A 1936 Postcard from Munich to Selsenhorst on the Blue Ridge

By Les Querry
Good friendships have marked the Blue Ridge Mountain community of unique historic homes since before the turn of the last century. Sometimes these relationships leave traces.

Picture postcard sent to Bluemont from Munich, Germany in 1936 from the Huntington’s of “Journeys End” to the Droops of “Selsenhorst.”

Mrs. Huntington was Frances Carpenter, daughter of Frank Carpenter, who built Joannaberg in 1896. Mrs. Droop was Elfrieda Sellhausen, the sister of Ernst Sellhausen, who built Seltsenhorst in 1903 (on what is now Seltenhorst Lane).

In 1928, Carpenter Huntington and her husband, William Chapin Huntington, a prominent journalist, bought 80 acres of property from Jeannette Scoville Aspinwall, her Georgetown neighbor in Washington, on which they built Journey’s End.

Mr. Droop is addressed on the card as “Kommerzeinrat” which is a tongue-in-cheek title of councilor of commerce.

Editor Susan Freis Falknor note:

We should also mention the engaging reminiscences of a 1919 summer stay at Joannasberg, near Selsenhorst. That summer a young woman named Josephine Lehman — who had come from Michigan to Washington D.C. to work as a “government girl” during World War I, visited Bluemont as the assistant of author Frank Carpenter and his wife Joanna. She stayed in the gracious stone house at 17939 Raven Rocks Road, part of the Bear’s Den Rural Historic District on the top of the Blue Ridge christened “Joannasberg” – from here, visitors could see across into four states: Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania.

Two chapters in a book by Josephine Lehman’s daughter, Margaret Thomas Buchholtz, Josephine: From Washington Working Girl to Fisherman’s Wife, A Memoire 1917-1959 capture life in that place and time.