George Washington. It was part of the Dogue Run Farm of the Mount Vernon Estate and was included in the land he willed to his ward Nelly Custis Lewis and her husband Lawrence Lewis, which they called Woodlawn Plantation. In 1848 the Lewis estate sold the plantation to the firm of Troth and Gillingham, a group of Quakers who planned to divide the land into small farms and work them with free labor. Troth and Gillingham divided the land between them, and in about 1850 Chalkley Gillingham agreed to give a piece of land to the Society of Friends for use as a meeting place. A formal deed to this effect was recorded in 1857.

The meeting house was constructed in about 1853 and, according to Dorothy Troth Muir in Potomac Interlude, "before long the building had to almost double its original size." The building is a simple, one-story structure, virtually without decoration except for the elaborate shutter stops. Separate entrances for men and women are still maintained. A one-story porch encloses the structure on three sides.

To the rear of the structure is a small cemetery where many early Quaker settlers of the area, including Troths and Gillinghams, are buried.

During the Civil War the monthly meetings were occasionally cancelled by the presence of troops blocking the roads, and the meeting house itself was often used by Northern troops. In the twentieth century the nearby Camp Humphreys (now Fort Belvoir) continued to expand and began to encroach upon the meeting house. The property abuts a state road on one side. Since World War II, Fort Belvoir has occupied the surrounding area.


<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>
<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>

The following history was written in 1968 by Mattie B. Cooper, then principal of Woodlawn Elementary School.

Woodlawn School has an interesting history as it dates back to the early settling of the area by the Quakers who believed in their children being educated. The name was logical as Woodlawn Plantation was originally a tract of two thousand acres known as the Dogue River Farm, which Washington left to his niece, Nellie Custis, and Major Lawrence Lewis, who gave the name WOODLAWN to the place. Their son, Lorenz Lewis, sold the property to Chalkley and Joseph Gillingham, Quakers, who were among many Quaker families that moved into the area about 1846.

A large room in the mansion served as a meeting place and, for awhile, it was used also as a school because the Quakers were advocates of the education of every child. This arrangement was not satisfactory and thus they sought a new location. The miller's cottage adjacent to Washington's Grist Mill was chosen as the new school. The roof of the mill could be seen from the front steps of Woodlawn and close beside it the miller's cottage. The miller's cottage, standing serenely on the hill, was put in repairs and became the first school in the area. Emily Reynolds Green, who had recently married at Woodlawn Mansion, became the first school Mistress. Thus Woodlawn School came into being.

James Charles Robinson stated "interesting experiences between September 1847-1849 with the other children" attended school in a small schoolhouse near Washington's old stone mill. The memory of those school days remains as a part of me. Here I learned to write and first studied geography and arithmetic, prospering under the patient efforts of Emily Reynolds. Even so quiet a school mistress had not learned to rule without a rod at that date and many times resorted to it to enforce order."

The Quakers continued to keep the school open even though they shifted the location to Gray's Hill Mansion, where Anna S. Wright taught, and on to the Quaker's Meeting House, which is still standing at Fort Belvoir. Seeing the need for a public school in the area, E. E. Mason and Courtland Lukens each granted to the Trustees of the Woodlawn School, on October 22, 1869, property for and in consideration of the sum of one dollar, land adjoining that of each other and containing one half acre strick measure. This property was situated on the Accotink Turnpike opposite old Haddon Hall. The name of this road was changed later to Richmond Highway.


<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>
<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>•<•>

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

Alexandria Friends Meeting, 1851
Route One and Woodlawn Road

Members of the Religious Society of Friends gather each Sunday for a “meeting for worship.” Their sessions are silent contemplations, with each attendee searching for his own connection to God. There is none of the liturgy, music, sermons, and collective prayer that characterize most other organized religious services in the U.S. The silence is only broken during the hour-long meeting when a member feels like sharing a thought with the others.

This silent worship is held in a simple frame building and thrives despite the noisy passage of cars and trucks along Route One, as well as activity at the immediately adjacent Woodlawn Road entrance to Fort Belvoir. Moreover, it’s an extraordinary juxtaposition of a beacon of anti-war sentiment—the Quaker faith—and the manifestations of national security wrought by the war on terror—barricades, machine gun emplacements, and armed guards at the Belvoir gate.

In 1846, two Quakers from New Jersey, Jacob Troth and Chalkley Gillingham, purchased Woodlawn Plantation and 2,030 acres from Washington heirs for $25,000. They bought the land for the timber, which they logged and sent to the Philadelphia shipyards.

Dozens of other Quaker families soon followed, intent on creating a successful agrarian society that was not dependent on slavery. Troth and Gilingham sold much of the Woodlawn tract to these folks, but retained the timber rights. One family, the Buckmans started a farm on the Potomac Path and gave their name to the section of the road south of Gum Springs. Abel Troth built his home on the Path—Engleside, later to become the home of Courtland Lukens, near the corner of Route One and Lukens Lane.

The Friends held meetings in the Woodlawn mansion starting in 1849 because of the distance to the nearest established “meeting,” the Friends’ term for both a parish and a service. Members erected the current Meeting house in 1851 on land donated by Chalkley Gillingham. The building was doubled in size in 1860 and a horse shelter added, one that is in a precarious state of repair today.

The Woodlawn Quakers suffered quietly during the Civil War. They were largely Union sympathizers and abolitionists, but lived in a rebel state. Woodlawn was a no-man’s land during much of the war, with both armies taking livestock and crops from the residents. Chalkley Gillingham kept a diary during the war, and his entries bemoan the Federals’ use of the Meeting house as an encampment. “The Union soldiers again entered our Meeting house and spent the night and made the floor and benches as dirty as ever. They cut benches for kindling wood,” Gillingham wrote in January, 1862.

Through several expansions of Fort Belvoir, the Army has completely enveloped the Woodlawn Meeting house. Increased security measures instituted at the post since 9-11 have made it difficult getting to meeting on First Day (Sunday). “The Army has been generally helpful,” reports meeting member Deborah Haines, “but it took a while to sort out access procedures.” To further compound matters, the Army is planning to build an Army museum at Fort Belvoir, and one of the possible sites is the soccer field next to the Meeting house. “We would have a mess if they did that,” said Mrs. Haines.

The Meeting has about 140 members, with that number including about thirty-five children. “Membership is growing,” Ms. Haines said. “People feel comfortable and welcome here. It’s a pool of peace.”