Oral History Transcription

Oral History Interview Interviewees: Delbert (Bill) E. Sheads and Elsie Sisson, Tape I Interviewer: Florence Naeve Wednesday, May 18, 2005

INTERVIEWER (INTERVIEWER): Today is May 18, 2005. I am Florence Naeve, the interviewer, and this morning we have with us BILL E. Sheads and his sister, Elsie Sisson. Mr. Sheads was born in September 1923. Ms. Sisson was born on February 1921. Thank you both very much for joining us this morning. We have lots of questions. Your family, I believe on both sides of the family, go back several generations.

DELBERT SHEADS (BILL): Oh yes.

FLORENCE: And so what I'd like to try to do in the early part of the interview is sort of kind of get a sense of where you grew up and whether it was more your mother or father's family holdings, and then sort of take you up with it through time. So when you were first born, first of all, were you born at home or in a hospital? And where was the family home, and was it the mother's side of the family or the father's? And if you could give the family names. And Mr. Sheads, would you like to go first, or would you like to go first, Mrs. Sisson?

BILL: Well, to go back a little bit, my father came down with his family in 1903 from Culpeper. He was one of several in the family, and they moved to Braddock Road and Shirley Gate Road to an old house there. He was born in '94, so he was seven years old. And the house burned while my grandfather had gone back with the wagon, horse and wagons, to Culpeper for another load of something, whatever, furniture, or animals, or whatever. But the house burned, and my grandmother and all the children were there and got out. And then they moved to down off of Ravensworth Road, and just in back of Holsom Hall. And my grandad had approximately 200 acres back there where the Annandale high school is now. And that's where my father and the family grew up. A couple of the boys were older than he. They had already started out doing work here and there for various people. Mrs. Lee, who sister Elsie will talk about more than me, although I knew her, and then from there on he and he his brother, Buck, was his nickname, Marion Sheads, they got over into Maryland around Rockville. My uncle Buck married over there, and then they got into saw milling, my dad and my uncle. They got into saw milling at a place near Potomac, Maryland and an old gold mine and things like that, that brings back memories to me being there as a kid later on. But then after the saw milling there, he came back to Fairfax here, back to Annandale. And then he met my mother, who was Virginia Dooley, and they were married at the old, old church there in Falls Church. The name was Falls Church, wasn't it, at that time?

ELSIE: I think so.

FLORENCE: I believe.

BILL: Yeah. And after this, he continued into saw milling. He was quite a timbering person here in Fairfax County, quite a bit in Culpeper, and Fauquier. So he was very prominent in lumbering service.

FLORENCE: Did he have a saw mill here?

BILL: Oh yeah. I've been back over these now because I'm hoping to write a little book, too. And I've found now that there was 57 different places that he had set a saw mill up mostly here in Fairfax County, but about 10 or 11 of them in Culpeper, and two, I think, in Fauquier, and maybe one in Rappahannock County, I'm not sure of the boundary there. But anyway, there were 57 different sets that he had. Now what that means is picking up the mill and the steam engine and taking them to an area of timberland that he had purchased from someone. And the main products that he handled was mainly like fencing boards and railroad cross ties for the Southern Railroad and for R&P Railroad. And then with heavy timber for the Smooth Sand and Gravel Company. Mr. Lewis Smoot had a contract with the federal government to keep the Potomac River open, dredged out deep enough for the ships. And so Mr. Smoot started his business down in Alexandria. Somebody wanted some sand, he was youngster, he went down to the river and dug up some sand in a bag or something and brought it up, or a little wagon, I think he said, little four-wheel pulled wagon, kid's wagon. Later on he picked up enough money, like five and 10 cents a load, until he bought a wheelbarrow. And then the next thing, I don't know what the history from then on, this was Mr. Smoot. I talked to him quite a little bit with my dad. They had things in common. And so Mr. Smoot ended up with the Smoot Sand and Gravel Company that was on Q Street. It was one of those places up in Georgetown. So they had these big, big dredging machines on the river, and it was made out of heavy timbers. And that was getting back to my dad now. That's he furnished for Mr. Smoot was the timbers to build those dredging machines and the barges that hauled the gravel as it was dug out and loaded. Then they brought them up in tug boats to D.C. and unloaded them. So that's kind of getting the history of what he did. And I'm talking about he had to look around for large timber, mainly oak, and he would take some red oak. But the timbers, the average daily sawing that he did was like three inches by 12 and 10 and 12, and four inches by 10 and 12, and these things had to be for the most part ran 28 to 32 feet long. So you can see that he had to do a lot of looking for the proper timber to cut that kind of 32 feet. Then there were some other special logs that he had to find for Smoot. These were the things that worked the dredging machines, big logs that had to be 65 feet long. They had to be 18 inches under the bark under the small end and straight in order to make the necessary piece of material that they needed on the dredging machine. So I walked hundreds of miles as a youngster looking for the proper kind of timber.

FLORENCE: I understand that he also was involved in cutting down the trees for the various purposes in the Ravensworth Farm area.

BILL: Oh yeah. Yeah. And he did several things for Mr. Lee. He and his brother built a fence for Accotink Creek on the mansion up to the Beltway now, which took it up to about the corner. And they built up a fence there for her and did some other work for her. The Lee family also had a road through their forest land all the way over to Southern Railroad for the carriage road, and they had a train stop there and a little building along the Southern Railroad. But my dad, other than the lumber for the Smoot Sand and Gravel Company, there was material for building barns and houses for his own house that he built during the Depression was cut down right Keene Mill Road just past Rosebud, and he had his own little setting in there, and that's where he cut the timber for that house up there.

FLORENCE: And that house, if you could tell us.

BILL: That house is right at the intersection of Guinea Road and now Twinbrook Road. At that time it was called Burke Station Road. Twinbrook, Guinea, and then where you go into Kings Park West, and it was right on the southwest quadrant, corner there. And it's still there and in good shape. It's had two different owners since he sold it. One was Patty Ruffner that had the horse place down there, and then I forget who the next one was. I think it's been three different families who had that place. But his other prime timbering, and this was back more during World War II when we sort of worked together, was in the poplar timber, yellow poplar, for a company known as Stock Resale Furniture Company in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. And we hauled hundred and hundreds of thousands of feet of timber up there for them of lumber. And it had to be especially solid. And those were the main things. Then he got into, way back, I would say in, well, whenever his house was built during the Depression, he got into some contracting for friends. And he has built, we were just carpenters, one house at the intersection of Braddock Road and Little River Turnpike, where Home Depot now is now. There was a house there. He built that for Joe Dove. And then he built another house, and I'm not sure if he built the one for Mildred and George or not, but he might have.

ELSIE: I don't know.

BILL: But that was next door to that one. But then he did some other work for Mr. Jim Dove and Daisy, his wife, who was the parents of the one that he built the house for over at Little River Turnpike. And he remodeled their house for them, and then he built another big house over in north Alexandria, Rosemont. And that was for one of the railroad engineers for Southern Railroad. And how he got to know him was that two of his brothers, my uncles, our uncles, were engineers on the Southern, and they were familiar with all the engineers, so he built a house for him, which was a big two story. Then he moved the old school house and redid it for a neighbor by the name of John Petit, who owned that land right there.

FLORENCE: And maybe you could help those of us who weren't here then and sort of place that. Where was that school then and where was it moved to?

BILL: That school was, if you went up Old Guinea Road right up to the old Burke Station Road that is now Twinbrook, it would be directly straight across Twinbrook Road, just about where the brick wall is, I would say, for the entrance into Kings Park West, right about there. My uncles and aunts on my mother's side, the Dooleys, and my mother, went to school there. I remember they taught everybody on a slate. Maybe you can expand on that. But anyway, he moved that house and some of the men, no need in calling those names, but I knew them all. Mr. McDermott was one that lived up right on Braddock Road going up towards the cemetery there, the intersection of Burke Station Road and Braddock Road. And he had a team of horses and a stump puller. Now a stump puller is just a big pile of iron about this big and about so tall, a couple of feet tall, and it had some gears in it. And the way it worked, it had a long wood tongue that went out probably 12, 15 feet, and the horse walked around and around that thing, and that's what run the gears. And they used that and anchored that thing up there somewhere with the necessary chains and hook up onto that building. When I was a kid, I stood back and watched it all, I guess I was maybe seven or eight years. And they moved that building for a short distance, and then they'd stop and move the stump puller farther up and pull it some more. And after a couple of days they finally got it up and got it set up. And there was a man by the name of William Whitmer from Clifton. He would ride the trains down to Burke in the morning. Some of us would pick him up, and dad or I was enough to drive, I was permitted to go down to the station and pick up Mr. Whitmer, the head carpenter. And he had several people that worked with him. So that's the way were back in that time. And another cousin of ours worked for him, Bill William Kender, who married one of the Darcy girls, one of our first cousins. Bill worked for him and he used to pay him 25 cents an hour. I knew that much. I don't know what he paid the other people. But he did quite a bit of building around, and then the next thing, and this was after I came out of the service, he was interested in trying to get him into more of the building industry. We were down in Hog Hills, I guess it was a hog maw probably. But they had those contemporary style houses down there, one story, and a lot of glass. And he was on the Board of Supervisors at the time, and I think that one of the members of the board down there, I can't recall his name at the moment, of that area got him to come down and look at those houses. And that was one thing that my dad said, always several times mentioned to me when he was on the Board of Supervisors. When a rezoning came in, let me go back a little bit. He only went to fourth grade down in Culpeper at Mitchell. He went to the fourth grade, and that was the end of his education as far as formal at that time. But he didn't finish school. He started working, and his dad was pushing him on the farm down there, of course the Southern Railroad from Mitchell. And so he didn't get any farther than the fourth grade. But he was well versed in what he did. But anyway, when he was on the Board of Supervisors, and at that period he was on there seven and half years. A Mr. Blecall at Burke Station, was elected to the board, and I think he was on there for like three or four months, and he passed away. And then Judge Paul Brown appointed my dad for the remainder of that year, and then he ran and he was elected for another four years. So he had about seven and a half years on it.

FLORENCE: So I have information that your father was first on the board, as you said, appointed, in 1944. So that's not right?

BILL: No. No. He was appointed in '44.

FLORENCE: I'm sorry, I meant to say '44. And then so he served out those last few months of that one term, and then he was elected then. He was the Lee District --

BILL: Well, he had three and a half years, and then he was elected.

FLORENCE: And he was the Lee District --

BILL: Lee District.

FLORENCE: -- Lee District supervisor. So what got him interested in politics?

BILL: Well, I guess Judge Brown, Judge Paul Brown, and a few others around. But Joe Staub, who ran a store at Burke, and his wife, they talked politics all the time. And Susie was her name. But anyway, they always talked politics, and, of course, Judge Brown lived over at Brimstone Hill, and various other people around there. But anyway, I think probably who really pushed him maybe was Judge James Duncan in Alexandria, and they were friends. Judge Duncan came out turkey hunting and other types of hunting with him all the time. And he kept saying, why don't you get into, take this job? Well, anyway he ended up with it. But back to what I was speaking of there, every rezoning case that came in, he not being an engineer and looking at the plans and all, which he could see what they wanted to do. But he said went to every one of them, and he sometimes one would come up for a vote, and he would tell Moss Carper, the chairman, he said, well, I haven't looked at that one yet; I've got to go look at it, before he would vote on it.

FLORENCE: So he would go out to the sites and take a look out there and see whether what was proposed was a good idea or not.

BILL: Yeah.

FLORENCE: Well, and that's fantastic.

BILL: Yeah.

FLORENCE: The right way to do it, right?

BILL: Well, I really think so. Back at that time, of course this day and time you have so many pictures, so many drawings, so many site plans and everything else that people can sit down on the board and look at those things and pretty well tell. But another thing, there was always somebody on the board in that district that knows that site anyway. But back in those days, the members of the board didn't know the whole county. Back now to the building business, and he looked at those houses down there, and we went down and measured up some of them. Came back, and then the meantime, he had an area on Burke Station Road between, I would say just up the hill from Little River Turnpike on Burke Station Road. There was an area in there, and the person laid off lots, like half acres, some of them a little bit larger. So he bought a lot on one corner of the street, and I bought the one on the opposite corner of the street. Those were the larger lots that were on the corner. Anyway, so we decided to build. We got the plans from whoever did that down in Hollin Hall. We dug the footers, and I dug the footers, and there was a man by the name of Harry Dean that did all of his masonry work when he was building houses for these various people. And we poured the concrete, and Mr. Dean was ready to lay the foundation. What happened at that time, eventually Stogg Furniture Company in Gaithersburg, they were in a lull sort of for a while, and they had said stop bringing lumber. Well then, about the time we started on this and got this footer dug and the concrete poured for the foundation, he had came and ordered some 300 or 400,000 board feet of poplar. So we had to drop this and get on with that. So we never did build that house, and later on I sold my lot. When they were widening Route 236, Little River Turnpike, there's a fella who had a house over there right across from my wife's parents' house, and he wanted to save his house. It was a nice brick house. And he kept after me to buy that lot that I had on the corner of Burke Station Road and to move the house over there. So he moved his house over there, I mean I sold him the lot double for what I paid for it. In just a few years, they told me the land was increasing in value. Then later on, my dad, a good friend of mine and his, too, was the captain of the fire department in Fairfax, and in the paid system of Fairfax County Fire and Rescue. And Stuart wanted to build a house, and so I talked to my dad, and he said, well, Stuart is a good boy, good man, and he gave him the lot for what he paid for it, $2,500. And so Stuart got the lot and built a house. Another question before I choke?

FLORENCE: That is fascinating. Well, I know you've done more than help your dad with the lumber business and the development business. I heard that you were a forester after the war. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

BILL: Yeah. I went in the Army in '42. I was inducted in '42, and they said stay until after Christmas. I went in like the 2nd or 3rd of January of '43. And it was on through that in Texas and so on, and then Normandy, and then back here in '45. And then the first thing, I wanted to build a house without a doubt. My wife, she was working at Fort Belvoir at the time in the engineering section. And we had saved up a little money. In the Army back then you get $21 a month, and that was it, $21 a month. So I didn't smoke or anything, so I didn't have to buy anything really. Uncle Sam furnished all I needed. So I'd send home, I guess, most of it, I don't know. But we had a little nest of about eight or $9,000 when I got home. And back then that was pretty good money. So I talked to my dad, and in the meantime, he had one mill set up over on Sideburn Road on Dr. Brook's woods and had shut it down mainly for the lack of labor, which I can get into that a little bit later. But he had prior to me leaving, going back to the forestry thing that somebody mentioned earlier, he had bought a tract of timber from a black man by the name of Manny Jackson over on Guinea Road on the old Guinea Road that went from what is now Sideburn area, out to Pohick Road, 40 streams and all to get over there. He bought that tract of timber from Mr. Jackson, and it was right where the Fairview School is now. And a fire, that was in either '42 or '43, but it started along some of the railroad, and that's one of the bigger that we had, and that went all out through the area there towards, I don't know where now.

FLORENCE: So you were here at the time that the fire --

BILL: Yes, I was at the time of that fire. I belonged to the fire department, too. I joined the fire department in Fairfax when I was 18.

FLORENCE: So you were part of the group of folks that were out there trying to deal with the fire.

BILL: Mm hm, yeah, at the time.

FLORENCE: I wanted to ask you a couple more questions about that fire. I understand that it burned for a week.

BILL: No, not that one.

FLORENCE: Oh, that was a different.

BILL: That's a different one. No, this fire was, I guess, about in the second day maybe, that day and the night.

FLORENCE: And, of course, you had no way of getting water to it, right, so it just had to kind of burn itself, and you had to control it.

BILL: No. You'd dig a line and then what you call backfiring or line firing, and that burns back, burns up the fuel. The fuel in the fire is going out. If it doesn't have fuel and oxygen, then it's not going to burn.

FLORENCE: Was that somebody started the fire, or was it lightening?

BILL: Railroad.

FLORENCE: Oh, the railroad, sparks from the railroad.

BILL: Right on the railroad tracks.

FLORENCE: Ah. Well, can you tell us about the fire in Burke that burned for a week?

BILL: Yeah. That fire was before I went in the service. I think that was '41. It started along the railroad at Sideburn right where Zion Drive and Guinea Road intersect. If you walk right through the woods there of the field at that time down to the railroad track. And there was a lane that went from Guinea Road down across the track and across the bridge. And up on the hill to the MD hall house, there was of schools for Fairfax County. And later on, a Mr. Downey had it, remember?

ELSIE: Mm hm.

BILL: Then that's where the fire started is right along where that lane went in and the railroad track. It was the winds from the northwest. And it blew that fire. I was in the fire department, too, at that time. I had just joined. And that fire went, kind of hard to explain, but out to through that area now where Burke Centre and the Burke Lake Road, and then it crossed Burke Lake Road and then over to 123. And that was the same afternoon, I believe. That fire was a crown fire. There was a lot of pine timber in that. A crown fire had burned the tops of the trees, and with a high wind this fire moved about as fast as you want to gallop along on a horse. So it was the kind that you can't get in the front of to try to stop it. I was up on Backlick Road with the fire engines at the time, and we came in from Lee Chapel Church up Backlick Road coming back to the west woods, 123, up about a half or mile or so. And the chief there said, we want to fire this road, which you burn it back so that the main fire got there, it wouldn't have any fuel. So we turned the apparatus around because it was a dangerous fire. And we got out there with some flares, like you use for accidents, and started lighting some fire along there, and I guess there was about eight or 10 on those rigs. And all of a sudden you hear it sounded like Great Falls, the smoke and timber dropping. Jumped on the stuff and took out of there. And by the time we got down towards Lee Chapel Church and looked back and just see that flame in that crown fire coming across the road, and the trees on the opposite of the road were just bending back. And I don't want to get into fire science stuff here now, but it takes a lot of oxygen for that much fire, that amount of fire to pull that oxygen in, and, of course, that was pulling the trees back because it pulls it from the front of the fire, and then the fire rolls this way. So it crossed the road. It got a little bit across Lee Chapel Road. If you're going from Backlick Road, Lee Chapel Road connects to 123, and we were able to control that part. And then it burned up, Mr. Bruce Simpson had a saw mill over along Sithes Run, and it burned that out completely. And only one house on Pohick Road, belonged to a black gentleman, name was Peterson. He had a little small house. He lived by himself. He made ax handles, which my dad bought ax handles from him. Made them out of hickory, and my dad would buy them from him like 25, 30 cents a piece. That was his livelihood. And I guess he sold something to Mr. Bruce Simpson, too, and people that used axes. But it burned his house completely down, and he got away. In fact, I think he was away at the time of the fire. But it went on through. It crossed 123, and a friend of ours by the name of Folsgrave, one of the older local residents, still living, and Marcel Folsgrave, he was a fire warden. It wasn't his full time job, but he was a volunteer fire warden through the state forestry department. And he was more or less in charge of everything. So over along 123, he was telling me the story that the fire had jumped 123, and Marcel was trying to organize inmates from the Lorton Reformatory, who he had called down there and had gotten maybe 100 or so, I think it was, up there. And he was trying organize them into fire crews and give them fire rakes and stuff to try to head that fire off. Marcel was telling me, he said, pretty soon here come a man all dressed in a suit and big watch chain -- I knew the guy later -- with a big watch chain hanging down. And his name was Hunter Garth, who was in charge of all fire suppression in the state of Virginia. Had an office at the time in Charlottesville. And Marcel was yelling up anybody he could to help fight this fire. And Mr. Garth walked down, didn't introduce himself, and he began to say, well now, what have you done here? What's going on? This fire is going on. What's happening? Marcel said, I'll tell you what's happening. Pull that necktie off, here's a fire rake. And he said Mr. Garth backed up and said, do you know who I am, and Marcel said, no, I don't care who you are. Unless you have a note from a doctor saying that you have a physical problem that you can't fight fire, then I'm going to put you on this fire line. And he said, well, I'm Hunter Garth in charge of fire fighters in the state of Virginia. Marcel said, well, why in the heck didn't you tell me who you were when you walked up here? So anyway that was the story of that. But the fire went on down to Hampton Road, and what's the name of the stream that goes down Hampton Road? Anyway, that's where they were able to finally control that fire on, I guess it was the second day. I know it was the second day because it was later in the evening when it crossed 123. Out of all that fire, the only house that was burned was Mr. Peterson's and the saw mill of Bruce Simpson's, and one other small little house back behind the old Simpson place, which is now the intersection of Burke Lake Road and the parkway, northwest quadrant. Been sold now, big houses up there. But there was a little house back in there that burned. Other than that, it was quite a fire. But back to the other fire up at Mr. Jackson's, both of these were railroad fires. I'll go back to this other one again that we were just discussing. Where that started down along the railroad at Sideburn, my dad had a saw mill up on Sideburn Road off of Zion, back up in there. And we had been over there with the mill. This was a Saturday and we had been over at the mill, and we came back at lunchtime. And when we came around, we saw the railroad people back at that time when they replaced rotted ties from under the rails, they would throw them in the pile and burn them. And we saw this pile of ties burning down there when we came back going home to lunch. But anyway, now back to the Jackson fire and back to 1946. We had wanted to build a house, so I asked my dad about, what do we have left around here for timber? He said, well, I have that tract over there I bought from Manny Jackson back in '42. He said, but the fire in there was so blackened and all, I didn't want the men working in that black soot. He said, I just left it to weather off. And with weathering, all the soot, not all of it, but a lot of it. And my brother-in-law, Mike Gregory, married my sister, he also wanted to build a house. He was right out of the Navy. So we got together and Mike had an old truck. So we decided, with my dad, we went over to see Mr. Jackson. And he said, well, you know, it's been four years of timber, and daddy said, well, we wanted to cut some. And he said, well, your contract ran out. And daddy said, let's buy it again. They bought the tract of timber a second time. And we went in right where the Fairview School is, Mike and I, and we put between 25 and 30,000 feet of logs out of there, nice pine logs.

FLORENCE: And that had grown up in that amount of time?

BILL: Oh no, no. The fire didn't destroy it, no. The fire didn't destroy that. It didn't burn, didn't crown on this fire like the other fire. That killed the timber, but this one didn't. So we cut that and hauled it over the mill that he had shut down then on Sideburn Road. Cut it all up, and then we got some labor, some local people, and sawed that 25 to 30,000 board feet of lumber for two houses. Mine was the one that's still the one on Twinbrook Road, the white cape cod style there. And Mr. Patell, he bought the property, he bought the house separately from me and kept it. And so we built that house and moved in in '47.

FLORENCE: I want to get back to your role with the fire department. But since you've moved to the area of the pines, let's talk a little bit about that property there. That was Dooley property from your grandfather.

BILL: Right.

FLORENCE: Right.

BILL: Joseph Dooley.

FLORENCE: And that was on your mother's side of the family.

BILL: Mother's side.

FLORENCE: Now how many generations does the Dooley family go back in this area?

BILL: Oh, he came down here from up in, what, Maine, in what year, do you recall?

ELSIE: I don't know the year, but they came over from Ireland. I think he was born in Maine.

BILL: Yeah, I think he was, too, back in mid 1800s, and then he came on down this way. He was a mason also, a working mason. And then with the railroad, and then he got a job with Southern Railroad. And I guess he got that, I think it was like 56 acres between Guinea Road and Braddock Road, and that didn't quite the back road. But Burke Station Road and Guinea Road, that whole quadrant there, and down to the Dodson place. In there was lane that went from Guinea Road to Braddock Road and basically that was the area. And he got this somewhere in the latter 1800s from a boy from the Burke family, I think. And he had this house built. There's a picture of the old farm style house. And that's where we were born right in that house, not in a hospital, all three of us, my older sister, Anna.

FLORENCE: So you were born in the house over in the Burke area, but you grew up --

BILL: I was born down in the Guinea Road house that you see that picture, yeah.

FLORENCE: But your father's family came from the Annandale area.

BILL: Yeah, from Culpeper to Annandale.

FLORENCE: Annandale. And he grew up in the tract of land that was in front of Ossian Hall.

BILL: It depends. When he came to Ossian Hall from Ravensworth Road, you came to the back of the house. But the front of the house faced Braddock Road. That was a showpiece from Braddock Road.

FLORENCE: Right. But your father's family grew up more in that area.

BILL: Yeah, in the back, in the back.

FLORENCE: And then your mother's family, the Dooleys, grew up in the area, what's considered the Burke area.

BILL: Guinea Road.

FLORENCE: And so your mother's family grew up with the Dodsons.

BILL: Yeah.

FLORENCE: And so that helps to better understand. So you grew up in Burke, and then you and your family, your mother and father's children, acquired or got parts of the family tracts in there.

BILL: Yeah. I've got to go back and think a little bit. I don't know what relative.

ELSIE: ... lived in --

BILL: No, she lived over on Braddock Road. Her house was down towards Aunt Ellie's, right behind Carver's. But the Claritys were, maybe you can think about what relation while I mention something else. Clarity owned a parcel of land from Braddock Road and Burke Station Road down to the Dooley property, the Dooley line, which was where the north end of the Queens Gate development. And she gave some part of land back there to my uncle Phil Dooley, my mother's brother, and it was about 10 and a half acres. And he was my idol on that side of the family. But Uncle Phil, he said, I don't know what I'm going to do with that old land up there. And I said, well, I would like to buy it from you. Well, we set a price; I forget now what it was, $700 or something like that. And I went to him with my first payment, like $50, and then later on I went back with my next payment. He said, I don't want any money. He said, what am I going to with it? So I got the piece just from $50 really because, and he gave me the deed for it. Then the rest of the land was deeded to, from my grandfather Dooley, it was deeded to my mother, and she then took the, let's see what happened next? A developer came in, wanted him to build the Queens Gate, which that was on the north end of the Braddock Road part, and also my 10 acres back there. And I had planted the Christmas trees, and I started growing trees in 1957, and then my mother and dad then decided that the taxes were so great and all. He had sold his bungalow, he had a section of Guinea Road, Twinbrook, or Burke Station Road then, and Kings Park west. He had sold that house and they tore the old farmhouse down, the Dooley, and they built a brick rambler there where the big oak trees are. There were three of those big large white oak trees. And so they decided then to sell a little off of the eastern end of there. So we put my 10 and a half acres and the other and one acre from Catherine Dooley, who was Ed Dooley's wife, who was another relative, and sold that land to Queens Gate. Then that's the way it stood then up until my dad passed in '82, and then my mother. Anyway, she passed away, and it was left by will to my older sister and the three of us. So we had for a while, we had another 7,000 Christmas trees in the field. This was way back. At first he had sugar corn in there which shows up in that picture. And he would get his workers to go out and pick that corn and take it down there to Washington, D.C. across the waterfront. But anyway, that's where they sold it on Saturdays, whole truck load of corn. He also had a parcel of land up there. I had bought about an acre and two tenths back from my parents, mainly mother, $500. That's where we built the house. And then she had an acre up there, and she divided and built two houses. And then we sold everything.

FLORENCE: We're running out of time on this tape, and you have so many good stories. So I just want to kind of cover a couple more things. You did the Christmas trees and you worked for the volunteer fire department. And I want to hear the story about the burning of Ossian Hall so you can for all time get the record straight. But when you weren't doing all of that, just can you tell me in a couple of sentences what other, did you stick with the lumbering and the forester work and so forth?

BILL: No. In 1951, labor was hard to get. That's hard work. Labor was hard to find. You couldn't get it here. It was all the federal government and a lot of building going on in Arlington and North Fairfax. And even before the war, I was driving over to south of Luray at 3 o'clock in the morning down to Stanley, Virginia picking up laborers and bringing them back to work at the mill, and we had the old farmhouse. And I had to bring those people back, about five or six of them, including DeSawyer, that was a church person in charge at the mill. And then I'd go to school, Fairfax High School. And they would have their room and board over in that old house. Dad had a cookstove and all in there for them. And then they worked a week, and I'd take them back home Saturday afternoon, back to Luray, back to Stanley. And this went on until I went in the Army. And after that, he tried to get some people from Norfolk here down around Sowego, a little village down Norfolk by the name of Park. And he brought his workers up, and they had their own transportation. And they worked up here. And then from '47 on to '51, my dad and I were sort of together in business. And the labor then was getting to the point to where we just couldn't hardly get it. He said, well, I really don't need it. Let's shut it down. But people from Charlottesville from the department of forestry kept coming to see me. I was what was called the local warden like I said Falsgrath was back on that big fire. I was a local warden. You only got paid something when you were fighting fires. And then I went with the department of forestry. I started off as a chief forester for Fairfax County, and it wasn't long before I was elevated a forestry position, which is the same as our forestry grade people out of colleges in various parts of the country. I got it through hard work and going to various seminars, every school VIP.

FLORENCE: Well, thank you very much. You've provided a wealth of information and filled a whole hour's worth. And so what we're going to do is we're going to stop the tape now and we'll all take a little break.

(END OF TAPE)