Published Articles

Docent Dispatch - December 2017

• Good bread and good drink, a good fire in the hall Brawn, pudding and souse, and good mustard withall:
  
  Beef, mutton and pork, shred pies of the best: Pig, veal, goose and capon and turkey well drest:
  
  Cheese, apples and nuts, jolly carols to hear, As then in the country is countedgood cheer.
  
  Thomas Tusser (c. 1520-1580)
  
  
  
  Christmas is come, hang on the pot, Let spits turn round, and ovens be hot; Beef, pork, and poultry, now
  
  provide To feast thy neighbors at this tide; Then wash all down with good wine and beer, And so with mirth conclude the
  
  Year. Virginia Almanac (Royle) 1765
  
  
  
  The two poems, written about 200 years and 3,000 miles apart, demonstrate that Christmas was kept much the same in
  
  mid-18th-century Virginia as it was in late 16th-century England.

Carlyle Connection - Fall 2017

• The landscape surrounding John Carlyle’s mansion house today is strikingly different in appearance from that of the eighteenth century. Not only has the contour of the land been altered beyond recognition, the structures that once stood in these areas have disappeared. Only crude outlines on insurance documents dating from 1796 represent these buildings, presumed to have been on the property during John Carlyle’s occupancy. Several of the structures lack any descriptive detail whatsoever, leaving their actual appearance and use to conjecture.

Docent Dispatch - November 2017

• Recent correspondence has shed new light on the provenance of the bed in the Master Chamber. The history of this item has shifted over the years, due to word of mouth or new finds in research. Originally, the donor of the bed informed Carlyle House staff that the family oral history said Sarah Fairfax brought this bed with her when she married John Carlyle. Recently
  
  Adam Erby discovered information at Mount Vernon, using the ledger that was keptby George William Fairfax, that supports this story instead of the bed being purchased at the Fort Belvoir auction. Below is his information that points toward this possible shift in interpretation:

Docent Dispatch - October 2017

• Whatever euphemism we use to personify our inevitable appointment with eternity (i.e., Angel of Death, Grim Reaper, or just simply Death), it does not diminish the tragedy, heartbreak, or fear associated with death. Colonel John Carlyle knew this
  
  all too well for the specter Death was a frequent visitor to his Alexandria home. From 1753 through 1780, the Angel of Death visited the Carlyles no less than nineteen times. At his residence on Fairfax Street, John mourned the loss of six of his eleven children, two wives, and at least ten of his enslaved “famely” until September 1780 when Death came calling for him. In the twenty-seven year period that John Carlyle and his family occupied his Aquia sandstone residence, there was a death associated with the household roughly every one and a half years.

Docent Dispatch - September 2017

• Whitehaven, today, is a modest city of about 24,000 people, located on the Cumbrian coast, in England’s northwest. It lies an hour's drive (40 miles) west of Carlisle, Cumbria's county seat--and only about 15 miles from the famed (and touristswamped) Lake District.

Restoration Lecture June 2017

• Notes
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Carlyle Connection - Summer 2017

• For the past four years, a small group of volunteers has been documenting the City of Alexandria’s alleys, an essential part of the City’s fabric. The alleys played a significant role in defining the character, landscape, and social history of the City. Yet City planning, development, and historic research often overlook these assets. Studies and reports tend to focus on the built landscape of the City, while generally neglecting to include, or even mention, the alleys. Alexandria’s historic alleyways suffer 
  
  from this lack of attention. Some alleys, like Shinbone Alley, were demolished for development. Others were incorporated into adjacent lots, sometimes illegally. Over the years, scores of alleys disappeared. The alley project seeks to survey and record all of Alexandria’s alleys as they exist today, in an effort to protect their very existence.

Docent Dispatch - August 2017

• Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Richard Henry Lee, George Mason, Patrick Henry…when thinking about the period before and during the American Revolution these names come up as some of the great Virginians who were involved in the 
  
  founding of our nation. While these men were great on their own accounts, there were other Virginian men who helped shaped our nation. Thomas Blackburn of Prince William County is one of these who history tends to glance over even though during the 1760s and 1770s, he was an important figure in American history.

Carlyle Connection - Winter 2017

• Thomas, the Sixth Lord Fairfax (1693- 1781), Baron of Cameron and Lord Proprietor of the Northern Neck in Virginia, controlled 5,282,000 acres between the Potomac and the Rappahannock Rivers. The Proprietary had been given to his ancestors by King Charles II in appreciation of their service to the crown during the Cromwell era. Thomas succeeded to the title when he was sixteen and gained full control of the Proprietary when his mother died in 1719. However, he left management of the Proprietary to agents like Robert “King” Carter during his early life. When Carter died, Lord Fairfax had his cousin, William Fairfax (1691-1757), transferred in 1733 from being Collector of Customs for Salem, Massachusetts, to being 
  
  Collector of Customs for the South Potomac. At the same time, Lord Fairfax appointed William Fairfax his agent for the Northern Neck Proprietary of Virginia. 

Carlyle Connection - Spring 2017

• Of the furnishings known or believed to have been in John Carlyle’s house in Alexandria, Virginia, none is more fascinating than Sarah Carlyle Herbert’s elusive spinet. Research confirms that, indeed, Sarah owned a spinet, that it was present in the Carlyle House both before and after her marriage to William Herbert and probably, that it remained there throughout her long life.

Docent Dispatch - July 2017

• After a fitful ride on the TransPennine Express through a mist-covered countryside, I arrived in Carlisle along with the sun’s first break through the gloom. Stepping out of Carlisle’s main rail station, a palatial neo-Tudor construction, I was immediately 
  
  barraged by the bustle of Court Square. Taxis, buses, and a crush of people were all about. And yet, despite the trappings of modernity, the city John Carlyle would have known as a boy began to take shape for me.

Docent Dispatch - June 2017

• Attic: During the Carlyle period, the attic was unfinished and probably used for storage. It’s possible that slaves may have slept up here, although the space was unheated. Green subdivided the attic into six rooms and added dormer windows to the front and rear elevations, making this a habitable space. He used the doors from the Carlyle first floor for these six rooms. Holes in the chimney indicate that Green used stoves to heat this area. It is unclear who lived in this space during Green’s time. It could have been some of his nine children, hired workers, slaves, or even overflow hotel guests.

Docent Dispatch - May 2017

• Embellishment indicates that the second floor rooms were much lower in the design hierarchy than the rooms downstairs.  The Carlyle family would have used the upper passage as an informal upstairs drawing room or parlor. It would have also held overflow guests or slave pallets on an as-needed basis. Instead of keeping the upper passage a large open space, James Green constructed a wall across the upper passage, running north and south, creating an additional room on the west side of the space. NOVA Parks removed that wall in the 1970s restoration.

Docent Dispatch - April 2017

• If folks driving by know about the legend of “Braddock’s Gold” they probably think the people lined up across the meadow waving their metal detectors across the ground are searching for it.

Docent Dispatch - March 2017

• Parlor: Like the dining room, the parlor retains its original embellishment. Although it is finely embellished, it is much simpler and more restrained than the more elaborate dining room. The walls are not paneled, the fireplace has a simple carved backband, the chair rail is simple, and the cornice is embellished with only a dentiled element. This hierarchy of design between the two most original rooms played an important role in the restoration of the house.

Docent Dispatch - February 2017

• To continue last month’s discussion, we will move to the interior of the mansion. Carlyle House has a typical full Georgian domestic floor plan, shown at the right, as it is double pile (two rooms deep), with stairs in the center passage. Notice that when you enter the house, your eye is immediately drawn to the impressive stair. That, of course, is on purpose. The guest would enter this fabulous space and wait to be announced to the Carlyle family. Houses at that time were divided into public and private space. Even middling families had this division of space. 

Docent Dispatch - January 2017

• As you all know, the background story of John Carlyle and his purchase of two lots in the newly-platted town of Alexandria, I will move right into the architecture without further preamble. The Carlyles finally moved into the house in August of 1753. Carlyle had anticipated that the building would be completed in 1752, and had the keystone carved to reflect that date, but several problems pushed completion of the mansion back a year.