Virginia Rambler: Mount Air

Northern Virginia is blessed to have some lovely historic homes--Mount Vernon, Gunston Hall, and Woodlawn Plantation among them. Other beautiful stately homes have been lost. Among those lost are the Belvoir Plantation (on the grounds that are now Fort Belvoir) and Mount Air in Lorton.

Mount Air was a large, working plantation. The land grant for the land it occupied was issued to Dennis McCarty in 1727, and by 1742 a mansion and a working farm and outbuildings were standing. The mansion survived a fire, as well as occupation by troops during the Civil War and World War II, but sadly, it burned to the ground in 1992, just weeks after the last owner died. The ruins and outbuildings have been preserved. For several years I've wanted to visit, and on a mild January day, Mark and I finally got there.

Click on any photo to get a larger version.

Interpretive signs show the remaining buildings and the grounds.

Below, we're looking at the right side of the mansion. County archaeologists tuckpointed the bricks in the basement walls and filled in the basement to preserve it. They swept all the rubble from the fire into the basement and then covered it with the stones you see here.

Below, we're standing in front of the right side of the mansion, looking at the left-side wall. Just to the left of the chimney you can see a set of stairs leading down to the basement.

The chimney below is the tallest remnant of the mansion.

There are two cabins on the property, in poor repair (below); they're relatively close to the mansion. According to oral history, they were slave cabins. (Mount Air was a tobacco plantation, and before the Civil War, the owners had approx. 50 slaves there.) The second photo below shows the slate roof tiles.

Below is the corn crib. You can't tell here, but it's on stilts.

Much of the property is wooded. On the edge of the woods, we found a blanket of snow drops.

Parts of the original formal gardens remain. This is from the boxwood alley.

Behind the greenhouse (also in poor condition), I saw this old gas can, with "Transportation" stenciled on the side. It was a spooky thing to see, since the mansion had burned to the ground. The cause of the fire is unknown, and not likely to be related to this gas can--the surveyors and preservationists would surely have noticed the can--but it's eerie nonetheless.

Preservationists think there were several additional buildings they haven't yet found. Here's a stone step, or lintel, or something, that's not on the map.

And here's another remnant of a structure; this one is very near the left rear corner of the mansion ruins. This was the well house for the original well, which was in use until the 1960s. It drew on water from streams that ran under the plantation land.

Below is the barn (right side). It was designed in Greek Revival style, to match the mansion.

The caretaker's cottage (below) was a 20th-century addition. The preservationists recommend that it be torn down because it's not "historically significant."

Near the mansion is a native Virginia meadow. While the Army Corps of Engineers was building nearby Camp Humphreys, they camped in this meadow. Another interesting detail: somewhere in this meadow are the graves of the several members of the McCarty family, the original owners of Mount Air. It's said that a later owner found it depressing to look at the graves (in view of the verandah of the mansion), so the headstones--but not the bodies--were relocated to Cedar Grove, a family property elsewhere.

We left Mount Air at sunset and promised ourselves we'd return in the spring, when the remnants of the formal gardens would be in bloom.

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