MEMORIES OF THE HOUSE ON THE ROAD

     My great grandparents Charles Wesley Shelton and Rose Anna Spencer Shelton came up from southwest Virginia and bought the property on Popes Head road and lived in the old house while a brand new home was built with the back of the new house butting up against the front porch of the old house.  It's been said that Great Grandmother was well off in her own right and that it was her money that bought the property.  I've never heard any description of the old house but my grandmother, born Anna Virginia Shelton and was called Ginny, told me about when she was a little girl and she and her cousin Nellie Spencer were playing on the upstairs landing with their dolls and Nellie fell out the window onto the  porch roof of the old house.  She wasn't hurt just surprised.

Rose Ann Spencer Shelton

     The house was wood framed and painted white with a mansard roof and a cousin also told me that the seams on the roof were painted red by Uncle Claude who was the eldest son.  There was a front porch and a kitchen porch and I spent many a day as a child dreaming on those porches and playing with my third cousins Bruce and Earl.  Uncle Harry, the brother that was closest in age to my grandmother inherited the house from his mother when she passed on January 1, 1946.  My grandmother inherited the 7.58 parcel next door where a house was built in the early 50's by my parents.  Uncle Harry used to give haircuts on the kitchen porch to all the boys in the family and probably half the males on Popes Head Road in the 1950's.  This is the house he raised his family in.
     Grandmother said her family moved up from Grassy Creek, Marion County, Virginia.  She came up in a wagon and said she held her cat on her lap all the way.  Her papa was a photographer and she said she helped him develop pictures.  I have a box full of glass negatives that were handed down to Grandmother from her older brother Byrl, then to Mom then to me.
     Great Grandfather was twice a widower when he met Great Grandmother.  He was in his thirties and she was eighteen when they married and she helped him raise his children from his first marriages and they had children of their own.  I knew Uncle Oscar who stayed close to his new half brothers and sisters and who loved his stepmother very much.  I've heard the story that when great grandmother was dying of cancer she told Oscar she thought she could hold down some squirrel soup and he got the shotgun and went out to get some squirrels for her.

Anna Virginia Shelton 

         I've written before about grandmother's family in a previous story about their runaway brother Brian I call "The Richest Shelton Known".  My grandmother was the next to the youngest of her family and was born in 1910.  She passed away at seventy-six years old in 1986.  
     The house on Popes Head Road was two story.  There were two front doors from the front porch with the first one leading into the parlor which was never used and the second door leading into the sitting room.  The parlor had three big windows that were side by side looking out on to the side yard giving a wide view and their was also a single window looking out the front of the house.  On one wall was a carved mantle but the room was heated by a bot bellied stove which set under it in the old days..
     The other front door from the porch was the door everyone used and it led into the sitting room.  The sitting room had a front window and two side windows and a staircase to the upstairs.  The room was heated by a black bot bellied stove and I remember it as a little girl with a coal bucket beside it and someone  maybe Uncle Harry stoking the fire.  It was in this room my Aunt Bill helped my mother make an angel costume for a play, "The Littlest Angel", when I was in second grade.  Aunt Bill was Uncle Harry's wife and I loved her very much.  The parlor and the sitting room were divided by great wooden paneled pocket doors that were always closed when grandmother was a little girl.  There were beautiful dark red velvet curtains hanging on each side of the entrance called portieres (por'-teers) which grandmother still had in a trunk when I was little.
       The only time the doors were open when Grandmother was little was for Christmas Day and if her parents threw a party.  A party would consist of opening the doors to the parlor and rolling back the rugs making a big dance floor.  A fiddler would play music and the adults would dance and then my great grandmother would serve a "midnight supper".  The supper would be a ham or fried chicken, salads, biscuits, and two cakes one chocolate and the other banana.  Grandmother said they'd put the cakes in a double boiler with a lid until it was time to set them out and they each one would perfume and flavor the other.  I imagine but Grandmother never said that cold sweet tea was served it being the table wine of the South and I don't know and it's never been said to me whether spirits were served.  This part of my family were never big drinkers.
     The kitchen is always the heart of the house and here is where me and my family would sit and visit with Uncle Harry and Aunt Bill when we would drive up from Alexandria in the years after WWII  and before the house was built on Grandmother's land next door.  I remember in the summertime sitting at the big table with the door and windows thrown open with just screens and millers flying around the ceiling light overhead in the evening because after all this was the country.  I loved listening to the adults talk.  When Grandmother was little and before electricity you canned food in jars and if you needed refrigeration you had a spring house.  A spring house was a shed over a spring or creek where you would set jars of food and milk and tea down in the water to keep them cool and prevent spoilage.  Mom told me about going down to the spring house one time and a snake was in a tree over the spring house after baby birds in a nest and she got out of there fast.
       I remember one time when we drove up and the road was still a gravel road and I was about three to five years old and when we pulled up all my cousins were standing in the road looking at a big dead snake.  Uncle Carroll, who was Momma's baby brother, and I walked out to see it and along came Robert Payne in the taxi cab he drove in Washington, DC and run over and squashed the snake.  Well, that dead snake splashed all up on and over me and Uncle Carroll and someone picked me up and ran with me to the house and as my mother, grandmother, and aunt were cleaning me up I heard them exclaiming "and it's even in her mouth!"   I remember my mom saying days later after taking me out of the bathtub that she could still smell that old dead snake in my hair.
     The fourth room on the ground floor had a door from the kitchen and a door to the parlor.  I don't know what it was used for when grandmother was a little girl but I suspect it was a dining room.  No one ever said but I know at different times over the years it was used as a bedroom.  When Great Grandmother was widowed and during The Great Depression she and Aunt Margarette (called Margui and pronounced with a hard G), slept here.  Margui was the baby of the family and I believe was five years younger than Grandmother.  Other members of the family returned home with their children during the hard times and occupied the four bedrooms upstairs and the attic room.  My own mother and  her two brothers lived with their grandmother when they were  little while my grandparents lived and worked in Washington, D.C.  Mom told me that every Friday she would tell all the kids at school that she was going to live with her parents and every Monday she had to go back to Fairview Elementary School at Fairfax Station.  The Great Depression was hard on little kids especially.
     The staircase from the sitting room led upstairs to a landing.  To the right you entered a bedroom that led into another bedroom.  If you turned left and walked down the landing there were two individual bedrooms and the end of the landing led to a small sitting room with a bay window looking out from the front of the house.  Off the upstairs sitting room was a door and then stairs to the attic.  The attic was long and narrow with a window that was just above the bay window of the sitting room.  Grandmother said the house was unusual for the time because the bedrooms had built in closets.  She also said that every family member had a trunk to keep at the foot of their beds.  Also, they had feather tick mattresses when Grandmother was little and the community got together and took a whole day to stuff and make new mattresses.  Mom said that those feather tick mattresses were so comfortable and you'd sink right in.  Another thing I loved that was left over from that time,when I was little, were patchwork quilts made from the cloth of men's wool suits.  They were heavy and boy they were warm.    
     Of course, the house being built sometime between 1915 and 1920, did not have an indoor bathroom and water for the kitchen was pumped from an outside well.  I remember when my uncle had a bathroom put in at the top of the stairs in the 1950's.  I've been in a lot of old houses where the bathroom was added way later than when the house was built.  In most cases a bedroom was made into a bathroom when the inside plumbing was installed.  In this case there was enough room in the landing at the top of the stairs to install a bathroom and this included the window that grandmother's cousin Nellie fell out of years before.  I don't ever remember the kitchen not having a running water sink but when I was little the outside  well pump  still worked.  I also remember using the outhouse when I was little which was down from the house on the way to the pasture and cow barn.
     When grandmother was little the family had a horse which pulled a carriage and her name was Maude and she had a baby whose name was Dixie.  Towards the end of her life Great Grandmother and Aunt Margui who was still in school went to live in Washington D.C.  where her older children were living and working.  Uncle Claude was a DC policeman and owned taxi cabs.  Uncle Harry was a bus driver and his wife Aunt Bill was a nurse at Sibley Hospital.  Uncle Kline drove cabs and Aunt Lena who had been a nurse at St. Elizabeth's Hospital was a homemaker with a large family.  They put all of Great Grandmother's household in the attic and left Maude and Dixie on the home place and leased out the house.  I understand they heard that the horses were being mistreated and the attic had been broken into so Great Grandmother and Aunt Margui returned to the country.
     As a little kid I lived next door in a house built by Grandmother's brother Byrl Shelton who was a local builder and who had built himself a beautiful home on Popes Head Road.  I spent as much time next door at Uncle Harry's as I did in my own home.  We kids especially liked to roam the fields, chase imaginary rabbits, play in the creek, and all of this with our boxer dog Mac as a constant companion.  This was the early 1950's until my parents moved us to The Town of Fairfax in 1958.  The catalpa tree in the side yard (also called a cigar tree) was the best place to climb and I swear my sister Linda lived in it all those childhood summers long ago.  We all belonged to Jerusalem Baptist Church out on Ox Road and Uncle Harry who was a deacon took Linda and I to church every Sunday.  I have such warm memories of being part of a warm close knit family.  My heart is full.    
     The original lot was almost sixty acres.  An acre was divided off and a house built for a widow lady with a daughter a long lime before I was born.  That home was occupied by the Dolingers when I was little and their daughter Nancy who was my age and good friend.  When my great grandmother died in 1946 the property was divided up into pretty equal plots inherited by my grandmother and her brothers and sisters.  All the lots were approximately 7.58 acres and all grandmothers family at one time or another have lived on the road.  Uncle Harry as I've said before got the plot with the house and he sold it to his son Bruce in the late 1970's and Bruce sold that house out of the family in the early 1980's.  The house burned to the ground about five to ten years ago and a new monster log cabin mansion has been built on the site.