Several Stories of Carrington House

By Annabel Hughes

I never found Carrington House, Carrington House found me.

When I first saw pictures of the house in the summer of 2003—sent to me in the mail by a realtor in Middleburg when I was living in Washington, D.C.—I’d never bought a house before, I’d never heard of Bluemont, and I’d never driven on a highway in America.

Shortly after I called her to say I wanted to see the house, I found the directions to Bluemont off the internet, I hired a car from M Street Avis, and set off with friends to claim what I sensed I knew was already mine.

Within five weeks of first setting eyes on Carrington House, I’d moved in. That I’d discover the house was in magnificent repair; that I could see the Blue Ridge Mountains from the back porch; that my neighbors would turn out to be the best I could hope for, were all just added bonuses.

Since moving out to Bluemont eight years ago from Washington, D.C. there have been many unexpected changes in my life.

Zimbabwe, my country of origin, has been destroyed by a dictatorial regime; my family broken apart and scattered to other countries after our commercial farm was stolen at gunpoint. Yet I have found a refuge here in Carrington House.

It is a place of safety and renewal, like the land beyond — like America itself, where in September 2009 I became a citizen. It is a place that has carried me through a deep catharsis, and the writing of my first book, a memoir called KUMUSHÀ–A Story of Home. It is a place that has beckoned me to let go of the past and put down new roots.

When I first gave these remarks as a talk at a Friends of Bluemont event, “If This House Could Talk” on November 8, 2009 at Whitehall Manor, my mother was in the audience, visiting me from Zimbabwe.

Former owner of Carrington, Joan Butler

Another special woman present at that event to give her perspective and answer questions was Joan Butler (pictured right).

Joan, along with her husband Scot, can claim full responsibility for transforming Carrington House into the beautiful place it is now. She and Scot bought Carrington House in 1966 for $7,500 and spent 16 years painstakingly restoring it. Such was their care and precision that, 30 years later, all I have to do is cosmetic repair and maintenance.

“J.H. Fugitt – Snickersville – May 5 1888.” Taken from Carrington House. The house across “the Pike” still stands. The curved lettering of the tavern’s “Entertainment Tonight” sign shows faintly mid-left

Carrington House is named for Englishman Timothy Carrington, who built it in 1827 and then died shortly after. I have visited his grave, which still stands in excellent condition in Ebenezer Church outside Bloomfield, Virginia. Whenever I drive past the cemetery I shout out a salutation of gratitude for creating what is to me a great gift.

By an interesting coincidence, my paternal great-grandmother, who lived in England, was also a Carrington. My English cousins all carry the Carrington name and were amazed to learn that I had bought an old house in Virginia bearing the same name. I have yet to explore the genealogy but feel sure that such were the remarkable circumstances in me finding the house, we are connected.

The Winchester Stage at Carrington House. Photographed by pioneering woman photographer, Frances Benjamin Johnson.

The history of Carrington House is well documented in articles and books about Bluemont, Loudoun County, and Virginia. In précis, therefore, let me highlight those aspects that triggered my own imagination. Like how Timothy Carrington’s widow went on to marry Alfred Glascock whose son, it is presumed, was the “Alfred Glascock Jnr” in Mosby’s Rangers during the Civil War. In my mind’s eye, I see Glascock and Mosby sitting in the house’s tavern—a tavern that existed for over a century — that today is my dining room. It’s fireplace and wooden floors, the boards worn and uneven, tell a story, at least to me, of talk about livestock and harvesting and military planning; of knocking back home-brewed whiskey and brandy; of fiddle-playing and boot stamping.

Meanwhile, in the adjoining drawing room, where the afternoon sun shines through the deeply set windows onto the Virginia heart-pine floors and the finely carved mantel—a mantel that in its intricacy illustrates a sophistication uncommon in a 19th-century rural village—I imagine I hear voices conversing in gentler, more temperate tones.

An unidentified gentleman stops his carriage at Carrington House around the turn of the century

Later, Carrington House went on to be called the Virginia House. It seems clear from these historic photos that the inn at Carrington House was an important stop in Snickersville for the stage coaches that served this region in the pre-automobile days at the turn of the century.

During Bluemont’s heyday as a resort town at the turn of the 20th century, Mrs. Mollie Weadon, who lived in the house from 1891 to 1944, ran a boarding house and was renowned for her cooking.

Abutting Carrington House by then was the Poston’s house, built in 1904, where my wonderful neighbor Betty Colbert has lived since she was three. The photograph (left) shows “Ma” Poston and Betty when she was little, which also shows how the kitchen of Carrington House exited directly into the Poston’s backyard.

Betty Colbert with “Ma” Poston

Betty told me she spent many an hour in the Carrington House kitchen with Mrs. Weadon’s venerable black cook called Louise Grayson. Ma Poston was herself assisted by another black lady called Suzy Neil, who lived in the old Snickersville Academy, a one-room log schoolhouse built in 1825, since divided into rooms for a dwelling, which sits the other side of the creek at the bottom of my garden.

I spent five years watching over the Snickersville Academy and mowing the grass for Tom Hatcher, until I helped to negotiate for the Hatcher family to deed it to the Friends of Bluemont in July, 2010.

Much later, when Betty was married to Sonny Colbert, Suzy’s daughter Margaret went into labor at the cabin when the rain was pouring down and the water was high. At 2 am in the morning, they asked Betty to drive Margaret to the hospital in Leesburg, but just outside Purcellville, she began giving birth to a baby girl in the car. Betty the Driver pulled to the side of the road in order to improvise as Betty the Midwife.

When later Margaret called her baby Dorothy there was much dismay in the Poston household for they all believed the baby should have been called Betty!

Since I’ve lived here I have met another of Margaret’s daughters called Ingrid Jewell, named for another well-known Bluemonter of days gone by. Jean Smith, the author who documented the history of Bluemont bought Carrington House from Mrs. Weadon’s heirs in 1948. Her love for the house is well illustrated in her book, From Snickersville to Bluemont: The Biography of a Village.

In 1969, Joan Butler, the mistress of Carrington House talks with Evelyn Johnson, the mistress of Clayton Hall on the front stoop of the Carrington House during the first annual Bluemont Fair

The Butlers

The next owners, the Butlers, restored the Carrington House in the late 1970s. The restoration not only won an award but also preserved one of Bluemont’s most treasured buildings.

Exterior Remodeling
Sonny Colbert sits with a pet behind Carrington House before the work began	Butler’s documentation shows scaffolding and demolition	The back of Carrington House was first stripped and then rebuilt
The stone pile for the addition came from the foundation of the store that used to stand beside Carrington House	Stripped of its exterior, the Carrington house is in transition	The remodeling and addition completed
Interior Remodeling
Early fireplaces		Restored fireplaces

The Butlers sold Carrington House to Barbara Sloat, who then sold it John and Gilda Montel in 1992. The Montels lived there for nine years, and Gilda said it was one of the happiest times of her life.

This photograph, taken from the lawn of Clayton Hall across Snickersville Turnpike, captures the sloping terrain so characteristic of Bluemont

And Then it Was My Turn to Live in Carrington House

The following excerpt from the prologue to my book testifies to my profound connection with the beautiful Carrington House:

“I stroked the curved lid of my mother’s Davenport desk. Ever since I was a child I’d claimed the desk as mine. Now it was—having just arrived from the port of Baltimore, delivered by a costly moving company used by foreign embassies in Washington, D.C. that my mother had insisted on hiring. She’d demanded an assurance that her beloved antiques she’d been abruptly forced to ship out of Zimbabwe arrived at my new home in Virginia safely.

“My inheritance, she’d announced over the telephone. Early. ‘Better you get these things now, or they’ll just be used for firewood.’

“The desk hadn’t arrived in the condition in which I’d seen it the previous March, when I’d gone home to scatter the ashes of my stepfather Bill—the final time I’d traveled back to Galloway, our family farm in Mvurwi in northern Zimbabwe, before being banned by Robert Mugabe’s government in September 2002. The walnut was scarred and stained pale in places—caused not by the long sea journey or the vehicular transfers either side but, Mum had warned, by overexposure to the bright, raw winter elements after being left outside on the lawn too long while waiting for the arrival of removal trucks from the capital, Harare.

“Six months before, in mid-August of 2003, I’d received a telephone call from my mother to say she’d been forced to pack up 30y years of her life after Paul, my younger brother, had been threatened at gunpoint by a retired major in the Zimbabwean army to vacate the farm in twenty-four hours.

“In a strangled voice, she’d told me how the major and his goons had terrorized the workers and looted Paul’s house—the Big House, as we called it, which my parents had designed and built in the 1970s—that she’d recently vacated following Bill’s untimely death to make way for Paul and his new bride, Katherine.

“The timing of this shocking news was unreal. Just days before, I in turn had called my mother to say I’d put a bid on an 1827 stone house in Bluemont, Virginia, a historic village at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I’d made a decision to buy my first home—to commit to grafting my African scion onto American rootstock—just before the land that had grown me was seized from my farming family’s guardianship forever.

“Carrington House, as it was called, was bigger than I needed as a single woman. I had no idea how my scanty furnishings with which I’d filled a two-bedroom apartment in downtown Washington, D.C. could possibly do it justice. But the mystical connection I felt to the place made me sure that in time I’d find a way. I knew it was where I belonged.

“It feels just like coming home….” The antique Davenport desk sent to Carrington House after Annabel’s family lost their farm at gunpoint in Zimbabwe in August, 2003

“Nothing broke on the journey over from Africa. Not the lead glass panels in the Victorian display cabinet, not a single china cup, not a crystal glass. Mum and her workers, along with the packers, had carefully wrapped each fragile piece in sheets torn from Zimbabwean newspapers—pages plastered with government propaganda blaming the country’s political and economic crises on sanctions imposed by Britain and the United States.

“On white farmers backing the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. On organizations like the Zimbabwe Democracy Trust, which, as its Executive Director, had brought me to America’s capital in the first place—to help steer through those targeted sanctions about which the Mugabe regime was so bitterly complaining.

“Nearly every item Mum had sent me was marked with a small sticky label on which she’d written a capital ‘A’. I ached at the thought of her emptying her house and, outside in the garden, forming three separate piles of precious things, according to their sticky labels: ‘A’ for Annabel, ‘P’ for Paul, and ‘W’ for William, my elder brother. It wasn’t a job she’d ever planned to do. Yet years before—long before the farm invasions started in 2000—my mother, ever practical, had decided to allocate her valuables to make it easier for my siblings and me, “just in case anything happened.” …

…Though Mum was sad to send away her cherished possessions, she was relieved they were coming here—to a house worthy of their elegance where they would be safe. For me, I grappled with the guilt and the pleasure of being surrounded by furniture and paintings and books I’d become so intimate with while growing up on an African farm thousands of miles away. It felt like I’d time-traveled the finest bits of Galloway into Carrington House, gratifying me at the expense of my mother. Yet, it was miraculous how every piece fitted so flawlessly. Like they belonged here. Like I did.

“When my mother later followed her furniture over to America on a visit in June 2004, the first words she voiced after she walked through the front door of Carrington House and saw all her things were: ‘It feels just like coming home, Annabel.’”