An 18th-Century Galaxy

To find Stratford Hall in mid-October, slip down Virginia State Route 3, take a left at 214 past shorn summer corn in half-inch stubble. Then drive along fields of soybeans that pop in shades of sage green, gingko yellow, and autumn ochre.

Eyes left:

A mile inside the gate the manor house rises, orange-red and massive.

At the service level, its oversized Flemish-bond masonry is laid in glazed headers and thick-troweled mortar. Above, rows of slim, hand-rubbed red brick dance lightly across paper-thin bonds—signifying the lives of the Lee family that once held court in its upper reaches.

It’s a 1740 house built in an H-shaped plan with two hip-roofed ends and a pair of four-clustered chimneys, stacked and joined with arches that reach for the sky. The arches are transparent—clouds slide behind them, seen clearly by the naked eye.

This is a structure grounded in verdant lawns and lush green trees. But from afar, it’s suspended above it all, a levitated apparition. It’s an 18th-century sleight of hand, a floating island that manipulates 21st-century eyes.

It does so with aplomb at night, when roads and grounds are pitch black—and the house hovers, lit by bright beams of white light.

There’s only one word for Stratford Hall: it’s magical.

To some, it’s the star of Westmoreland County. But other suns are at play here, each with its own architectural, historical, and social auras. So let’s explore some of the most accessible:

Menokin:

Love in the Ruins

Calder Loth first discovered Menokin’s ruins as a UVA student in 1965.

Later, he’d become its champion.

To be sure, Menokin is not in Westmoreland County. It’s a stone’s throw away, near Warsaw.

But it’s well worth a visit—because it’s the site of a neo-Palladian, 1769 manor house for Francis Lightfoot Lee, signer of the Declaration of Independence, member of the Second Continental Congress, and Virginia state senator. He had two great loves in his life: his wife and his home. 

That home, on 1,000 acres along Cat Point Creek, was a gift to his wife, Rebecca Tayloe, from her father. Today, in its visitor center, a chalkboard lists 150 descendants of people who were enslaved at Menokin between 1837-1865, after the Lee home had passed to Richard Henry Harwood. Two members of Menokin’s board of trustees are descendants.

The home was built with iron-infused sandstone, quarried nearby. Its bricks were fired on site; native white pine was the lumber of choice.

Alas, Menokin—named by the Rappahannock Indian Tribe whose study center is located across the creek today—would not last. It was abandoned in 1950. Atrophy set in: sandstone crumbled, walls collapsed, and a tree fell through its roof.

But Menokin found a path forward after Loth discovered it. He helped form a foundation to save it in 1995. 

A steel shed now protects Menokin’s collapsed roof, and its stabilization is slated for completion by 2026, in time for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration’s signing. 

Part of Menokin’s future lies in the hands of Boston-based architects Machado Silvetti. They’ll replace missing portions of the original house with glass rainscreens supported by stainless steel. One panel, etched to mark window and door positions, is already in place. Fittingly, it’s called “Calder’s Corner,” a tribute to the now-retired architectural historian who helped save Menokin’s ruins from obscurity.

Bushfield:

A Clean, Well-Mannered Place

Bushfield, a centuries-old home in Mount Holly, has been reinvented almost too many times to count.

Built in 1751, it started out as a plantation for the Bushrod family, who’d bought it from Rice Madox, one of Westmoreland’s early settlers. It overlooks Buckner Creek, which feeds into Nomini Creek, which then flows into the Potomac. 

Bushfield stayed in the Bushrod family for several generations, but by 1915 big changes were afoot. The property was acquired by Mark Skinner Willing, heir to Chicago’s Marshall Field. He wanted to live in Virginia, not Chicago, and he set about purchasing the peninsula that surrounded the plantation. By 1915, he’d hired Colonial Revival architect Waddy Wood of Washington, D.C., to enlarge the home for his wife and family.

Wood’s design left much of the original home intact at its core, but added two wings and a third floor. He designed the new home to envelop the older one, leaving the foyer, center staircase, parlor, and two bedrooms above it. He clad it all in brick—in the Flemish bond pattern—and added a cupola atop. The new home reveled in views of the Potomac, with breezes off both creeks and river.

After Willing died in 1944, the house and land were sold. Through the decades, it flip-flopped from country club back to a residential house, but today, finally, Bushfield has a happy ending. In 2012, Raymond Miller bought the property, which had been owned by his father, Lester. Raymond and his wife, Sabrina, set about restoring it, replacing termite-damaged flooring, repointing the brick, repairing the chimneys, restoring the brick sidewalks, and waterproofing the cupola. In 2014, they moved in.

It’s their home, but it’s also a destination for weddings and special events, overlooking one of the most breathtaking waterfront views of any Westmoreland County estate. Inside, it boasts something not many others offer: upstairs is the guest bedroom where George Washington slept when he visited his brother. That’s no myth. The Millers say that Washington—the epitome of good Virginia manners—wrote fondly about his stays there.

Wilton:

Work in Progress

Diane and David Bostic are nothing if not ambitious.

On a Wednesday in 2019, they bought Wilton on Jackson Creek in Hague, just east of Montross. They closed on it on that Friday. And they’ve been working on it nonstop ever since.

Of the three Virginia Wiltons—one in Richmond’s West End dates from 1753 and another in Middlesex from 1763—this is the oldest, built from 1737 to 1742.

It’s got dated timber to prove it, from the time when Richard Jackson looked to the Georgian Colonial style for his new home on 1,000 acres. By the 1790s, it was updated for the Federal period.

When the Bostics bought it, the landscape was out of control. Its chimneys were birds’ nests. And termites had invaded the first floor through a brick pier, then moved up to the second. 

They initially worked on the main house for a year. Plaster came down and masonry, reminiscent of Stratford Hall’s lower level, was repaired. They took out termite-riddled floor joists in the foyer and the 26-by-24-foot great room, and replaced them, adding heart pine flooring salvaged from another house. 

In its five-foot-four-inch-tall basement, they re-laid a basket weave-patterned brick floor. And they moved the second-floor stairway back to its original central location.

Outside, David laid a new walkway approaching the house, and another behind it toward Jackson Creek. He used reclaimed brick for each, punctuated vertically with a pair of four-foot-tall, carved marble columns, capped by sundials. 

When they paint the interior, they’ll reference the Prussian Blue and Biscuit Yellow tones that still show, plus the reddish milk paint in the kitchen.

After they’re done—in two years, they say—they’ll have the main house plus four outbuildings, including one of three quarters for enslaved workers, all restored.

And then—crafted and finished by hand—Wilton will be ready for wedding parties and Airbnb guests.

James Monroe Birthplace Musem:

Fertile Ground

Even as a young man, James Monroe was a bright light.

He attended school at the home of Archibald Campbell, a Scottish immigrant and Episcopal minister at nearby St. Peter’s Church. James Madison and John Marshall were also Campbell’s students. 

Monroe was fluent in Greek and Latin and excelled at mathematics. He kept the books for the family’s 500-acre farm, and by age 16, was studying law at William & Mary.

He left school to fight in the Revolution. He would cross the Delaware River with Washington for the Battle of Trenton. Wounded severely, he later took part in the battles of Brandywine and Germantown—and survived the 1777 winter at Valley Forge. He rose to the rank of major.

By 1780, he’d resigned his commission and was studying law under Virginia Governor Thomas Jefferson. The same year, he advertised his 1752 home and property for sale in the Virginia Gazette, with a drawing attributed to Henry Latrobe, architect of the U.S. Capitol. The property sold three years later.

Monroe was elected to the House of Delegates in 1782, admitted to the bar in 1783, and served in the Continental Congress from 1783 to 1786. He was elected a U.S. senator in 1790, governor of Virginia in 1799 and 1811, and fifth president of the U.S. in 1817 and 1820. He introduced the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, naming the U.S. the dominant power in the Western Hemisphere and warning off any further colonization by Europe.

After he died on July 4, 1831, his birthplace was dismantled. Not until his great-great-grandson organized a family foundation in 1927 was any thought given to rebuilding it. The foundation was incorporated in 1947, and fundraising efforts began in earnest in the late ’80s.

By 2021, the home and landscape were rebuilt and dedicated, at a cost of about $2 million. 

A quarter-mile path to Monroe’s Creek is laid today in composite stone mingled with oyster shells. Quotes from Monroe are etched in granite pavers every 10 feet. One is from his 1817 inaugural address: 

It is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising their sovereignty.

More than 200 years later, James Monroe still lights the way. 

George Washington Birthplace National Monument:

Fact & Fiction

Everything about the George Washington Birthplace National Monument on Pope’s Creek is a little confusing. 

Except that Washington definitely was born there. The National Park Service, steward of the 551-acre park on site, confirms the fact—and that he would live there for four years.

However, exactly where there he was born is uncertain. And what happened to his original home is as much a mystery as its location. Oral history says the home burned on Christmas Day, 1779, but the Park Service lacks evidence to back that up. 

Now a granite obelisk, almost one-tenth the scale of the Washington Monument, rises at the entrance to the site. In 1896, it was placed on a spot believed to be Washington’s birthplace, but moved later to make way for a different memorial. 

In 1932, for the 200th anniversary of Washington’s birth, architect Edward Donn Jr. opened the doors to a Colonial Revival residence there. Since no records of the birth house existed, Donn’s design was influenced by the 1930s architectural style du jour. Interestingly, his house/museum bears a striking resemblance to Twiford, the childhood home of the then-president of the Wakefield National Memorial Association, the group behind the commemoration. Its president, Josephine Wheelwright Rust, was a prominent socialite and descendant of the Washington family. 

Historical documents help, sort of. In 1726, Augustine Washington, George’s father, submitted to Westmoreland County a page from his account book that documents a payment in tobacco for “finishing” a home on land he’d bought in 1718. It’s unclear, though, if “finishing” described work on an existing house or a new one. 

Still, this site remains significant: First, it’s where seven generations of the Washington family lived. Second, it’s where the nation’s premier founding father was born. And third, it’s where the Park Service pursues its research to preserve and explore its legacy.

The year 2032 will mark the tricentennial of Washington’s birthday, surely with celebrations on site.

But more monuments?

Probably not. There’s still confusion to clear up.

Yeocomico Church:

Vessel of Virginia History

Yeocomico Church is a chapel with a past.

It started out humbly enough in 1655, oak-timbered and clapboard-clad. Once termites had their way with its wood, parishioners sought a more permanent fix. The vestry’s instructions to hired workers from England, sans blueprints, were straightforward: “Build us a church as you remember from your early years.”

By 1706, their new church, made of brick—fired on site and laid in both Flemish and English bond—was open for worship. It retained a one-of-a-kind feature from the original: a wicket door within a door. The smaller one, rather than the larger, can be opened and closed to keep warmth inside during winter, and hold off heat in the summer. It’s said to be the only functioning door of its type remaining in the nation.

Inside, a polished white and gray-streaked marble baptismal font also dates from the original church. It’s said to have held the holy water that baptized both George Washington and Richard Henry Lee on a spring Saturday in 1732 .

Some years back, the church identified about 100 skeletal remains from the 18th century, buried with long-gone wooden markers in the surrounding cemetery. Their identities are unknown today, except for Daniel McCarty, speaker of the House of Burgesses in the 1720s.

In 1970, American author John Dos Passos—a Hemingway contemporary and author of the U.S.A. trilogy—was buried there. For his last 25 years, he’d lived at nearby Spence’s Point on the Potomac River.

That’s because he knew God’s country when he saw it.