This post is about Virginia and William Freeman (see Figures 1 and 2). The Freemans were the last pre-development owners of the future Beulah Terrace subdivision who actually resided on the parcel; their property also included what would later be the Embassy Court subdivisions (see Figure 3). The Freemans referred to their property as “Runnymede Farm.” The post is part of a study of the history of an area northwest of northeast Vienna, Virginia, bounded by the Vienna Town line to the south, Beulah Road to the east, Clarks Crossing Road to the north, and the Washington & Old Dominion Bike Trail to the west.
Virginia Cushing Brant was born in 1907 at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Her parents were Gerald Clark Brant, an Iowa-born U.S. Army officer, and Ethel Frey Cushing Brant of Manhattan. Virginia was the Brants’ middle child; she had two brothers. When Virginia was young the family changed residences between posts out west—e.g. Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas and Fort D.A. Russell, Wyoming— and the new U.S. possession of the Philippines until World War I brought Gerald an assignment in Washington. These moves during Virginia’s childhood reflect the U.S. Army’s transition from a constabulary force on the western frontier in the late 19th century to a military of an emerging world power in the early 20th century.
Virginia’s mother wrote a memoir of her life as a young Army bride, providing us with unusual detail about the childhood of one of the subjects of our study of the local area. Virginia was just three months old when the family embarked on a 30-day trip by sea to the Philippines for Gerald’s new assignment. The family traveled on the U.S. Army Transport Crook (see Figure 4). Bedbugs and other insects plagued the vessel, leaving baby Virginia covered with red splotches. After the ship was underway, her mother discovered that the steamer trunk with the baby’s clothes had not made it on board. Then, her father’s questionable scheme to wash the infant’s one remaining outfit by hanging it overboard went awry. This ensured that the family was left with no baby clothes for the trip’s leg to Honolulu.
The clothing misfortune seemed manageable, because after nursing, Ethel could leave the sated baby on the upper birth, protected by pillows. However, this approach didn’t take into account the Crook’s instability from the combination of a narrow beam and top-heaviness. At one point, the Crook took a “terrific lunge,” upending the washbasin and hurling Virginia into it with a scream, leaving a “deep dent” in the back of the baby’s skull. Fortunately, Virginia recovered with the treatment of an ice bag and Ethel’s round-the-clock bedside monitoring. (Epilogue to this episode: by the time the misrouted steamer trunk caught up with the Brants in the Philippines, the baby clothes inside were too small for Virginia).
Ethel describes young Virginia as an “individualist,” and a sense of the 13-year-old girl emerges in excerpts from the diary of the family’s live-in maid, Agnes White. During the First World War, Virginia’s father served in Washington, DC, while the family remained in its quarters at the Presidio in San Francisco. With the war over, Ethel in the spring of 1919 traveled to Texas for seven weeks to rendezvous with Gerald and reconnoiter the family’s housing for his next assignment.
During these seven weeks, Virginia’s non-school time was devoted to after-school activities, play, and some homework and chores, judging from Agnes’s account. Virginia took French and piano lessons—one Sunday morning at 7:30 practicing the former in bathrobe and slippers—and attended dance classes with her older brother, Clark. Seemingly at every chance, the young teen spent time with her friend, Betty. More time than Agnes would like, both in terms of too often and too long. On occasion Agnes vetoed a trip to Betty’s. At least once Virginia defied Agnes and went anyway. On several other occasions, Virginia didn’t come home until well after she had promised, “late as usual,” according to Agnes. Virginia also brought Betty to the Brant house for dinner, and Agnes baked a mocha cake to celebrate. On another occasion as Virginia was making her bed, she was so busy talking to her friend that she forgot to swap out the linens. In a sign of the rise of the automobile in American life, one Sunday afternoon Betty’s father took the children out for a three-hour drive in his car.
In this pre-radio, pre-TV, pre-device era, Virginia enjoyed reading: “Virginia and her book as usual,” writes Agnes. Virginia also sang at the house with her brother and Agnes. Movies are one form of mass entertainment that Virginia’s youth shares with our times one hundred years later. Agnes took the children to see a Mary Pickford film as well as Charlie Chaplin’s WWI service comedy, “Shoulder Arms.” While Mom was away, a family friend took Virginia and her older brother to the Hippodrome, a theater that a San Francisco newspaper characterized as “a notorious Barbary coast dance hall.” This somewhat unreliable friend sent the children home alone in a car at 11:30PM, too unsupervised and too late for Agnes. The kids went to the circus ($1.25 per ticket, 50 cents each for the sideshow) and to the beach, where they bought root beer (two for 15 cents) and a dime-ride on the merry-go-round—and where Virginia lost her Kodak camera. San Francisco’s role at the time as a major naval and military base also provided Virginia and her brothers with entertainment. Agnes notes for one Saturday in May: “Big sham battle on bay this morning, good view from front porch.” And when an infantry regiment paraded through San Francisco after its return from the war in France, a friend of Agnes’s provided a hotel vantage point to watch the spectacle.
In addition to changing her bed linens, Virginia’s chores included washing and ironing her stockings and underwear. Her brother helped by wringing out the clothes. Virginia cleaned her room and scrubbed its floor, getting her clothes dirty in the process. And what comes off more as an act of affection than as a chore, when Agnes returned from an evening outing, Virginia was waiting, making a cup of coffee for Agnes.
Virginia’s early teen years brought teen drama and defiance, judging from Agnes’s diary. After a Mr. Niscox returned from France, presumably as a soldier, Virginia wanted to see him after school and arrange a dinner on his behalf. Agnes understandably refused to permit such contact. Meanwhile, April Fool’s Day fell in the period that Ethel was out of town, and Clark and Agnes pranked Virginia by putting salt and castor oil on the girl’s orange. This prompted one of the tantrums that Agnes labels as a “brainstorm,” which in turn prompted Virginia’s younger brother to call his sister a “bawl baby.” (Virginia retaliated against Clark by putting “salts” in his chocolate drops). Virginia was supposed to attend Sunday School with Clark, taking a 50-cent ride on the streetcar to get there, but on multiple occasions over the seven weeks of her mother’s absence she refused to go. Agnes also had to stand over Virginia to ensure that she ate her creamed meat. On a day of “furious” San Francisco rain, Virginia refused to wear overshoes. For what Agnes describes as a “fancy ball,” Virginia sewed to fix up a dress. On the afternoon of the ball, however, Virginia was in tears because of what other girls thought (or might have thought—it’s unclear to me) about her slippers. Virginia sometimes refused to go to school, although her brothers were worse, so Agnes credits Virginia as being the most faithful of the three when it came to school attendance. Virginia also sometimes refused to take her bath, or what Agnes and the family characterize as “plunges.” However, I think we can be on Virginia’s side here, considering what constituted such “plunges.” As Ethel Brant confesses in her memoirs, “I was at the time a fanatic about cold plunges each morning for the children to build up resistance, but I had my troubles enforcing them….”
In the mid-1920s, Gerald Brant served in the War Department in Washington and the family lived in the DC area. In Washington, Virginia attended Western High School, which is now the Duke Ellington School of the Arts (see Figures 5 and 6). In 1925, she left Washington “to study art in New York until Christmas, when she will return here for the holidays and be presented to society,” according to Washington’s Sunday Star. The school was the New York School of Fine and Applied Art. Today, this school is known as the Parson School of Design, one of the components of The New School in New York City. The debut in society did indeed follow. Virginia was “one of the most popular debutantes of 1925-26 in Washington D.C.,” the Los Angeles Times later wrote. In the spring of 1927, she studied at the school’s satellite in Paris.
Virginia’s trip to France led to her first marriage. On her return to the U.S. in 1927, Virginia met Sidney Lanier Bartlett, who was traveling on the same steamer (see Figure 7). Sidney was a descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Josiah Bartlett. Virginia and Sidney married in Paris in July, 1927 and honeymooned in Switzerland. They then established their home in Paris in the 6th arrondissement on the left bank of the Seine (see Figures 8 and 9). Husband Sidney was “in business” and Virginia was to continue her art studies. In 1928, the couple traveled to California, where Virginia’s parents now lived and where Sidney was from, so Virginia could give birth in the United States to their son, Sidney Jr. Later that year in a newspaper fashion article, Virginia shared mention with 14 other women, including President Coolidge’s wife and the wives of the candidates in the 1928 presidential election, two senators, a governor, and a diplomat:
“Mrs. Sidney Lanier Bartlett has a dinner gown of cream and black tulle, with the upper part made over white chiffon. This is made with a tight bodice and full skirt, with two large chrysanthemums of black and cream on one shoulder.”
By 1930, Virginia, her husband, and son were living in Rye, New York. The family continued to live well, judging from their travels, but apparently not happily. In 1933, Virginia and Sidney divorced. Sidney had filed, charging that Virginia was traveling abroad and refused to return to him, according to the San Francisco Examiner. Sidney claimed that she had written letters to him expressing an interest in getting divorced.
In 1935, Virginia remarried. Her second husband was the 1931 West Point graduate and US Army officer Russell Hunter Griffith, the son of an army officer (see Figure 10). The wedding was in Hawaii. Russell was stationed there as a US Army Air Corps pilot, and Virginia’s father, also a pilot and now a general, was posted to Hawaii at the time. In 1936, a day after his 29th birthday, 1LT Griffith was killed instantly in an aircraft accident several miles from Dallas, Texas. Griffith and another man were flying from an Army airfield near Dallas when the engine apparently stalled and the plane plummeted to the ground from 3,000 feet. Russell Griffith’s death left Virginia a widow and single mother.
In 1937, Virginia, her son, and her mother—Ethel had been divorced since the 1920s—moved to Washington, D.C., where Virginia eventually met the man who would be her husband for more than 25 years. In 1939 in Washington, she married William Morten Breakey Freeman, an official at the Department of the Treasury. The family was a blended family. Freeman was a widower with two children. For the first two years of the marriage, the family lived in Alexandria. Their house at 203 Cameron Street in Alexandria was big enough for the family to host large social gatherings (see Figure 11). For instance, several days before Christmas, 1940, Virginia and her husband “gave a dance in their home on Cameron Street for their daughter…to celebrate her birthday anniversary. About 50 guests were present,” and Virginia’s mother helped out, according to the Washington Star.
In early March 1941, Virginia sailed from St. Thomas, Virgin Islands to Puerto Rico, presumably in connection with her mother’s death, based on the timing. Her mother had died at St. Thomas in late February.
Also in 1941, Virginia Freeman and her husband moved to the Vienna area from Alexandria. In mid-1941, Virginia bought 29 acres from the widowed Ada Frances Pearson Hummer. These 29 acres constituted the future Beulah Terrace and Embassy Court (II and III) subdivisions. Virginia and her husband appeared to have paid $9000 plus 6 percent annual interest for the property, with the first $2000 due within a few months of the sale and the remainder paid to Ada Hummer in $65 monthly installments. The Freemans named their Vienna property “Runnymede Farm,” according to Washington newspapers and travel records (See Figures 12 and 13).
When Virginia lived in the Vienna area, she was active in various volunteer activities. This was a natural follow-on to her pre-Vienna volunteer work, such as managing a barn dance in 1939 as a fundraiser for the National Symphony Orchestra. Newspaper snippets during World War II show how Virginia supported the war effort. In 1942, she was Vienna’s “Shelter Leader” in the Fairfax County Chapter of the American Red Cross, according to the Fairfax Herald. The Chapter was organizing evacuation shelters in “strategic locations throughout Fairfax County” in conjunction with the responsibility of the Red Cross “[i]n the event of enemy action” to provide “temporary shelter, food and clothing of persons in distress.” Virginia remained active in the Red Cross throughout the war and afterwards. As of 1944, for instance, she was “Chairman for the Vienna Area of the Fairfax County American Red Cross War Fund Drive,” raising almost $3,000. She also supported the effort to finance the war by serving as a chairwoman in a Fairfax County war loan committee. After the war, Virginia participated in sales drives for Christmas seals, which in that era were aimed at combatting tuberculosis. In 1947, she chaired the Fairfax County Christmas seals campaign to raise $12,000, managing three dozen area chairwomen and volunteers from the Girl Scouts and Fairfax High School, according to the Washington Post.
Art and agriculture remained an interest for Virginia after the war. In 1954, as president of the Tuesday Afternoon Club, she arranged for a modern dance recital at the Oakton School. In 1956, she won a blue ribbon “for her single specimen of Samite” at a daffodil show held by the club, according to the Fairfax Herald (see Figure 14). In the 1930s, the owner of the neighboring property to the immediate north of what would later be the Freeman property had grown daffodils for sale, according to a Fairfax County man who had grown up in the area in the 1930s. Considering Virginia’s expertise with the flower, perhaps daffodils were a specialty of the Beulah Road neighborhood.
In two transactions separated by five years, Virginia and husband William sold off their Beulah Road property. In September 1956, they sold to James and Virginia Mechling the seven acres that constituted the northeastern quarter of the tract (see Figures 15). Today, these seven acres comprise the two Embassy Court subdivisions. The seven-acre parcel included the farmhouse, which survived until circa 2011. In the deed of sale, the Freemans conveyed “the automatic dishwasher, refrigerator and stove and all appurtenances attached to the premises, with the exception of the crystal chandelier in the dining room and the Bendix washing machine and deepfreezer.” Presumably, the Freemans moved to the what was then a newly built house on the 22 acres of the parcel that they continued to own. According to Fairfax County property tax records, the house at today’s corner of Delancey Street and Quartet Circle was built in 1956. Presumably, it was built for the Freemans, given the timing and the Freeman’s continued presence in Fairfax County after the sale to the Mechlings. In 1957, Virginia was chairing a birthday ball at the Fairfax Hunt Club, William hadn’t retired yet from the civil service, and the county’s property records do not list any land purchase by the Freemans after the sale to the Mechlings. Taken together, this suggests that the Freemans continued to reside on their Vienna parcel (see Figure 16). In 1959, however, Virginia apparently moved to Mississippi. William’s obituary indicates he moved there that year; Virginia presumably accompanied him at the time. In 1961, twenty years after acquiring their Beulah Road property, the Freemans sold their residual 22-acre parcel to real estate attorney Ronald Maddox and his wife, Betty, of Fairfax County. (It does not appear that the Maddoxes subsequently lived on the property).
With the move to Poplarville in southeastern Mississippi, Virginia and William operated a tung and cattle ranch and were active in the community, according to their obituaries (see Figure 17). Tung oil is a vegetable oil derived from the nut of the tung tree. It is used for drying wood. American production of tung oil peaked in the late ‘50s and Mississippi was the top producer among the several southern states suitable for growing the tree, according to the website for the Waterlox Company. According to local press, as of the mid-60s, tung nuts were the primary agricultural crop in Pearl River County, for which Poplarville is the county seat. Virginia’s work in connection with the family’s tung business included service on the board for the Tung Research and Development League, according to her obituary. She also was the secretary-treasurer for the Pearl River Valley Country Club until retiring because of poor health. In 1965, she traveled back to northern Virginia for a visit. As a former officer of the Tuesday Afternoon Club in Vienna, she was a guest of honor at the club’s Christmas luncheon.
Virginia was widowed with William’s death in 1966. As of mid-August 1968, she was still travelling regionally; her trip to New Orleans received mention in the social pages of the Hattiesburg American newspaper. However, two months later, in October 1968, Virginia Brant Freeman died in a Washington, DC hospital “after an illness of several months,” according to her obituary. Virginia is buried with William in the same cemetery where her mother rests, Ivy Hill Cemetery in Alexandria (see Figure 18).
Virginia was just 61 when she died. In her six decades, she had lived in the outlands of the new American empire and at the center of the U.S. government, in multiple regions of the country itself as well as in the old world. She appears to have appreciated art and fashion and she took leading roles in a variety of community activities. In what would be the final decade of her life, she had a go at agriculture with her husband. One marriage hadn’t worked out, another had ended with her new husband’s death in an airplane accident, but the third, with William Freeman, proved to be a lasting union. She bore one child in her first marriage and also parented two step-children. And for almost twenty of Virginia Freeman’s 61 years, she had lived on “Runnymede Farm,” known today as the Beulah Terrace and Embassy Court subdivisions and part of our community northwest of northeast Vienna.
William M.B. Freeman
Virginia’s husband, William Morton Breakey Freeman, was born in West Orange, New Jersey in 1896, making him ten years older than Virginia. His parents were Francis Breakey Freeman, a Dublin-born civil engineer, and Mary Brewer of London. William was an only-child. As of 1910, the family lived in Newton, Massachusetts (see Figure 19). He was a member of the class of 2020 at MIT. At the university, William was chairman of the editorial board for the MIT newspaper and president of the Golf Club. Service in World War I appears to have pushed him into the class of 1921. His name is listed on a tablet that the British Ambassador presented to the British Schools and Universities Club in New York in 1921 honoring men for WWI service. The 1930 US census lists him as a veteran of the World War. In 1921, he was discharged from the service—presumably the Navy, in view of his later commission in the naval reserve. He graduated from MIT in 1921 with a BS in civil engineering.
By the mid-1920’s William had established his career and a family. He apparently was a man of some financial ambition and means. In 1922, he acquired at auction a $1 million note and the 10,000 shares of stock of a bankrupt shipping corporation that were securing the note as collateral, but the bankruptcy courts ended up favoring other creditors, according to Huron Navigation Corp. v. United States. In 1924, he helped to fund the purchase of a house for his fraternity at MIT. He appears to have been the youngest alumnus among some 20 contributors. In 1925, the Boston Society of Civil Engineers elected him as a member. The year before he had married Elizabeth Hodgman of St. Louis. The wedding was the top story in Society News in the St. Louis Star on 9 October, 1924. Elizabeth gave birth to a daughter in 1925 and a son in 1930. As of 1930, William was a sales manager in a contracting firm, according to the US census. The family lived in Brookline, Massachusetts. They owned a radio, lived in a house valued at $25,000, and housed two servants at their residence. In 1935, William took a position with the Procurement Division at the Department of the Treasury, according to postwar Congressional testimony. FDR had established the Procurement Division by executive order in 1933 to consolidate acquisition activities by the federal government’s civilian agencies, according to the National Archives.
In August 1937, William’s first wife, Elizabeth, died of cancer in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, Canada. She was 39. I suspect the family was vacationing in St. Andrews, and while vacationing the cancer was discovered. St. Andrews at the time was a resort community for Bostonians, according to a history on the town’s website, and the couple had previously lived in Boston, so the place was a plausible vacation spot for them in the summer of 1937. About a week before Elizabeth’s death, she was operated on in St. Andrews, according to her death certificate, indicative of an emergency that couldn’t wait for the return to the hospitals in the Washington area. The Freeman’s children were 11 and 7 when they lost their mother and William became a widower. At the time of Elizabeth’s death, the family’s residence was 525 Queen Street in Alexandria (see Figure 20).
After William married Virginia in 1939, the blended family lived in a rented house at 203 Cameron Street in Alexandria. The monthly rent was $85. As of mid-1940, William was an “assistant division chief” at the Department of the Treasury, according to the US census. His annual salary was more than $5000. A record of his duty position at the end of 1940 characterized it as the Chief of the Contract and Purchase Branch, a subunit of the Procurement Division.
Meanwhile, William joined the US Navy reserve as an officer, probably in 1936, judging from naval records. As of 1939 he was a Lieutenant Commander in the naval reserve. In December 1941, he was called up from the reserves to serve on active duty, presumably as part of the intensified mobilization following the attack on Pearl Harbor and U.S. entry into WWII, based on the timing. Ada Hummer’s grandson remembers that when Ada sold the Vienna property in 1943, the buyer was a naval officer; in other words, William. During the war, William served in the Office of Chief Cable Censor in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), according to naval records. He presumably worked in CNO spaces in the Main Navy Building, the concrete, multi-winged structure opened in 1918 on the Mall where Constitution Gardens is now located and meant to be temporary but lasting until 1970 (see Figure 21). William’s contribution to the war effort and his potential for success at a higher level were recognized with a promotion to Commander in 1942, according to U.S. Navy records. In October 1945, just after the war ended, William left active duty, but he remained a naval reservist until retiring in 1951 with the rank of Captain, according to Congressional testimony and Department of Defense records.
With his active military service concluded, William in 1945 returned to Treasury. He was now the deputy director of the Purchase Branch of the Bureau of Federal Supply. It appears that postwar inflation complicated his job. In 1947, Congress called him to testify as part of its oversight of executive branch expenditures on procurement and buildings. The relevant committee was looking into what it considered to be an unauthorized price increase in Treasury’s oil procurement program, according to Congressional records. William had played a key role in a decision by Treasury to pay oil suppliers a higher price than what was under contract, because the lifting of wartime price controls had resulted in increased market prices in 1946. The experience didn’t jeopardize his career. As of 1948, his annual salary was $10,000, twice what it was—there’s that inflation again—eight years before in the same position.
A postwar reorganization of the federal government’s procurement outfits established the General Services Administration (GSA), which absorbed Treasury’s procurement bureau and with that, William as an administrator. In 1951, he served as the supply representative of GSA’s Emergency Procurement Service. That year, he traveled to Oregon to brief chrome miners on the U.S. Government’s program for purchasing chrome ores and concentrates, according to Oregon’s Department of Geology and Mineral Industries. The program appears to have been part of a Department of the Interior effort to subsidize the private sector’s exploration of minerals critical to the defense industry. A subsequent position in the government related to similar work. During 1956-58, he was the Director and Acting Director of the Expansion and Trade Development Division in GSA’s Defense Material Service, operating out of 7th and D Streets, SW, according to government records. William closed his career as the assistant director of the Projects Administration Division of the Defense Material Service, according to the Hattiesburg American newspaper. He retired from the federal government in 1959.
Before the Freemans moved to Mississippi in 1959, William had purchased land that was west of Poplarville and used to grow tung nuts, according to his obituary. Sidney L. Bartlett, Jr., Virginia’s son and William’s stepson, had been living in the area since at least 1956 and had been involved in agriculture, including cattle. Thus presumably he had a role in getting the Freemans involved with tung nuts and raising cattle. William in the early 1960’s was active in the tung industry, serving as director or president of three organizations with roles in tung R&D, marketing, and lobbying, according to his obituary (see Figure 22). He also remained a member of various groups, including his college fraternity, the American Legion, and the local Rotary Club, according to his obituary. Like Virginia, he served as the treasurer for the Pearl River Country Club.
In May, 1966, Captain (Ret) William Morton Breakey Freeman, 79, died days after suffering a heart attack. He is buried with Virginia in Alexandria’s Ivy Hill Cemetery.
[Sources include Ancestry.com; Dafftube.org; Ethel Cushing Brant, Following the Drum: Memoirs of an Army Bride, 1904-1919; Fairfax County Circuit Court Historic Records Center (property deeds); Fairfax County Digital Map Viewer; Fairfax County Historical Imagery Viewer; Fairfax County Public Library’s Historical Newspaper Index and Washington Post Historical database; Findagrave.com; Fold3.com; Interview of a former resident of the Ada Hummer house; Ghosts of DC website; Library of Virginia virginiachronicle Fairfax Herald database; mysterydancer.net; navsource.org; Navy History and Heritage Command; Newspaperarchives.com, Newspapers.com].