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Community Corner

Fawcett-Reeder House For Sale

The home is one of Old Town's most authentic historic homes. Washington, D.C. Chapter of the American Institute of Architects gave the kitchen restoration project an Award of Excellence.

History buff Joe Reeder loves old houses. Since 1957, he has owned a 1730s farmhouse near Fair Oaks. He also had an early 1800s home on Lee Street in Old Town from the 1980s until 2000, the year his friend and real estate agent, Paul Anderson, showed him the 1772 home at 517 Prince Street in Old Town.

“We were there 20 minutes and wrote a contract,” said Reeder, who is retired from two careers, one in military intelligence and the other in convention servicing. “This house was older, far more authentic, and much more interesting than the one on Lee Street…. How many homes have a solid brick, eight-holer [outhouse]?”

Well, not many. And, the sprawling, four-bedroom house is like a time capsule, virtually every inch reflecting the lifestyle of colonial Virginia. The original house, estimated by a dendrologist to be built in 1772, was four rooms: two on the main floor and two bedrooms upstairs. That space, now serving as Reeder’s living room and library on the main floor, was expanded in 1784 with a two-room Saltbox addition, now used as Reeder’s dining room and master bedroom.

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In the late 1790s, a smokehouse and what was likely an outdoor slave kitchen were attached to the house. Reeder remodeled that kitchen to become his antiques-filled sitting room, centered around a huge, smoke-blackened fireplace in which he hangs an old boiling pot to add humidity during winter months.

Reeder spent more than a half-million dollars renovating and restoring the house. Much of that went toward building a new kitchen annex, a task that was complicated by requirements of the Alexandria Board of Architectural Review, charged with protecting the integrity of historic homes. Reeder hired McCrery Architects to help him create a kitchen with modern amenities that also remained true to the home’s history. They designed the 16’ x 14’ kitchen with a cathedral ceiling built from 8 x 8 oak timbers cut with a band saw to look as if they—like the home’s original floors—were pit-sawn.

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The kitchen also features timber beams of hand-sawn poplar, and floors of reclaimed walnut. The cabinets are dry sinks with butcher block tops, and the “new” stove, dated 1894, was taken from the upstate New York house in which both Reeder and his mother were born. Of course, the eat-in kitchen includes a masonry fireplace, the home’s seventh. The kitchen/bath/garden project earned an Award of Excellence from the Washington, D.C. Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

Reeder also restored the home’s floors. In the original part of the house, the floors were painted black. With 100 gallons of paint stripper and a lot of elbow grease, Reeder got down to the natural wood of the pit-sawn, tongue-and-groove, heart pine planks, but he did not sand them.

“William Seale, a White House historian who lived up the street, asked me not to sand the floors because they were so original they had never been sanded,” Reeder explains. Reeder installed radiant floor heating beneath the main level floor boards.

Reeder also returned the home’s exterior to its original state. While repairing its 1820s-era, white, 8-inch weatherboards, he realized that beneath them was shiplap siding with hand-wrought, 5-strike nails—the original siding. He stripped off the weatherboard to expose the shiplap, which has different colors delineating the original section from the additions. The roof of the house also tells its history: the original space has cedar-shake roofing, while the additions from 1789 forward have standing-seam tin.

The respect Reeder holds for even the smallest detail is evident throughout the house. For example, the old chair rail molding in the living room still has notches taken out of the wood where space was made to run gas light pipes in the mid-1800s. “I could have taken it off and fixed it so you would never know the notches were there,” Reeder notes. “But why take it out when it tells you a piece of history?”

Although he can’t prove it, Reeder believes George Washington spent time at the house. “This was a big, first-class house from 1772-1799,” Reeder explains. “It’s logical that Washington would have visited it.”

Reeder enjoys digging up the hidden histories of his home, previously known as the John Douglas Brown House, but now named the Fawcett-Reeder House. (The Fawcett family, from whom Reeder bought the house, owned it for well over a century; a wardrobe of Fawcett family wedding dresses dating back to 1816 was still in the house when Reeder bought it.) 

During our interview, he digressed briefly for a lively discussion with Anderson—also an old-home aficionado—about the significance of a stone foundation beneath the house, and whether the property might once have been used for a commercial purpose, such as selling smoked hams.

“Putting the puzzle together—that’s half the fun of this whole enterprise,” Reeder admitted, noting that much of what he has learned about historical homes comes from his friend and Mt. Vernon curator, Worth Bailey.

Reeder hopes the next owner of the home, now on the market for $1,849,000 through Anderson, with McEnearney Associates, will share Reeder’s enthusiasm 

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