Oral History Transcription

Oral History Interview Interviewee: Lee Hubbard, Part II Interviewer: Mary Lipsey Date: August 15, 2005

MARY LIPSEY (MARY): Good morning.

LEE HUBBARD (LEE): Good morning.

MARY: This is Monday, August 15th, and I'm Mary Lipsey and I'm interviewing Lee Hubbard who is a native of the Braddock District, and particularly around the Twin Brook area, I guess.

LEE: Fairfax Station.

MARY: Fairfax Station area - and we're doing this as part of Sharon Bulova's Look Back at Braddock, and Lee has been interviewed once before but we brought him back so we could get some more information from him, and we want to talk about the bridge collapse on Ox Road, or it's known as 123 in the area also. If you could start with that and tell us when it happened and how and all of that.

LEE: Okay. I remember that. It was a Sunday morning, June 4, 1944, and my mother got me up - the noise woke them. We lived the third house up - actually the second house up from the bridge north on 123 at that time. And she, my dad and I and my brother, we went down to see, and of course, the bridge had completely collapsed onto the railroad. A truck was hung up - an Army truck was hung up in the girders and the way I understood it, their convoy was going from Fort Belvoir out to the Shenandoah area - the mountains - for some training, and the story I always was told - that one of the trucks making the turn onto the bridge struck the corner of the railing and had to back up to cross over it. They knew the bridge was not real sturdy, so they were letting them go one truck at a time. Well anyway, it wound up collapsing and killing one - I understood - one soldier, and our neighbor, Mrs. Helen Newcomb, was a nurse and she went down straight away. She lived next door to us, and helped tend to some of the other people that were wounded. And a friend of mine, Helen Jones, who was a school teacher in Fairfax County - she took the pictures I brought in of the bridge collapsed onto the railroad. They brought out a work train, with the crane on it, and lifted the debris. And it wasn't too long before they had the trains running again.

MARY: Now this was a trestle bridge?

LEE: It was an iron overhead trestle. There was another one just like it at Rolling Road and the railroad.

MARY: Okay, and I understand, from what I've read, that this was actually a bridge maintained by the Southern Railway.

LEE: Yes.

MARY: It wasn't - VDOT is what we call it today.

LEE: Right.

MARY: It wasn't Virginia Railways operated?

LEE: Right.

MARY: And so, did they bring out ambulance or anything?

LEE: You know, I cannot remember. I suppose by the time we got down there - got dressed and went down - they probably had the wounded already taken away, cause the closest ambulance would have been Fairfax.

MARY: Right, the there wouldn't have been any at Burke or. . .

LEE: Burke had a fire department, but the closest one would have been three and a half miles up to. . .

MARY: Fairfax City.

LEE: What's now Fairfax City. They made a temporary crossing at the depot and routed traffic down to the village - they crossed the tracks and up, what is now, Poplar Road over south of the railroad - until they got a temporary bridge put across - in just a few weeks - maybe a month or so, and that stayed there until 1948, when they realigned 123, Ox Road, and ran it behind St. Mary's Church, where it had gone in front of it before, and built a new bridge there in 1948.

MARY: Okay, and I'm trying to vision now - is it considered in front of St. Mary's now?

LEE: The present 123 is behind the church.

MARY: Oh, okay, right.

LEE: The original Ox Road, when the church was built, was in the front - right by the front door of the church.

MARY: Okay.

LEE: And it's now - that portion past the church, when you go straight down, it's a one-way road now, and it's that section, that used to go to the railroad, is now called Vogue Road.

MARY: Okay, V - O. . .

LEE: V - O - G - U - E. MARY: Okay, that's an unusual name.

LEE: Yeah, I don't know where it came from. That's where I was born, on that little stretch. My granddaddy's house was still there and I grew up in it and it's still there.

MARY: Well, I read in the Washington Post that the widow of the Fort Belvoir soldier who died sued for $15,000 and went to court and that your brother, Travis, was brought into the court to be a witness. Do you have any memories of that?

LEE: Yeah, I remember when he had to go to that court as a - and they were questioning him about a hive of honey bees that had built up into the upper girder on the side towards Fairview School, claiming that the - I think that somebody was trying to claim that that had helped weaken it, but I'm sure it didn't, and he remembered it very well because the bigger boys - and he was older than me by four years - used to throw rocks at the - make the metal clang and get the bees stirred up, cause some people remember that morning that the bridge collapsed, there were a lot of honey bees flying around the scene, and I'm not sure the result of the trial. I just know he had to go.

MARY: Well, it did say in the paper that she was not awarded any damages, that they were - basically her claim wasn't just Southern Railways - you know, inadequate bridge that caused the collapse.

LEE: I remember the bridge floor boards, kind of, rattling when you drove the car across them, but that bridge was really - in '44 - it was only thirty-some years old because I understood it was only - it was built about 1912. They double-tracked that old Orange and Alexandria single-track line about 1905 and cut the deep cuts, which caused them to have to put a bridge up, but it could have been built earlier, but 1912 was always the date I was told.

MARY: Now is this the same railroad that ends up going through Burke?

LEE: Absolutely.

MARY: Okay, but the railroad that now crosses under 123, you might say, is that the Southern Railroad?

LEE: It is now. It was the Southern then.

MARY: Oh, okay.

LEE: See the old original line was the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, which came through there about 1850.

MARY: Right.

LEE: And St. Mary's Church was built by a lot of the Irish railroad workers, but then it became the Southern - now it's the Norfolk-Southern - but it's the same general alignment, and at that point, where the bridge is, it's in the exact spot where the old railroad was.

MARY: And there were enough trains crossing there - that made it easier or made more sense to have a bridge. . .

LEE: Oh yeah, back in those days, there were lots of trains - every day, so it was - any - there was a grade crossing at Sideburn. There was one at Burke, and there were accidents. There were two at Burke - one up, just below Paul Kincheloe's farm - they called that the upper crossing, and then another one right in Burke itself, but later they put signals on it and arms that came down and blocked the traffic.

MARY: But before that, you just. . .

LEE: You just took a chance.

MARY: You just looked and listened, right?

LEE: Yeah.

MARY: Right. Well, can you tell us - you said that your great-grandfather was born on Braddock Road - or grandfather - I wasn't sure?

LEE: No, I was.

MARY: You were born there.

LEE: And my mother was. My grandfather bought a house there in 1905, and he had a shop and then later became an auto mechanic and his shop was right beside his house, and we kept that house until - in the early '70s and now it belongs to the VFW.

MARY: Oh really.

LEE: They own it and my granddaddy paid $500 for it and the house. . .

MARY: That was 1905?

LEE: 1905. The house had been built in 1899 by Frank Gibson and then they moved to D.C. - the Gibson's did - and my granddaddy bought it. He bought his note from Dr. Brooks who had the note on the place.

MARY: Okay, I've heard of Dr. Brooks before. He actually worked up until the day he died.

LEE: Absolutely, he died at Harlow Rice's house. MARY: Right. Well, tell me a little bit about your grandfather and what brought him to this area.

LEE: Well, he was born here.

MARY: Oh, he was born here?

LEE: Yeah, my granddaddy was born on Braddock Road, where the Trinity School sits now. It was my great-grandfather, Robert Taylor - he leased that farm from Anna Watkins, and all his children were born there, and he farmed it 'til, probably - oh, 1912 or 15 and then he moved down towards the Merrifield area, and - but, of course, that was all farm. That whole area around there was nothing but farms and woods, and he just never left the area. He stayed right where he was born. My grandmother was born just a couple miles down Ox Road, but her family - my grandmother's mother's family - my great-grandmother - her family had been here since 1678 - when they got some land grants - the Simpsons did.

MARY: Oh, the Simpson family, I've heard of them.

LEE: Yeah, we come from Thomas Simpson, who bought the oldest house standing in Fairfax County, and it's still there.

MARY: That's the Silas Burke. . .

LEE: No.

MARY: No?

LEE: No, it's not. He sold it in 1734.

MARY: Okay.

LEE: Thomas Simpson did - to Catesby Cocke who was the first clerk of the court in Fairfax County, and at the time he bought it - in 1734 - Catesby Cocke was the clerk of Prince William County - clerk of the court. . .

MARY: Right.

LEE: And he came over in 1742 and became the clerk in this county.

MARY: He - how do you spell her name? Was it - I'm hearing a woman's name that you're saying - the clerk's name?

LEE: It's a man.

MARY: Oh, it's a man.

LEE: Catesby Cocke. C - A - T - E - S - B - Y. C - O - C - K - E.

MARY: Go a little bit slower here.

LEE: C - A - T - E - S - B - Y.

MARY: S - B - Y.

LEE: You can recheck that spelling.

MARY: Okay.

LEE: And then his last name was Cocke - C - O - C - K - E.

MARY: Okay.

LEE: And he was the first clerk of the court.

MARY: What I was hearing was Kate - like Kate. . .

LEE: No, Catesby.

MARY: Catesby, okay.

LEE: Catesby Cocke.

MARY: All right, and you said that that house was still. . .

LEE: It's still standing. It's on Brownmont Boulevard.

MARY: Brownmont Boulevard.

LEE: Down in the Gunston Hall neighborhood.

MARY: Oh, okay. All right.

LEE: And we're pretty certain that Thomas was living there as early as 1722 - Thomas Simpson - and it's part of the Belmont Plantation that Thomas had and then - so that was my grandmother's side. On my granddaddy's side - his ancestor, Daniel Taylor, was farming out on Braddock Road, where the Ponds of Clifton is now. He had about - almost 400 acres there, but he died during the Civil War, 1864 - Daniel did - at old age - he wasn't in the war. And then he passed on down to a couple of his boys and then it got out of the family after his last son died in 1915 - Thomas Taylor.

MARY: Were they dairy farmers or. . .

LEE: General farmers.

MARY: General farmers.

LEE: Yeah, he had a big inventory in 1860 - in a cultural census - I had looked that up, and his children - he had ten of them - so they just - they were all around.

MARY: Right, settled around here?

LEE: Yeah, all stayed in the area and my grandfather's father was born on Pope's Head Road, which is - I guess it's not in your district, but it's. . .

MARY: It's close.

LEE: Close, right down behind Jerusalem Church - there's a log house, the Henry Taylor's cabin, and there was another leased farm - they leased it from the Wheatley family in Alexandria for 99 years. That lease ran out shortly after the Civil War and - but anyways, we just stayed here.

MARY: Let me ask you, cause I've had lots of people ask me - how in the world Pope's Head got its name, and what I've heard is that there was a family's farm where Pope's were head of the stream or something.

LEE: No.

MARY: Okay, you tell us.

LEE: The Popes that lived on Braddock Road - was a woman named Beulah Pope, a buyer for a big chain store. She didn't come here until, probably, right after World War II.

MARY: Relatively newcomer.

LEE: Yeah. But then she lived on Braddock Road.

MARY: Okay.

LEE: There was a Pope's Head Baptist Church in 1770 and it was named for the stream, Pope's Head Creek, which starts back in the present day field house of George Mason University, and it runs to Bull Run. It merges with Piney Branch, just down between Fairfax Station and Clifton. It becomes Pope's Head from then on until it gets to Bull Run. The road, no doubt, was named after the stream was named. The stream was named real early. It shows up in some real early surveys. Now the only theory I have is that there was a surveyor, named Pope, who owned a piece of land up, but he abandoned - well it was a grant - you know, he never bought it - he turned that land over to a Dodson and a Jenkins. That's the only Pope I've ever heard mentioned that was anywhere near. . .

MARY: The area.

LEE: The end of that stream. But nobody really knows.

MARY: Right.

LEE: Nobody really knows. I've heard all sort of theories, but nobody that I know knows where it got its name, but I know the stream was named first. In 1770 Richard Major preached at the Pope's Head Baptist Church, which no longer exists, but it's mentioned in Robert Sample's book on Baptists in Virginia, and - but normally the old Baptists named their churches after a nearby nature location, like streams and that sort, cause there was a Baptist church also, so - but I think the stream was named first, and then the road was named, but I never knew of anybody named Pope connected with that area, other than that person that had an early grant - but it was clear down on the Occoquan.

MARY: So it would be near the beginning of it.

LEE: Well, it would be near the end of Pope's Head.

MARY: Right.

LEE: See, Pope's Head runs into Bull Run, which than becomes Occoquan after the two run together, so after Occoquan and Bull Run run together.

MARY: Right.

LEE: So, nobody - well, maybe. . .

MARY: Will find it out. Well, it certainly has a reputation for being a very windy road.

LEE: Yeah. It was a dirt road when I was a kid.

MARY: Oh really.

LEE: Mmm hmmm, gravel road - so was the road to Clifton.

MARY: Was it two lanes or one lane?

LEE: It was a lane and a half. (laughter)

MARY: A lane and a half.

LEE: You had to move over if you met somebody.

MARY: Okay. Well, there's also a legend in the area that many kids have grown up with - about the Bunny Man. Can you tell us what you know about the Bunny Man? LEE: Well, I know that there was never anybody killed. I know it had nothing to do with the - where Colchester Road runs under the Southern Railroad.

MARY: Not the bridge area, right?

LEE: Absolutely not. Some kids from around Clifton, I understand, had put a bunch of erroneous information on a web site and made that stuff up about rabbits being hung up and people being killed at an insane asylum, and there has never - that guy even mentions a library in Clifton - you can check it out (see, he says), but there's not a library in Clifton. There never was an insane asylum there. There's a poor house there, but the incident that started this happened - if I remember right, in the 60's - cause I retired from the police department in '79 - it happened while I was working. A young couple were parked in the vicinity of the - what we call Harrison's Crossing, where Guinea Road went over the railroad - it's now close to where the present, the New Roberts Road passes. Supposedly, a guy in a rabbit suit hit their windshield with a hammer or a hatchet and broke the windshield and they fled and he fled. I never believed it, but that's where the story started and it's absolutely. . .

MARY: Exaggerated.

LEE: Yeah, it got that story about the people killed, which is absolutely false.

MARY: It's become a campfire story.

LEE: Yeah, and it's just not true.

MARY: Yeah.

LEE: And I'm not even convinced that the young couple saw what they said they saw.

MARY: Yeah.

LEE: They may have been covering up for something else.

MARY: Well, it makes a good story.

LEE: Yeah, but it's gotten out of hand and our friend at the Virginia Room, Brian Conley, I think has pretty much debunked all the things that are mentioned in that web site.

MARY: Well, apparently I've also read that other localities are picking up the story and making their own - I guess we'd call it an urban legend - about the Bunny Man, so he's hopping around other places.

LEE: And he probably never existed.

MARY: Yeah. Well, could you tell us what it was like during World War II in this area?

LEE: Well, as I say, I lived right in the village. Mr. Jim Lockhoff had the general store and my dad had worked for Mr. Lockhoff prior to my dad getting the job at the work house, down near Lorton, and we had ration books. I have our whole family's still at home, with those stamps in them that you had to tear and take to the store to buy various things - some things, meat, for instance and butter and things like that were rationed, and a lot of our books still had a lot of stamps in them. We didn't use them, (I'll tell you why) but Mr. Lockhoff also had scrap metal drives at the store and a couple of us neighborhood boys - we'd take a wagon and any kind of old metal scrap we could gather up - we'd haul it up to his store outside, pile it up, and then somebody came and got it. We weren't paid for it. It was just a. . .

MARY: Patriotic thing.

LEE: One of those volunteer things - but we had our own cow. We raised our own pigs and that sort of thing, so we had our own milk and butter, so we didn't have to use those stamps at the store. We didn't buy at that store anyway.

MARY: But they were issued. . .

LEE: To take to the store.

MARY: To every family?

LEE: Yeah, everybody - each member of the family had a book.

MARY: Right.

LEE: And the tokens were a percentage of a stamp. They were like change.

MARY: Okay.

LEE: Then my dad - I remember on the back of our old car, there was a sticker for gas - you had to have a number. It was an A-D - or that sort of thing - and depending on your job, that told them what kind of a gasoline sticker. . .

MARY: How much gas. . .

LEE: How much you could buy, but his - at that time - he was a guard at the work house, so he had to go to work, so he had a - I think it was an "A" sticker on the back of the car so. . .

MARY: So he probably got more gas.

LEE: He might have got a little more than somebody that. . .

MARY: Cause that had been what - about ten miles drive?

LEE: Yeah, a little over - to there. MARY: And when you talk about the village at Fairfax Station, can you describe for us where it was and what it looked like?

LEE: Well, it's actually still there. St. Mary's Church and then a few houses - some of the older houses are still there - my grandmother's. The house my dad built in '36 is still there.

MARY: What streets are they located on?

LEE: They're on Vogue Road.

MARY: Vogue Road, okay.

LEE: And Clarence Collier - his house is still there. The old John Harrison house, Barney Ford's house, his sister, Gussy - her house is still there. Mr Chesley's house - the rectory of St. Mary's Church, which was Ecca Swetnam's house.

MARY: They ran a store.

LEE: He had a store.

MARY: In Burke.

LEE: Well no, that was his brother's.

MARY: Oh, okay.

LEE: That was Charles Swetnam's. He had a store in Burke. Ecca had the store in Fairfax Station.

MARY: How do you spell Ecca?

LEE: E - C - C - A.

MARY: Okay. That's an unusual name.

LEE: Yeah, Ecca - he died in 1910 and then Dr. Brooks bought the store.

MARY: So when I'm envisioning the village, I have to think in terms of the front of St. Mary's Catholic Church.

LEE: Yes, yes, cause the back of the church, it was fields.

MARY: Okay, all right, so the village is off of, what we consider, 123.

LEE: Yes, it's to the right of the present 123. You go down Fairfax Station Road - then the Hamil house was the first one on the left, after you came down and gotten sight of the church - Hamils and the Cunninghams donated the land for St. Mary's. It was built in 1858 and then the road went down to the bridge or made a right and went up to the store, and Mr. Lockhoff had the store. Well, it was the same site as the Swetnam store site, but it burned - the old store burned in '20 - I think in April of '24, but I'd have to check that to make sure, but at the time it burned, Dr. Brooks owned it, and someone was managing it, and then in 1917 St. Mary's Church bought the old Swetnam house, the Ecca Swetnam house, and made it a parsonage for the priests and the other - they rented out a couple of apartments in it. It's a big house, and it's still used as a rectory. And then Mr. Lockhoff's store - then he built a house in 1939 next to the store - opposite from the rectory - then Mr. Crews's house and the Mock house, which later was Dick Thayers, but that encompassed, what we called, the village.

MARY: Okay. So it included, maybe, fifteen-twenty families.

LEE: Yeah, and Thomas Randolph Swetnam had a house next door to Ecca and it's still there. It's been remodeled a couple of time, but it's still sitting there.

MARY: Let's go back to World War II - do you remember air raid drills or airplane watching or anything like that?

LEE: Yeah, I remember Mr. Chesley, who was the rural mail carrier, was - I guess - appointed the air raid warden, as air raid warden, and there was a siren - it was a hand-cranked siren and you were supposed to have your blackout shades or your lights out when dark came and for years I had an air raid warden helmet that came from the store. I can't find it. I don't know what happened to it. And there was - at the corner of Chapel Road and 123 - which is called Buck's Corner, in the old terminology - before that, it was called Sangster's Crossroads (during the Civil War) - there was an airplane spotting tower there for a while, right on a piece of land.

MARY: And for how - how high was it?

LEE: It wasn't very high. I can't. . .

MARY: Two stories maybe?

LEE: Yeah, two or three stories, made out of wood.

MARY: And volunteers would go up there?

LEE: No, they actually had a man there who was - I think he was from Fort Belvoir.

MARY: Oh.

LEE: Part of the time, anyway.

MARY: Right, so somebody who was official?

LEE: Yeah, yeah, and - but they did use volunteers, and, of course, as a kid, I remember - I wrote to a couple of the neighborhood guys that were away - older boys - Jim Mahoney, who later became one of my bosses at the police department - he was in the SeaBees. I remember writing him and to the Owens - a couple of the Owens' boys.

MARY: Did you use V-mail?

LEE: Yeah, they had a little thin envelope that - writing to a serviceman - I think it went to - you know, I don't know how they handled the mail because all we did was - the post office was in Lockhoff's store. He had one corner of the store, as you went into the door - right hand corner was the post office - and we just came up there and whatever stamp it took, you know. Regular mail was three cents.

MARY: Right, three cents back then.

LEE: But I do remember writing - my mother would say - you all come write these guys letters so we'd do it.

MARY: And you were in elementary school at that time, and did you have stamp drives?

LEE: Yes.

MARY: We have to explain to the younger generation what a stamp drive is - cause all they think about is, maybe, food stamps.

LEE: Yeah. Well, you could buy these savings stamps and put them in a book, and when you got your book full, you could trade it for a bond - you know, a certain amount.

MARY: Right, which is like a little certificate type of thing.

LEE: Yeah, the same as the Series E bond type that we have now - and I cannot remember - I think the stamps were ten cents, but it was just a nice little booklet that had little places where you put all the stamps and you filled a page and you turned it and kept filling - but I brought in a picture. I went to Fairview School, which is just across the track out of your district, I suppose, but of one of the stamp drives in 1944 and they put a flag on the pole with the American flag under it. They had this flag, but it was kind of an important thing.

MARY: It was basically helping out the government.

LEE: Yeah.

MARY: Cause they were actually giving money. . .

LEE: They were borrowing money from us, actually.

MARY: Yeah, and when you cashed in your book, you bond didn't mature for a certain. . . LEE: Right.

MARY: . . .number of years.

LEE: Yes, and actually, it was called a war bond.

MARY: Right, right, but then when it matured, you actually got back a little bit more.

LEE: More money than you. . .

MARY: Invested in your stamps.

LEE: Right.

MARY: Cause when I started elementary school in '55 or '56, they were still doing it - stamp drives. I guess they still needed them for the war. I don't know - they didn't call them war bonds, but we. . .

LEE: Yeah, I think they were what they called Series E. . .

MARY: Savings bonds.

LEE: Series E Savings bonds, but it was a good thing and the community was pretty much behind everything that went on, and the school was kind of a community center, even though it didn't sit in the village - there had been a - now I forgot to tell you this. The - what I call, the Village of Fairfax Station - cause it never was a town - never was incorporated, but it had a post office - for a period of time, it was called Swetnam, Virginia, named for Mr. Swetnam, who had the store and he had the post office, and I think I have a few letters at home that are postmarked "Swetnam," and then it reverted back to Fairfax Station - before my time even.

MARY: Right.

LEE: And it still has a post office. Now - after Jim Lockhoff died, his wife, Lena, ran the store and the post office for a while, and then a couple other people did - my cousin ran it for a while, but she built - closed in a porch on her house and had the post office at her house during the '51/'52, along in there, and then later they put the post office back in the old store building - they had the whole building there.

MARY: So was this like a general store that we've seen with - almost food and hardware stuff?

LEE: Oh yeah, yeah. The store was pretty prominent. He had a good size feed ride - that he delivered feed to farmers, and that's what my dad did for him. He worked in the store and he also drove a feed truck. You could buy - anything you could buy normally at a big store because he's have shelves full of canned goods. Sugar and flour and that sort of thing, in those days were in a bulk bin under the counter, and you pulled the bin out and they weighed it out for you. MARY: Did they have the penny candy, and all the kids drooled?

LEE: Penny candy. Some of it was two cent for a penny.

MARY: Yeah.

LEE: Mr. Lockhoff was good to us kids. My cousin and I would be building something - a fort or whatever, and we'd have a few pennies and we'd go up to Mr. Lockhoff and say - we need some nails. Well, he'd give us a great big handful of nails for two cents.

MARY: Wow, wasn't that. . .

LEE: He would practically give them to us, but his son and I and daughter - we're still friends. They still live in the area.

MARY: Getting back to World War II, I heard that there were German Prisoners of War, or POWs, that were - actually used as day laborers in the area.

LEE: Right.

MARY: Can you tell us about that?

LEE: The camp was an old state road camp up on Lee Highway, and it - there's been some confusion about where it was located, but it was just about at the corner of the, present day, Waples Mill Road and Lee Highway. There's a Sears Roebuck house on the corner that was owned by a family - Rosemont - and next door is now a storage facility - Shurguard, I think. That is where the prison camp was.

MARY: So it wasn't what we call Camp Washington?

LEE: Oh no, that pre-dates that. No, a long time before - that was called Black Lantern Inn before it was called Camp Washington. This was what was commonly called an Old Camp Thirty by the present Camp Thirty, which is now vacant - was up at West Ox Road and Lee Highway.

MARY: Okay. But when you're saying it used to be a state camp. . .

LEE: Prisoners.

MARY: Oh, I see.

LEE: Road gangs. Uh huh, but they brought those German prisoners here and the local farmers could - you could get one, two, three for a day to work on your farm. Now I do not know who paid who for their - cause my dad brought two of them to our house for lunch one day. We had - we were working - or he was - of course, I was tagging along - I was a kid - I always went up there too. He was helping Mrs. Kidwell on the Dr. Brook's farm and lunch time came - they usually brought a sandwich with them from the camp, but it wasn't very - it didn't look very tasty.

MARY: Right, and they're doing hard labor.

LEE: Yeah, and so my dad and I and my brother - we went home for lunch from Dr. Brook's farm and we brought those two men with us. They were young men and my mother fed them the lunch that we had, and I remember one of them asking her if - by gesture more than anything. . .

MARY: Cause they couldn't speak English.

LEE: . . . if he could put sugar in his milk. And, of course, she said he could, but he pointed to a knife and told me that was called a messer, and a glass of water there was wasser, and I remember that incident, probably, as well as having them there. But they seemed all right. I mean, they were probably glad to get out of the place and come out to work on the farm, and people - my dad treated them good. I suppose everybody else did. Mr. Haight, who had a farm where the Fairfax Country Club is now, on 123 - he would get them to work. That was a dairy farm - he had a dairy farm, and at one time Fairfax was the leading milk producing county in the state of Virginia.

MARY: I read that.

LEE: Yeah, and there were well over a hundred. . .

MARY: Dairy farms.

LEE: . . .128 or 130, somewhere like that - they were actually working dairy farms.

MARY: Well, did you have any fear of these soldiers?

LEE: No, no, none.

MARY: You didn't have to worry about. . .

{BOTH SPEAKING AT ONCE]

MARY: Now how old were you at that time?

LEE: Well, that would have been in '45 probably.

MARY: Yeah, towards the end of the war.

LEE: Yeah, and so I would have been nine or ten.

MARY: Okay, but you weren't worried.

LEE: No, I wasn't worried a bit. It was kind of - we were just - kids were kind of fascinated. Here are these guys who had been fighting over there and there were just like people. (Laughter)

MARY: Yeah. They didn't have horns or anything like that.

LEE: No, no, no. They were very pleasant.

MARY: What about, you know, we think about in the '30s and '40s of hobos riding the trains. Do you have any memories about that?

LEE: Yeah, a couple incidents I remember. Our next door neighbor at that time - I remember them coming up to her house and she gave - there was one man and I remember her bringing out a couple sandwiches to him, and I know he had walked up from the railroad, cause we were within sight of the railroad. In fact, we lived close enough that when the locomotives were operating, you could get a cinder in your eye up at our house from the. . .

MARY: From the steam engines.

LEE: Steam engines, yeah. When the wind was blowing from the south, it would blow that - it would get on the ladies' sheets they had hanging on the lines and then when diesels came it was - they were a different sound, but you got used to the trains, and there were a lot of trains daily, but they were coming every day and at night and it wouldn't even wake you up at night when they came by.

MARY: You could just sleep right through it.

LEE: Sleep right through it, yeah.

MARY: And you said there was another story about hobos, or not?

LEE: Well, I just remember that incident and then you'd see them occasionally, walking along, and they'd come up to the store, but not any great amount.

MARY: These are people who jumped onto the. . .

LEE: Yeah, I'm assuming they hopped the train. Now my daddy came here in 1926 from Louisiana to work at Ravensworth Farm and his next brother to him, Uncle Dwight, came up in the early 30s to see my dad and he hopped a train in Louisiana and rode up here.

MARY: Wow.

LEE: But my dad and his - an older brother of theirs that lived here also at Sideburn, at that time - they gathered up enough money to buy him a train ticket to ride home.

MARY: A ticket to go home. (laughter) Wow. Now what did your dad do at the Ravensworth Farm? LEE: Mr. Allen was the farm manager and he had been my dad's high school teacher in Louisiana and asked him - wrote to him and said, if you'll come up and work, we'll pay your way up if you work a year. If you don't like it, we'll pay your way back. So he came up February of '26 and met my mother, who was raised there at Fairfax Station, and he stayed here.

MARY: Wow, cause I was going to say, I think the Ravensworth Mansion burned.

LEE: It burned in August of 1926, uh huh.

MARY: Right.

LEE: But they kept running the farm, yeah.

MARY: Because the relatives of the Lee family stayed there in another building.

LEE: Yes, yes, yes.

MARY: Until - well, she sold it to a developer.

LEE: Yeah, yeah. That was a shame and it was thought that it may have been arson, but I don't think anybody was ever convicted of anything on it. A young man that lived there, or worked there - they thought maybe he had set it, but who knows. Those old buildings were fire traps sitting anyway. And it burned. . .

MARY: He said he was arrested - his name was Russell Wood.

LEE: That's right, but they thought he was arrested for stealing some wine - I mean, to cover up - he said cover up from stealing wine.

MARY: But I haven't been able to find anything that says when he went to trial or anything.

LEE: Yeah, and then Mr. Nelson was working there and he was a coachman - he had been, and his name was even mentioned, but I don't think anybody had - they never convicted anybody that I'm aware of. They got a lot of stuff out of the house that didn't burn - picture, paintings, furniture and stuff like that. If I remember right, that was August of '26.

MARY: Right.

LEE: My dad also worked for Mr. Lake who had the old Burnside house. It was sort of like an experimental farm there. He raised various ornamental crops. They raised crops and made syrup there.

MARY: I just had a question, just to follow up on something you said is - how is the world did a high school teacher from Louisiana end up at the Ravensworth?

LEE: Well, not only that - he was raised in Illinois, but he and my dad stayed friends until they both - until they died, and Mr. Allen's remaining children are still friends of mine. He just decided - oh, well, Mr. Allen had lived in Louisiana after he left Illinois and my dad was a big guy and a hard worker, and he knew him - he had taught my dad in the 9th grade there, so Mr. Allen liked to kind of move around, so he wound up here managing that farm, which was probably a pretty good job in those days.

MARY: A lot of acres.

LEE: Yeah, and they just remained steadfast friends.

MARY: That's a neat story.

LEE: Yeah, and he still has - Mr. Allen still has some children that are living and they're friends of ours yet. They're older than me, but we've kept pretty close contact. We even email now with one of his older daughters.

MARY: We certainly have changed the way we - I was thinking about kids - we were talking in some of these interviews, and talking about telephone party lines - these kids have no understanding.

LEE: Real party lines.

MARY: Yeah - have no understanding as to what it was like. There was a forest fire that started - we think around 1941. I know that they brought prisoners, and you called it the - you don't call it a prison - I forget what you. . .

LEE: Well, there were two separate places at Lorton. Lorton was the prison, had the wall all around it, and had the farm - I mean, next door was the farm. The distinction was the amount of prison time that someone got a sentence to. The workhouse, which was right out on 123, where the Fairfax Water Authority has built some new buildings that kind of match the old work house buildings - that's built over, what was called, a women's division. My dad worked at the left side of the road, at the work house, and if they got up to one year from the D.C. courts, they went to the workhouse.

MARY: So sort of like a minimum - what they call a minimum security prison today?

LEE: Yeah, but they would take those prisoners from the workhouse and work the fields - work the farms. They had a dairy. They had chicken houses, big ones. They had a hog farm. They raised lots of corn, tomatoes and had a pretty sizeable dairy herd there, but then over off - well, you can get to it off of Silverbrook Road too - where the walled prison was - people had - they had served long sentences there, and there were different sets of employees - worked for the same outfit, but you either worked at Lorton or at the work house. My dad worked at the work house.

MARY: Okay, and. . . LEE: And he brought prisoners out to that fire - a couple, maybe three days of - as far as I recall, as a kid, it lasted three or so days - burned all through that region of, now, Burke Lake, and they would take the prisoners out, and other guards - he wasn't the only one - and they'd set what they called fire breaks. They'd go ahead and burn a strip under control burning to try to keep it from getting any further and they dug ditches and backfires. Backfires is what they would do - call for the control burning, and. . .

MARY: Okay, cause there weren't fire hydrants.

LEE: No, no. What they had - Fairfax had a couple of engines - Fairfax Company 3 - and everybody was called in to it, and I don't know if the - see, that was right during the - well, it was spring of '41, I guess, and so we hadn't gotten into the war yet.

MARY: Not yet.

LEE: So, there could have even been some people from Fort Belvoir used in it. I don't recall, but that was old Camp Humphries.

MARY: Right.

LEE: That was a military camp called Camp Humphries before it was Belvoir, but I remember being afraid the fire was going to come on up close to where we lived, but I don't remember it crossing the railroad. I think it stayed all - what I would call - just generally south of the railroad towards the Lorton area, but it burned a lot of acres.

MARY: The farm that you talked about at Lorton, where was that food going? Was it feeding the prisoners or. . .

LEE: Well, yeah, they - and I suppose they had a market - must have - cause there's no way they could have used all of the milk products there, but they used it for the prison population and they also had a machine shop which was an industry. One of my cousins was the head of that machine shop industry and they actually bid on jobs and I remember - Harry Collier was his name - they made some of the cannons, reproduction cannons - the carriages that the cannon barrels were on, for Gettysburg and places like that, and it was - I suppose they could outbid a lot of people. (laughter) But those prisoners that worked in there - they got a certain amount of credit at that machine shop. They had a blacksmith shop.

MARY: And when you say credit - like they could then spend. . .

LEE: Well, I don't know whether they were paid, but there was an incentive for them to do a job.

MARY: Okay.

LEE: They had a brick yard. They manufactured brick to build those buildings with. It was down on the river. They baked them - had kilns to make their own brick. They had their own water system.

MARY: Now this was the D.C. . .

LEE: That was all part of the D.C. jail system.

MARY: Right, which is now - they're going to tear it all down.

LEE: Yeah, it's gone now. It's going to be houses and parks and that sort of thing.

MARY: Yeah, townhouses and all sorts of things.

LEE: Yeah, but it was a pretty big deal when it started because a lot of the neighborhood men got jobs there and this was - my dad went there in 1940 - and got paid $100 a month and he was glad to get a job paying that kind of money.

MARY: Yeah, because the Depression and all. . .

LEE: Yeah, and to get pay - regular pay - you had some benefits as well, and that's where he stayed and retired from there.

MARY: Wow. There was something that somebody mentioned and I didn't write it down - something about garbage trucks and having to cover over garbage trucks - had to do with your grandfather, where he lived - Florence, who was talking about this, said be sure and ask. . .

LEE: Who was that?

MARY: Florence Naeve.

LEE: Oh.

MARY: She said that he had to cover over it with white sheets, something, so that people wouldn't see - I thought she said garbage trucks.

LEE: Oh, oh, no. I think I know what she's talking about.

MARY: Okay?

LEE: Maybe. No, it wouldn't involve my grandfather, but it's that place where Trinity School is. . .

MARY: Yeah, she said it was at Trinity School, yes.

LEE: Yeah, I know what she's talking about. A guy named Audric LaBelle, lived in the house that's - not the house my granddaddy was born in - it was a little old frame, two-story building, that's been gone - I never saw it, but up on the hill was a better house, and Mr. LaBelle lived there. He started a septic tank pumping business called Suburban Sanitary Engineers, cause he thought it would sound better - you know - nobody knew what that was. (laughter) Well, when he was having a party there at his house, if the trucks were coming back in from working during the day, and there would be - he'd have guests there - they would cover that truck up with a big cloth so they couldn't see. . .

MARY: So they couldn't see. . .

LEE: Even what was written on it.

MARY: To know what was in the truck. Oh my gosh. Oh, that's neat. What time period was that, do you know?

LEE: Oh, that was in the '50s.

MARY: 1950 - wow. Times have changed. Well, I guess there still are septic tanks in our area.

LEE: Oh yeah, yeah. There are still some and several - that company was later sold and then it was sold again, and - but there's still a need for it. The County requires it be pumped every five years whether they're working good or not so. . .

MARY: I was amazed there was a house in Fairfax recently, burned to the ground, because the fire hydrant was two miles away, and you don't think of that anymore.

LEE: No, no.

MARY: But this was south of Burke Lake Road, or Burke Lake Park, and the closest hydrant was two miles away, and the house got hit by lightning.

LEE: Oh yeah, that big house that just burned.

MARY: Yeah, a million dollar house, so - well, we definitely have improved our lifestyles.

LEE: Well, I suppose, but I'm not too sure I wasn't happier back then in those old days cause we had no - there was no such thing as a traffic jam.

MARY: Right.

LEE: They built the theater in Fairfax - we used to have to go to Occoquan or Falls Church to the movies. There was an old theater, called the Lyric, in Occoquan.

MARY: And the State Theater.

LEE: And the State Theater, and the Lee in Falls Church, but Mr. Higgenbottom built a theater in Fairfax around '46 and we would sometimes hitchhike or walk up to the theater - it would be about four miles from here, from my house. Well, when the movie was over at nine, you had to get back out on 123 to catch a ride. If you stayed till the next movie was over, there'd be no cars, no traffic, and you'd have to walk home, so we learned.

MARY: That's a long way.

LEE: So we learned to. . .

MARY: Go to the early show.

LEE: Go to the early show or ride our bikes. We could ride our bikes and leave it outside the theater and it would still be there when we came out.

MARY: Now where was that theater?

LEE: It's now a Toyota dealer on Lee Highway.

MARY: Okay, so there were - was it Route 50 and Lee Highway?

LEE: Yeah, almost at the corner. Vincent's Store was on the corner and then the diner and then the theater.

MARY: Oh, where the old - it's not called the Silver Diner -

LEE: No. It was called Vincent's. . .

MARY: Lee Highway.

LEE: No, there's the. . .

MARY: I can see all these. I can't think of the name of it now.

LEE: You're talking about the one across the road that's still there - the Tasty Diner.

MARY: The Tasty Diner.

LEE: Yeah, we called that the 29 Diner, but there was another one, that's now - there's a Denney's on that site. That was a different building. It was called Vincent's Diner. Vincent owned the store on the corner and then Vincent's Diner and then the theater.

MARY: Okay, so it was the diner - that you called the Tasty.

LEE: It's still there.

MARY: Was that from your childhood too?

LEE: That was put in there about 1946.

MARY: Okay.

LEE: Old man Glasscott set it up, but there's not many of those.

MARY: Right, right, you don't see them.

LEE: But it was a pleasant place and area to grow up.

MARY: Well, we're just about out of time. Is there anything? I'm just going to check my notes here. I think we've pretty much - oh, baseball. We didn't talk about baseball.

LEE: Well, I had talked earlier and going home - I guess Suzanne had asked me about organized sports, but then driving home, I said well, shoot - we had kind of loosely organized baseball system. Dick Boyer lived near us - one of the houses in the village - and he started us playing ball. He was older, an older man - older than us, I mean - he was an adult. He started us playing in a league called the "14 and Under" and we played teams not real far away. The furthest one I remember, on that team, going to was down Carlin Springs Road in Arlington, but then after that, there was a group that was "17 and Under" league and then an unlimited age, so that some of the older guys played with us, and this would have started about '48 with the younger team and then in the early '50s, up to '54. I finished high school in '54, but when we got into playing that - we were the Fairfax Red Sox - at the unlimited age, and we'd play at Warrenton, Culpeper, Stafford and one team on the Braddock Road, but there was - we had to buy our own shoes and gloves and nobody got paid anything. It cost us a little money, but it was a good thing.

MARY: And where was your baseball field, where you practiced on?

LEE: We played at Fairview School. That was our home field.

MARY: Okay. So there weren't any night games?

LEE: No, the only time we had a night game was at Warrenton, and I don't remember whether it was at a high school or what, but we always played Sunday afternoons usually, and there was. .

MARY: Did you have a good crowd?

LEE: Pretty good. I mean, it was - if word got out, please would come watch and - no bleachers - they just stood and watched. There had been an earlier, kind of, a real well known ball team in the '30s - my cousin, Pete Keys, played on that and they drew big crowds. They charged admission and they had a ball field down here by where the parkway intersects 123 in a field that belonged to the Carroll family.

MARY: And did they have a name?

LEE: Well, they had "Fairfax" on their uniform because I had seen - I have a picture of that team and there had been an earlier - I'd seen one early picture in 1911 that had "Fairfax Station" like we did, but only one person in the crowd had that uniform on.

MARY: They were the only ones who could afford it. (laughter)

LEE: Yeah, but that was kind of a good summer for us, and Mr. Boyer did it all on his own.

MARY: That was before you had high school baseball?

LEE: No, they had baseball at that time, but this was. . .

MARY: This was during the summer time when you were out of school?

LEE: This was, kind of what you called, a sand lot type of thing.

MARY: Yeah, okay, when you're out of school.

LEE: Out of school, and loosely organized, but somewhat scheduled with various guys. My brother played on the older team before I did and - but it was something fun to do.

MARY: Well, thank you very much. This has been very interesting. I'm going to step in front of you and turn off the machines here.

LEE: Okay. We'll talk about these pictures, and you can add them in.