The Van Riswicks

This post discusses the Van Riswick family. From 1883 to 1906, the Van Riswicks owned some 300 acres just outside Northeast Vienna and extending into the Town itself (see Figure 1).  The Van Riswicks were a well-to-do DC family.  The patriarch had prominent roles in DC business and government affairs, to include a tie to President Lincoln. His heirs were the subject of a great deal of press interest because of their legal squabbles over their inheritance.

Figure 1: John Van Riswick eventually acquired the land that Benjamin Thornton owned as of 1860 and that was largely to the north of today’s Vienna town line. This map, by local historian Beth Mitchell, shows the property lines of 1860 and the names of the property owners, superimposed on a Fairfax County real property map from the early 1980s.

The Van Riswick Land Transactions

In late December 1883, John Van Riswick acquired 310 acres, some of this in Vienna and some of it northwest of the town. The previous owner, Samuel Stead, had died by 1880 and he or his estate had defaulted on the payments. District of Columbia resident John Van Riswick held a note on Stead’s deed of trust (see Figure 2), and when a trustee auctioned the Stead land, Van Riswick submitted the highest bid, paying $3023.  

Within weeks of the purchase, John Van Riswick and his wife, Mary, began to sell portions of the land.  In 1884 they sold off roughly half the land in three transactions (see Figure 3): 

–The southernmost part of the property, which was in the Town of Vienna, was bordered to the west by Lawyers Road and extended south of Maple Avenue. It went to the prominent Vienna citizen O.E. Hine for $1138. This parcel is recorded as 65 acres.

–The northernmost part of the property, a 75-acre parcel along Beulah Road, went to Charles Calphus Dyer for $1200. Among the modern-day subdivisions in this parcel are Overlook Acres, Starks Crossing, Chestnut Farm, Francis Young Estates, Hawthorne Estates, Lindsey, and the northern portion of Eudora, as well as Antioch Church.

–A 20-acre strip along Beulah Road went to Thomas J. Cooper for $400.  Today, this land constitutes the southern portion of the Eudora subdivision.  

After John and Mary died, daughters Avarilla and Martina eventually disposed of the remaining half of the original property over the course of three transactions: 

–In 1901, the sisters sold 105 acres just north of the Town line to F.W. Pearson for $2100. Today, this land is composed of the Embassy Court subdivisions, Beulah Terrace, Talisman Court, Bennett Kiln, Concord Green, Butler, and one of the Beechwood subdivisions, as well as Vienna’s Northside Park.

–At the same time, Avarilla and Martina swapped 9.5 acres with O.E. Hine’s widow, Alma Delano Hine, involving three parcels in the Town. The parties cited two reasons for the exchange. First, “…the boundary lines between the land of the two parties…are unsatisfactory by reason of being oblique to the general direction of the streets and roads in the Village of Vienna, Virginia, and of causing an unnecessary amount of fencing….” Second, a survey by county surveyor Joseph Berry showed that a new boundary parallel to Maple Avenue and extending from “Beulah Street” to the railroad would allow an exchange of similarly sized land, resulting in more straightforward boundaries. 

–In 1906, the Van Riswick sisters sold to Alma Delano Hine for $3250 a 65 acre parcel inside Vienna.  This parcel included but was not limited to the previously swapped land. Today, Ayr Hill Heights and the Town of Vienna’s maintenance facility occupy much of this land. 

Figure 3: The Van Riswick family sells various portions of the former Thornton property, 1884-1906.

John Van Riswick, the Patriarch

John Van Riswick was born in 1816 in Washington, DC. His parents most likely were John and Jane Tyer Van Riswick. Van Riswick the younger had a variety of business interests. From the late 1830s to the early 1860s he was in the lumber business. “In 1839, he owned and operated the first planing machine in this District, and used it in connection with the lumber business which he conducted with such a signal ability and success,” according to his obituary. Perhaps that background in lumber exposed him to the Thornton brothers and their land: the Thorntons had used the land in Reston for lumber. Van Riswick also dealt in other natural resources. In testimony before Congress in 1862, Van Riswick declared himself a dealer in coal in addition to wood. He was wealthy enough to be subject to the temporary federal income tax levied during the Civil War. Those tax records listed him as a retail dealer. 

Van Riswick branched out into other business affairs. In 1867, he and a partner offered to purchase the C&O Canal and assume the canal’s obligations for $50,000. That same year, he was among the incorporators of the proposed Georgetown and Washington Canal and Sewer Company in a bill before the House of Representatives. The bill proposed to build a canal and sewer from Jefferson Street in Georgetown to the Anacostia River, along a right-of-way already used by or designated to various canal companies.  

Van Riswick was involved in other real estate work. For instance, in 1868, he worked a complicated transaction in Alexandria on Royal Street. Thus the real estate business was another potential path for how Van Riswick learned of the land in the study area, given that he acquired the study area’s land at auction. Van Riswick also was a director of the Mutual Fire Insurance Company and from 1878 until 1885, he was the vice president of Citizens’ National Bank.

Van Riswick leaves a trail in various government matters. From 1848 to 1856, he represented Ward 7 on the District’s Common Council. The Common Council was one of the governing bodies for DC at the time. Members of the Common Council served one-year terms. Together with aldermen, the members of the Common Council elected the District’s mayor. Government documents also show that in 1859 he patented a brick machine. In 1875, the US Supreme Court ruled against him in Wallach v. Van Riswick, an important case for interpreting the Civil War’s Confiscation Act. In 1876, Van Riswick was the chairman of a committee that sought unsuccessfully to recruit one of the political parties to hold their presidential nominating convention in Washington.  

Like Joseph Thornton, John Van Riswick had a tie of sorts to Abraham Lincoln. In 1861, Van Riswick was part of a group that petitioned President Lincoln to appoint Ward H. Lamon as the marshal for the District of Columbia. Lamon is known to history as the bodyguard who was out of town on other business the night John Wilkes Booth shot the President at Ford’s Theater. Lamon was a confidante and former law partner of Lincoln’s. After taking office, Lincoln wanted to appoint Lamon as the federal marshal for the district.  However, Lincoln—as he put it—didn’t want to make an appointment that might be contrary to the wishes of the people of the District. Thus he delayed appointing Lamon so that endorsements from various prominent citizens could be arranged first. Hence Van Riswick’s participation in the petition and Lamon’s assumption of the duties as DC marshal.  

Van Riswick’s relationship with Lamon had its downs and ups. In 1862, a year after endorsing Lamon, Van Riswick’s testimony in a court case called Lamon’s judgment into question. The court case involved the District’s jailer, John Wise, who the Republican-led Congress was investigating for mistreating African-Americans in his custody. Van Riswick testified that he had warned Lamon not to appoint Wise as the jailer. 

Despite the critical implications of the testimony in 1862, a year later Lamon tapped Van Riswick to accompany him on an important mission. As a Lincoln associate and federal marshal, Lamon served as the President’s de facto bodyguard. And in 1863, Lamon was selected to serve as the Marshal-in-Chief for the November dedication ceremonies for the battlefield cemetery at Gettysburg, where the President would speak. Lamon in turn chose a dozen citizens to travel with him to Gettysburg to serve as his aides, Van Riswick among them. And thus John Van Riswick was at Gettysburg for Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

Twelve years later, Van Riswisk and Lamon were in court. In John Van Riswick vs. Ward H. Lamon, the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia in 1875 ruled in favor of Van Riswick. The court decided that Van Riswick’s lien upon Lamon’s real estate had priority over the lien of Lamon’s attorney for services in a suit involving the property.  

Van Riswick had at least one other Lincoln connection. In 1867, he was in the jury pool for the trial of an accused conspirator in the President’s assassination, John Surratt. Van Riswick attested that he had no opinion on Surratt’s guilt or innocence. I am unable to determine if he ever sat on the jury itself.

In 1841, John Van Riswick married Mary Ann Fenwick in Baltimore County. They had five daughters. Only two lived to old age. One daughter appears to have died as a child, another died at 25, and a third at 44. Van Riswick built the home for his family on a portion of the estate of his father-in-law, where Georgia Avenue today bisects the District’s northern tip. The home that the Van Riswicks built, Van View, remains to this day (see  Figure 4). The family appeared to split their time between Van View and a house at McPherson Square, judging from dual entries in the 1880 census, as noted in an analysis by the District’s Historic Preservation Office. 

Antebellum DC allowed slavery, and as of 1860 the prosperous Van Riswick family enslaved three people: a 50-year old woman, a 46-year-old man, and an 11-year-old girl. The three were dignified with names in Van Riswick’s 1862 petition to the federal government for compensation for freeing his slaves. The petition was submitted under the Civil War law liberating the District’s enslaved people with payment to the slaveowner. Van Riswick had purchased the woman, Harriet Clarke, circa 1850 and the girl, Phoebe Ross, circa 1856. The man, George Barton, was inherited by Van Riswick from his father. Van Riswick’s petition has a comment about Mr. Barton with a potentially sinister connotation: Barton “had his leg broken about 16 or 17 years ago, but is not much effected by it now.”  Not “he broke his leg,” but rather “had his leg broken,” the passive voice obscuring the actor, who may not have been Barton himself. The perpetrator is unspecified, but if someone other than Barton broke Barton’s leg, the motive was probably to punish an infraction such as an attempt to flee bondage for freedom. 

John Van Riswick died in 1886 (Figure 5), “depriv[ing] the District of another of its oldest, most useful and most highly esteemed citizens,” according to the Washington Evening Star.  “From an early age,” according to the Washington Post, “he had been identified with some of the most prominent enterprises in the city.”

In 1884, Van Riswick had documented how his property would be divided after his death between his wife, Mary, and his daughters, Mary Jane, Avarilla, and Martina. Whereas he specified to whom his many District of Columbia properties would go, he did not do the same with his Virginia property. Instead, “all the rest and residue of his real estate, wherever the same may be situated,” jointly went to Mary and his daughters, free from control of any husbands. Eldest daughter Mary Jane died two years after John, so as of 1888, the remaining Virginia properties were owned jointly by the surviving two daughters and their mother.  

Mary Van Riswick, the Matriarch

John’s wife, Mary Van Riswick nee Fenwick, was born to Philip Washington Fenwick and Mary Ann Stewart in 1820 at St. Mary’s, Maryland. In 1893, a bout of the “grip,” that is, the flu, left her weakened, by one published account, although a son-in-law disagreed.  Mary was “among the latest of notable victims of influenza” when she died in 1896, according to the Washington Evening Star. 

A court case after Mary’s death included testimony about her personality. Mary made a record of everything in her bookkeeping, including outlays for boiling cabbage, but with an idiosyncratic form of spelling. Her youngest daughter, Martina, testified that her mother was easily influenced and would often change her mind. Another witness, a builder who had worked for Mary, testified otherwise. Mary was a strong-willed woman, not easily influenced by others, according to the builder.  By his account, she was a sharp, shrewd woman who “always saw that she got the worth of her money.” A son-in-law spoke highly of Mary’s executive ability and testified that she was competent to safeguard her own interests.  This son-in-law echoed that Mary was not easily influenced and characterized her as stubborn. Because of the nature of the case, a variety of witnesses went on record with their impressions that Mary was not easily influenced.

Conveying a different sense of Mary’s faculties, Mary’s brother testified that after her 1893 flu, she would authorize him to arrange for property repairs, only to refuse permission for the work to be done when workmen arrived, indicative of her decline. A grandniece testified that Mary was a very superstitious person. She would not permit an umbrella to be opened indoors and would not pass through a funeral procession. Making a claim very germane to the court case, a niece testified that Mary was so superstitious she believed that people who made wills died soon thereafter. This niece also indicated that she didn’t consider Mary a very good businesswoman and, similar to other witnesses, testified to Mary’s poor memory late in life. One of these other witnesses stated that it was difficult to do business with Mary in her final years. Her attention would wander and she did not understand the matter at hand. In the final months of her life she was unable to participate in important business, according to this witness, a plumber. In Mary’s final days, she was irritable and indecisive, according to her nurse.  

Avarilla Van Riswick Lambert and Martina Van Riswick Carr, the Quarreling Sisters

With Mary’s death, the owners for the Van Riswick’s Vienna-area land were reduced to two: daughters Avarilla Lambert and Martina Carr. Mary Van Riswick was spared the public discussion of her personality and final days because she was dead when the relevant court case was heard. Mary’s daughters, however, were alive and on opposing sides in the case. They were not similarly spared from the public airing of multiple articles of family dirty laundry. In fact, they enabled it.   

The daughters’ dispute over the Van Riswick will started as a page-two story in Washington-area newspapers in 1897, reflecting the prominence of the families and the eternal fascination with unseemly behavior by the wealthy. The Van Riswick family itself was well-known in Washington, as we’ve seen in the discussion of patriarch John. Avarilla was married to Tallmadge Lambert, a lawyer with a national reputation and a founder of the DC bar. Martina was married to William Carr, a scientist and son of the governor of North Carolina. The Washington Times put it this way: “No case before the courts this winter has attracted as much attention as this one. Not only was this true because of the high social standing of the parties interested in it, but also because of the value of the real estate involved.”

The Baltimore Sun provides a useful synopsis of what was at issue in the case:

“Mrs. Van Riswick left a will, drawn ten years before her death [a different account states two years], giving certain property to her grandchildren, and then dividing the residue between Mrs. Carr and Mrs. Lambert, but giving them only a life estate in the property, which was to go to their children, if any should be living at their death. As Mrs. Lambert has three children and Mrs. Carr none, the property would thus eventually pass into the hands of the Lamberts, Mrs. Van Riswick’s grandchildren. Mr. Wilton J. Lambert…was named executor with Mrs. Carr. The latter is attempting to break the will on the ground of undue influence exerted on the testator by [Wilton] Lambert.”

Within weeks of their mother’s death in 1896, the two sisters were at each other, first with Martina’s contesting of the will and then with a suit initiated by Avarilla over a jointly owned property. “Another Lambert Suit,” is how the Washington Times headlined a story on the latter. At the start of the legal wrangling, Martina alleged that Avarilla was hiding personal property rightfully belonging to the estate.  Avarilla refused a request from Martina’s attorneys to inventory these items, claiming that she had owned them for almost a decade.  

During the trial itself, Martina’s lawyers contended that a breach had opened between mother Mary and daughter Avarilla, to the point that the mother was not welcome in the home of the daughter. After John’s death, Mary went to live with daughter Mary Jane until Mary Jane’s death. Then she lived with daughter Martina in Norfolk until persuading Martina to live with her in Washington.  A witness testified Mary at one point had commented that if Avarilla had offered her a room, she would have lived with her. Avarilla on one occasion had invited her aunt to go driving, but not her mother, hurting Mary’s feelings to the point that Mary wept over the matter. Martina seemed to be Mary’s favorite and was affectionate towards her, according to John Van Riswick’s sister, whereas Mary seemed to be afraid of Avarilla.  

Witnesses claimed that Avarilla was hard to please and very demanding. For instance, when Mary visited Avarilla, Avarilla required her mother to handle her business with friends on the stairs. Mary had supposedly remarked that Avarilla had been willful since childhood and tended to rule over everyone, including her husband. Avarilla also supposedly criticized her mother’s purchases of goods and services, and had critiqued Martina’s husband, the scientist, as a business failure. About a year before Mary’s death, Avarilla reportedly worried that unnamed relatives had great influence on her mother and would get some of Mary’s property, according to another witness. Whereas executor and grandson Wilton was a favorite of Mary’s, his 13-year-old sister was disrespectful to her grandmother and often demanded money. When Mary refused demands from Avarilla’s daughters for money, they sometimes supposedly helped themselves, according to John’s sister. Yet despite Wilton’s role as supposed favorite, Mary reportedly had complained that Wilton did not allot her enough spending money so she therefore had to borrow money from Martina. Avarilla herself had been an invalid or in poor health for several years, according to a witness, so when Avarilla called at her mother’s, Mary would come down the stairs to meet with her rather that put Avarilla through the exertion of having to climb the stairs. At a time after making the subsequently disputed will, Mary supposedly commented that she never made a will and did not intend to do so, given that she had just two children and wanted them to receive her property, which her lawyers would work out. The letter from Mary to her attorney, laying out her wishes for a will, was contrasted by Martina’s lawyers with Mary’s poor spelling in her household ledgers to imply that the letter was someone else’s creation.

On the stand, Martina said her mother often mentioned that the Lamberts wanted her to make a will.  Wilton, in attending to his mother’s finances in her later years, charged his grandmother a five percent commission, according to Martina. Avarilla’s husband, Tallmadge, once showed patriarch John a list of cases for which Tallmadge had served as John’s lawyer. For each, Tallmadge had listed himself as “unpaid,” infuriating Mary. Martina testified that in her first summer away from Washington, residing in North Carolina, she had left her horses at Van View.  On her return, she found the animals worn out and blamed Avarilla’s family. Martina also claimed that during Mary’s final illness, Avarilla’s presence agitated her mother.

Meanwhile, Martina had supposedly sold off a large amount of inherited stock in the Great Falls Ice Company, despite Mary’s wishes to keep the stock in the family. The lawsuit supposedly prompted a rupture in relations between Martina and one of her nieces, a daughter of Avarilla’s. In her mother’s last days, Martina reportedly entertained friends with a reception that include the serving of light refreshments, implied as disrespectful to her mother. Martina acknowledged that the proceeds from some of her inherited property had ended up in her husband’s name, which scored points for Avarilla’s case, on the grounds that Avarilla was claiming the will reflected an intention to prevent further such transfers to Martina’s husband.

The family bloodletting was over in March 1897, when the jury reached its verdict: undue influence exercised in drawing up the will, overturning the document. Avarilla’s lawyers announced that they would seek a new trial, but in June the parties finalized an out-of-court settlement allotting more property to Martina than in the disputed will. “This ends one of the longest will contests ever before the District courts,” concluded the Washington Evening Star.  

Avarilla and Martina were on the same side in a US Supreme Court case decided the following year. They contended that a provision of the Rock Creek Park act of 1890 was unconstitutional. The sisters had sued to prevent the park commission from assessing their land to help pay for establishing the park. Avarilla and Martina had prevailed in the lower courts, but the Supreme Court ruled against them. In 1899, the two women were among the many property owners who lost to the United States at the Supreme Court in the Potomac Flats case. As the federal government dredged the Potomac and reclaimed tidal flats that would eventually hold the Lincoln Memorial and East and West Potomac Parks, Congress took title of the new land. Owners of the adjacent properties sued. Avarilla and Martina were among these because they inherited the land that John had bought for a canal. The case wound its way through the courts for some 15 years until the government prevailed. 

After being on the same side in the Rock Creek and Potomac Flats cases, Avarilla and Martin were at odds again in 1909 over their conflicting property interests. Martina sued her sister over the division of property between Chevy Chase Circle, Georgia Avenue, and Rock Creek Park.  

Figure 6: In their later years, the Van Riswick sisters lived separately at DC landmark residences.

Avarilla died in 1918 from heart disease. She was living at the then-new Dresden apartment building at Connecticut Avenue and Kalorama Road, now a Washington landmark (see Figure 6). Martina died in 1932, apparently from complications from a fall from an automobile while in Massachusetts. She was living at the Bates Warren Apartment House, a block away from her sister’s last residence. After the deaths of the sisters and long after the family’s sales of their Vienna-area land, a formal association of sorts remained between the Van Riswick name and at least a portion of the land. In a major Town of Vienna land transaction for Northeast Vienna in 1934, a parcel adjacent to the W&OD railroad still carried a “Van Riswick” reference on the relevant plat (see Figure 7).

Figure 7: In 1934, the Town of Vienna and Katrina Hine Echols engaged in a real estate transaction in northeast Vienna involving more than 100 acres spread across numerous parcels. This portion of the plat for the transaction still referred to a 7.695-acre parcel along the railroad and south of the town line in the Van Riswick name.

[Sources include: Alexandria Gazette; Ancestry.com; Baltimore Sun; Findagrave.com; Fold3.com; Historic Records Center, Fairfax County Courthouse; New York Times; Newspapers.com; Rural Remnants of Washington County: An Architectural Survey of Washington’s Historic Farms and Estates, DC Historic Preservation Office, September 2013; Washington Evening Star; Washington Law Reporter Vol 2. No. 31 10 August 1875; Washington Post; Washington Times.]

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