If you happen to use the Washington and Old Dominion bike trail between Vienna and Hunter Mill Road, take a few steps off the trail at Clarks Crossing Road to appreciate the charming, century-old house on the south side of the road. (From the sidewalk or road, of course, given that it is private property).
Since it was built in 1918, this house has had only two ownerships, beyond a short period under trusteeship: Beulah Adams Young, who owned it for more than 60 years, and the family that has owned it since, according to property records (see Figure 1). The house is the second oldest existing home in the area bounded by Clarks Crossing Road to the north, the W&OD bike trail to the west, the Vienna town line to the south, and Beulah Road to the east (see Figure 2). To commemorate the house and honor its original owner, here’s a history of the parcel and a biography of Beulah Young .


The Parcel
Sometime between 1805 and 1809, Thomas Fairfax sold 190 acres “on the waters of Piney Branch” to Henry Gunnell, according to the latter’s will (M1:301) and a list of Fairfax County property transactions during the early 19th century. Judging from the Piney Branch reference and the chain of subsequent transactions, the 190 acres included the land upon which our house of interest was eventually built.
In 1832, as part of a court-ordered partition, Bushrod Gunnell received land that his father, Henry, had acquired from Thomas Fairfax (A3:339). Judging from subsequent transactions, this included our land of interest.
In 1847, the Fairfax County Circuit Court authorized George Gunnell to sell Bushrod’s real estate. George proceeded to sell a tract of 174 acres to Ira Williams for $1044. (U3:60). This tract included the approximately 1.5 acres that would eventually feature our house of interest.
Ira Williams subsequently sold 119.5 acres of the 174-acre tract to co-owners Noah Huntt and William J. Clarke, and the Court formalized the transaction in 1854 (U3:60). This was just before construction began in 1855 on the Alexandria, Loudon, and Hampshire railroad (the future Washington & Old Dominion). Almost all of the Huntt/Clarke joint property was to the immediate east of the right-of-way for the pending railroad (see Figure 3).

In 1866, Huntt and Clarke divided the property between themselves. Huntt received the land adjacent to the railroad, 42 acres in total (C5:53).
In 1914, 20 years after the death of Noah Hunt (now without the second “t”), the Court divided his property among his heirs. Daughter Sarah Hunt Day received 13.32 acres, “in three parts, separated by the Railroad and the County Road.” (The latter referring to the road that ran at the time from the railroad at Clarks Crossing southwest to Lawyers Road). The largest of the three parts, accounting for more than half of the total, was at the southeast intersection of Clarks Crossing Road and the railroad. (See Figure 4). (S7:135).

In 1917, Sarah Hunt Day sold the 13.32 acres to Beulah Adams Young and her husband, Charles F. Young, for $700 (F8:97).
In 1918, the Young family built the house that still stands, judging from county property tax records. (Government documents and local newspapers from this period identify the location of the residence as Hunter, Virginia, rather than the Vienna of later years).
In 1980, Beulah Young sold the 13+ acres to a trustee with the help of her son, Francis A. Young. About eight of these acres were on the eastern side of the W&OD and include our tract of interest. The price of the transaction was $105,000 (5509:1493 & 5593:1534).
In 1982, the trustees subdivided the eight acres into two parcels. The smaller of these parcels, totaling 1.47 acres and upon which the Young house sits, was then sold by the grantors to the current owner of the property (5716:805).
In 1984, the 1.47-acre parcel was subdivided into two lots and included in the deed of dedication for the Aubrey Place subdivision. However, the two lots of the 1.47-acre parcel were not subject to the covenants and restrictions of the Aubrey Place Homeowners Association, other than some of the easements. (The remainder of the subdivision was the other, larger parcel that had been separated in 1982) (5949:0766).
Beulah Young
Beulah Aubrey Adams was born in 1890. She was “a descendant of early Virginia settlers,” according to the Washington Post’s obituary for a brother. Beulah’s parents were Idella Price and Thomas Stanhope Adams, a farmer. Beulah was the first of their nine children. (Despite the many pregnancies, Idella lived to 103, a longevity foreshadowing Beulah’s lifespan). Idella Price was descended from Vienna notable John Follin, who fathered as many as 30 children by two wives, according to a family history. (Explaining the striking fact of how so many people in the Vienna area in the 19th century and into the mid-20th century were descendants of John Follin). John Follin was a veteran of the Continental Navy during the Revolutionary War, presumably the basis for Beulah’s longtime membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution. Idella was also a descendant of the Pearson family, which had a longstanding presence in the Vienna area. Meanwhile, the Adams family had been in Virginia since sometime before 1725, judging from Ancestry.com information.
Beulah Adams grew up on the other side (west side) of the railroad near where she would eventually own a house on the east side. I believe the house sat where the eastern end of Hillington Court is today, based on maps and aerial imagery from the early 20th century as well as property records (see Figures 5 & 6). (Beulah’s father received the dwelling and surrounding property circa 1890 from a partition resulting from a lawsuit. Her mother indicated in the late 1960s that she’d lived at the same house since 1890, according to the Northern Virginia Sun).


Beulah Adams had a long career in education. She had apparently performed well in secondary school. In 1906, for instance, she made the honor roll at the Clarke School because she maintained an average above 85 percent, according to the Fairfax Herald. She left home in 1907 to receive an education in teaching at the State Female Normal School in Farmville, Virginia’s first public institution for higher education for women, according to the Herald and the Virginia Museum of History & Culture. In 1909, she began teaching in the public schools at the school at Columbia Pike, according to the Fairfax Herald. In the 1920s, she was a teacher and principal at the Oakton grade school, according to the Fairfax Herald. By 1926, she was teaching at “a Washington business college” and a decade later she attended a convention in New York City for teachers at business schools, according to local press articles. These events presumably related to employment with what was then known as “Strayer Business College”; in 1939, she sat on the Strayer board that examined scholarship applications. She authored an English textbook in use at Strayer as of the early 1970s and was still teaching English at Strayer into her 80’s, according to the Northern Virginia Sun.
In 1926, Beulah’s teaching was complicated by something that ought to resonate with us today. From the Fairfax Herald:
“Mrs. Beulah Young, a teacher in the Oakton School, and her sister, Miss Ethel Adams, are ill at their home, at Clarke’s Crossing, of scarlet fever, and the house is quarantined. Dr. W.P. Caton, health officer, is keeping close watch on pupils of the Oakton school to prevent any spread of the disease among the pupils and teachers.”
I don’t know when Beulah started her association with Strayer, but if it overlapped with her early career in the public schools, then perhaps it explains how she met her husband, Charles F. Young. Charles, a Michigan native born in 1879, had apparently enlisted in the Army in the late 1890s, although he was back at home in Michigan in 1900, according to the US census. He apparently re-upped in 1910, working as an Army clerk—“with knowledge of timekeeping”—in his next assignment, according to military records. Strayer’s niche was teaching business skills such as typing and bookkeeping, which would have been useful for a clerk. Charles reported for duty in the Panama Canal Zone in early 1911 and at year’s end went on leave for six weeks. On 18 January 1912, Charles Francis Young married Beulah Aubrey Adams in Fairfax County, according to the Newspapers.com index of marriage records. Fours days later Charles sailed back to Panama. Beulah was presumably with him, given that in September 1912 she traveled back to the east coast from Panama, according to travel records. For this trip from Panama she was alone—and pregnant. In January 1913, Beulah Young gave birth to her son and only child, Francis Adams Young.
Francis A. Young was a Strayer graduate, civil servant, WWII veteran, father, and a longtime Vienna-area resident who attended nearby Antioch Church. He lived into his 90s, dying in 2005. The Francis Young Estates subdivision and Francis Young Lane are on the site of his former property alongside Beulah Road and south of the intersection with Clarks Crossing Road.
Beulah, Charles, and Francis traveled from Panama to the east coast at least three times between 1914 and 1918, according to immigration records. In mid-1919, Charles F. Young, at that point a US Army captain serving in an ordnance unit, sailed from Hoboken for the American Expeditionary Force, which after WWI had an occupation mission in Germany. By 1920, however, he was back with the family, living at the house on Clarks Crossing Road and working as a poultry farmer, according to the US census. In mid-1920, Charles and Beulah borrowed $2000 against their 13 acres, payable in three years, perhaps to finance the poultry farming.
The Beulah-Charles marriage failed in the 1920s, probably sometime between 1920, when Charles was living at the house, and 1925, when Beulah was back to teaching. Beulah petitioned for divorce, which Charles did not contest and which Fairfax County granted in 1927. The couple had defaulted on their $2000 loan, for which their parcel was collateral, and the trustee put it up for auction in 1928. Beulah was the highest bidder, so she retained the property. The transactions had the effect of removing Charles from the title to the land and providing Beulah with sole ownership (subject to a $1500 loan that she paid off on-time in 1931).
Charles, meanwhile, returned to Michigan and remarried, working as a Federal Prohibition Inspector as of 1930 and as an assistant cashier at a state-run liquor store in 1940. During WWII he was back in the DC area, working in the War Department’s finance office, although Michigan remained his place of residence. Charles F. Young died in Michigan in 1961.
As of the mid-1920s, Beulah’s unmarried sister, Ethel, lived with Beulah and Francis at the house on Clarks Crossing Road, judging from press accounts of the scarlet fever episode. In the 1930 census, however, Beulah and Francis are recorded as living in the household headed by her father, Thomas. If this wasn’t a mistake on the part of the census-taker, then perhaps Beulah was renting her house out to her brother Dewilton and his wife. The two are listed as renting in the next entry in the census record after the Thomas Adams household. In the mid-1930s, Beulah shows up in several newspaper reports about local social events, in the company of several of her siblings, or, as in the Washington Post in 1935, at a party hosted by one of her brothers.
In 1960, Beulah and her ex-husband conveyed to their son an 18.5-acre parcel that was further north up the railroad from their house and that they had owned since 1913. (This parcel is now Fairfax County parkland and the cul-de-sac area of Adams Hill Road in the Hunter Mill Forest subdivision). In 1978, Beulah and her fellow surviving heirs of Thomas S. Adams, who died intestate in 1941, sold Thomas’s 62 acres for $400,000. (This area includes elements of the Wendover and Hunter Mill Forest subdivisions).
Beulah sold her house and its parcel in 1980 (see Figure 7), after she had apparently moved in with her son, Francis. His house at 1838 Beulah Road (since demolished) was listed as her residence at her death. Beulah Aubrey Adams Young, age 95, died in 1986 from complications from a stroke, according to her death certificate. She is buried at Andrew Chapel Cemetery.

The Aubrey Place subdivision, which had once been her parcel and where her house remains for the time being, is presumably named in honor of Beulah, given that it carries her middle name and given the identity of the builder. Beulah’s nephew, the homebuilder, WWII veteran, and lifelong Vienna-area resident George B. Atkisson (who himself died in 2021 at age 97), built the subdivision, judging from a comment posted with his obituary.