Clarke’s School House, North of Vienna, Virginia

Decades before there was a Wolftrap Elementary School, Clarke’s School House serviced the same general area outside Vienna, Virginia that Wolftrap now serves. Clarke’s School House, aka the Clarke School, was a Fairfax County public school that sat on the south side of Clarks Crossing Road less than a mile northeast of the county’s border with the Town of Vienna (see Figures 1 and 2). In 1883, William T. Clarke and his wife, Amelia, conveyed a lot “containing 2 Roods, one pole of land”—the equivalent of a half-acre—to “William Moore, H.L. Faulkner, A.J. Sager, and their successors, School Trustees of the Providence School District of Fairfax County.” (These details will be relevant later in this article). The parcel was for use as a “Public Free School” under Virginia law. The deed specified that if the property passed beyond the control of the trustees or their successors, or if the “lot of ground and buildings thereon cease to be used for public white free school purposes,” then the property reverted to the Clarkes or their heirs (source: Fairfax County deed C5:127). The school appears to have been built and put into operation sometime between 1883 and 1887. In 1887, when William Clarke subdivided his property for the benefit of his son, Benjamin Franklin (B.F.) Clarke, the deed referred to the adjoining “School house lot,” suggesting the school was in-place on its parcel (F5:475). 

Figure 1 shows the location of the Clarke School on a 1915 map. The map is from the U.S. Geological Survey’s Historical Topographic Map Explorer.
Figure 2: The red “X” shows on a 2022 map the approximate location of where the Clarke School sat. The school was near what today is the southwest corner of the T-intersection at Clarks Crossing Road and Percussion Way. The map is from the Fairfax County Historical Imagery Viewer.

Deeds from the late 19th and early 20th centuries sometimes refer to the school when they involve nearby properties. For instance, in 1897, when Wethers and Maggie Smith sold 10 of their 104 acres north of the Clarke property, the deed’s description of the boundaries starts with “a point in the middle of the County Road, running by Clarke’s School House” (Z5:379). In 1905, a deed covering a transaction within the Clarke family describes the relevant property as “situated on the east side of the Clarke’s [sic] Crossing Road near Clarke’s School-House” (V6:669). The identity of Clarks Crossing Road itself was also influenced by the presence of the school: a deed from 1906, in laying out the boundaries of an adjoining parcel, refers to “a big black oak in the Clarke’s School house road” (U6:224).

For the period from 1899 to the early 1920s, we get a glimpse of the school, its activities, and its personnel via local newspaper articles, church documents, and the minutes of the school board for the Providence District. 

–In December 1899, principal Walter Taylor joined Clarke’s schoolboys in a late-season ballgame, according to the Fairfax Herald. “Being a novice to this dangerous and exciting sport,” Walter misplayed a catch and took a painful beaning under an eye.

–Circa 1903, a faction from the Beulah Methodist Protestant Church at the corner of Clarks Crossing Road and today’s Beulah Road used the Clarke School for Sunday School pending the establishment of Antioch Christian Church, according to a history of Antioch Church from the church’s 2003 centennial. Antioch’s first pastor, Reverend J.T. Watson, also taught at Clarke during the 1904-05 school year, according to the Fairfax Herald. In this period, the school facility hosted religious services from at least one other denomination, judging from a notice in the Fairfax Herald (see Figure 3).

Figure 3 is from the Fairfax Herald, July 1903. This Albert Hollinger was presumably the same Albert Hollinger who was a minister at what is now known as the Oakton Church of the Brethren, judging from an online history of the church. Elder Hollinger “was a prosperous farmer and Church of the Brethren minister from Gettsyburg, Pennsylvania, in the early twentieth century,” according to a review of a book by Hollinger’s grandson. Hollinger moved from Fairfax County to Gettysburg in 1907 and then to Saskatchewan in 1921.

–In 1912, 49 students were enrolled at the school, according to a letter to the editor of the Fairfax Herald. Apparently, this was more students than the year before but less than the 60 or so in some earlier, unspecified years.

–In 1912, the school employed one teacher, whereas in at least some other years there were two. Some articles refer to a principal. For instance, as of 1900, Grace Berry of the prominent Berry family of Vienna was Clarke’s principal, according to the Fairfax Herald. The principals appear to have had a teaching role, augmenting the very small teaching staff—if one additional teacher can be considered a “staff.” 

–In the 1911-1912 academic year, the Clarke School won various awards, including the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) County Medal. The school also won a ten-dollar gold piece for the best corn yield in the Providence District, a commendation that underscores the rural nature of the County’s schools in this era. The following school year, Alice Cockrell from the Clarke School received an honorable mention from the DAR for her essay on the American Revolution, according to the Fairfax Herald.

–Also in 1912, Clarke beat the Andrew Chapel School in the spelling bee. That same year, the school’s treasury ended the academic year with a $17 surplus. 

–Near the end of the 1912 session, the students of the Clarke School performed “A Box of Monkeys” “before a large audience” at Bouton Hall, apparently over multiple nights, according to the Fairfax Herald (see Figures 4 and 5). “The children for their acting secured vociferous applause, and the entertainment ended with a merry dance,” reported the Herald. The students performed under the tutelage of teacher Sybel Grant, who seems to have been a love-her or dislike-her kind of teacher, judging from a pair of dueling letters from unidentified “patrons”–presumably parents–to the editor of the Fairfax Herald in mid-2012. (See Sybel’s biographical sketch at the link above for the letters and the details).

Figure 4. “The humor of [Grace Furniss’s] play revolved around a rustic, western-raised American woman teaching American slang and behavior to an upper-crust, ‘titled’ English Lady,” according to pop-culture blogger Peter Jensen Brown. The Library of Congress website has the text for the play.
Figure 5: Bouton Hall as it looked in the late 19th century. It was the site of a Clarke School student performance in May 1912, according to the Fairfax Herald. Bouton Hall still stands today at Mill and Church Streets. The photo is embedded from Mike Berger’s Pinterest site, a valuable repository of vintage photos of the Vienna area.

–As of the mid-teens, the school board was contracting for firewood for the school from B.F. Clarke, owner of the neighboring property, according to school board minutes. Clarke received $20 per school year for the wood. In that same period, teachers such as Clarke’s Clarice Haines were under contract for $40 per month, judging from the minutes.  

The students of the school would have lived in the surrounding area and have been approximately 6 to 13 years-old (see Figure 6), judging from a video from the Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) about the history of the school system. According to the video, from the establishment of the county’s public schools in 1870 until 1907, the school system educated children through the seventh grade. After that, when higher grades were available in the county, the instruction would have been at another facility rather than Clarke. A 1912 letter to the editor about the Clarke School boasted that “[t]en pupils are well-prepared to enter any High School,” indicating that the highest grades were not taught at Clarke. Segregation meant that the students at Clarke would have been exclusively white. Thus although Clarke served the same general area as today’s Wolftrap Elementary, it would not have served a similarly diverse population.

Figure 6: This is one of only two photos of the Clarke School of which I am aware. There appear to be 45 children in the photo, in addition to the eight women in the top row from the right side, who appear too old to be students. One or two are probably teachers and the rest presumably mothers of the children. The tall young man at the top center seems too old to be a student; his prominence of place suggests he is a person of some authority. That impression is reinforced by the positioning of his right hand on the shoulder of the boy to his front right. The girl annotated with the orange “A” is probably Ethel M. Dyer (1892-1973), according to Virginia Rita. The boy marked with “B” is Ethel’s brother, Albert R. Dyer (1898-1983). Among the local families of which some of the other children may be members, judging from the 1900 and 1910 U.S. censuses: Adams, Gunnell, Hummer, Jones, Loveless, McDaniel, Moreland, Pearson, and Young. On the day this photo was taken, the weather was better than average for a mid-December day, judging from historical data for Washington DC: high of 59, low of 27, and no precipitation, and thus consistent with how the children are dressed.

Clarke’s staff over the years tended to live nearby, which isn’t surprising for the early or pre-automobile era. Bessie Rice and possibly Nannie Jones took rooms at the residence of widow Rose Smith Graham, judging from Fairfax Herald articles. Rose Graham lived near the intersection of Clarks Crossing and Beulah Roads, according to Fairfax County property records. Mollie Thompson taught at Clarke before she married John Smith, and it’s unclear if she continued to do so after she became Mollie Smith. But if she did, she would have been living just on the other side of Clarks Crossing Road across from the school, judging from property records.

Regarding academics, on one day in December 1909, Clarke’s principal, Bessie Rice, required the students to name Virginia’s 100 counties as part of a lesson, according to the Fairfax Herald. She asked student Mary Gunnell to name a Washington other than Washington, D.C. Mary answered the challenge by calling out Washington, Pennsylvania. Another teacher, Miss Jones (presumably Nannie Jones), at the same time was considering an exercise about the “agricultural and zoological and climatic differences in different sections of the Commonwealth.” In November 1906, eight students made the honor roll, according to the Herald (see Figures 7 and 8). And in 1912, two of three children who tied to win the multi-school “Graded School Spelling Contest,” Florence Adams and Walter Jones, were from the Clarke School, according to the Fairfax Herald.  

Figure 7: The Adams cousins, Gertie and Beulah, lived west of the W&OD railroad between Clarks Crossing and Hunter Mill Road, respectively where today’s Wendover and Hunter Mill Forest subdivisions are located. Ruth Young lived east of the railroad, where Macy Avenue is today. The Elgin brothers lived north of Clarks Crossing Road in the house now known as the Lahey Lost Valley House. Isabel Dyer probably lived just up Clarks Crossing Road some 500 yards from the school. Walter Jones lived on on what is now named Trap Road, as did Jessie McDaniel, further to the northeast and where the Barns at Wolftrap now sit. See Figure 8. The Fairfax Herald’s honor-roll item was accessed via the Fairfax County Public Library website.
Figure 8 uses a 1915 map to show the residences of children who were on the Clarke School honor roll in late 1906 (see Figure 7). The residences were determined from Fairfax County property records and US census data.

The school consolidation movement presumably doomed the Clarke School. The movement began in the 1910s, according to a FCPS video history. Over time, the school system closed its rural, one-room schools in favor of new, larger buildings with “auditoriums, running water, and indoor bathrooms,” according to the video. The process started with the communities that had the better roads and access to trolley lines. Vienna, the logical place for Clarke to consolidate to, would have at least met the trolley-line standard. In 1915, the Town built a new school in Vienna, made of brick, to replace the two-room, wooden school built in the 1890s, according to Connie and Mayo Stuntz in their “This Was Vienna, Virginia.” By 1918, the Providence District school board appeared to be weighing the fate of Clarke in the context of this new Vienna facility. From the minutes of a school board meeting held in June, 1918 at the Vienna school house:

“Inspection of the school property at Vienna was made. Careful consideration was given to the question of necessary repairs and improvements, and to the advisability of bringing the children thereto from Clarke and Robey by trolley.”

The Clarke School remained open as of March, 1921. “Clarke’s school, with Miss Henrietta Adams as teacher, is doing fine, having school five days every week, regardless of the weather,” according to the Fairfax Herald. Reading between the lines, is there a hint of defensiveness or whistling-by-the-graveyard? After all, what’s so newsworthy that a school “is doing fine,” unless claims have surfaced that it isn’t?  

The school closed sometime between 1922 and 1925. In 1922, Fairfax consolidated its six magisterial district school boards into one Fairfax County School Board, according the online FCPS history and county property records, illustrating that big changes were underway in the school system at the time. A year later, Vienna opened the school that remains to this day as Vienna Elementary, according to the Stuntz book, providing facilities that would have made it practical to include Clarke School children in the Vienna student population.

The Clarke School House was out of business before the 1925-26 school year. In October 1925, B.F. Clarke complained to the Fairfax County School Board “in regard to the old school on the Clark [sic] property,” according to the Herndon Observer. “A claim of nuisance was made, and the Board authorized Mr. Clark [sic] to seal the school and protect the same, pending further action of the Board toward abandoning the same.” In 1928, several parents pushed for the school’s reopening, without success.  “A petition signed by six residents of the disused Clarke school neighborhood, near Vienna, asking for the reopening of the school, was received” by the Fairfax County School Board, the Fairfax Herald reported. “As the petition represented but a small minority of residents, no action was taken.”

As of the late 1930s or early 1940s, a Clarke family member had converted the school to an industrial purpose (see Figures 9 and 10). Ed Hummer, who lived on Beulah Road just outside Vienna as a child in the 1930s, recalls that his uncle, Harley “Dibby” Clarke, operated an oil refining business in the basement or the on the first floor of the building. Mr Hummer had been in the building once–and thus we have a living memory of someone who had actually set foot in the structure. I seem to recall reading circa the early 2000s—perhaps on an HOA home page or in a newspaper reminiscence—that old-timers from the Clarks Crossing vicinity remembered an oil stink in the area. (But when I searched for such a write-up recently, I couldn’t find it).  

Figure 9: The former Clarke School was still standing when this aerial photo was taken in April 1937, even though the building’s role as a school had ended more than a decade earlier. See Figure 10 for a closer view.

Figure 10 zooms in on the former Clarke School in the 1937 aerial photo. The residence for B. F. Clarke’s widow, Anne “Annie” Frances Cronin Clarke, is at the lower left, judging from property records and the 1940 U.S. census. B.F. Clarke had died in 1926, according to his death certificate.

The building’s final fate comes to us courtesy of Barbara Hymas and her book, “The Dyer Family of Fairfax County, Virginia, and Related Families.” Probably circa the early-1940s, a fire destroyed the school. (See Figure 11).

Figure 11: This photo of the Clarke School is one of only two ground-level images of the school that I am aware of, and unlike the personnel photo in Figure 6, it gives us a good sense of the school’s external appearance. The photo is courtesy of Barbara Perine Hymas and is featured in her local history, “The Dyer Family of Fairfax County, Virginia and Related Families. The Hymas book is available at familysearch.org (requires an account, which is free) and the Virginia Room at the City of Fairfax Regional Library, call number VREF 929.273 DYER 2012.

Epilogue: 

In 1965, there was something of a postscript for the school lot. The death of B.F. Clarke’s widow in 1953 seems to have prompted property transactions within the Clarke family. One of these transactions reversed the 1887 partition of the William T. Clarke property at Clarks Crossing and gave ownership of the consolidated 77-acre tract to Harley Clarke. In 1965, as the property was approaching development, the widow of one of the parties to a 1950s transaction issued a deed of correction to rectify an earlier omission. The earlier deed had excluded from its scope the parcel of the former Clarke School. We know it is the school lot in part because the language of the correction points to the 1883 origination deed, quoted at the beginning of this article. According to the 1965 deed of correction, “it has been ascertained that…a parcel containing 2 roods and 1 pole” and “conveyed by William T. Clarke, et ux, to William Moore, et al…” had “in fact, reconveyed to the land [of] Benjamin F. Clarke during his lifetime and it was intended” to have conveyed to Harley Clarke under one of the 1950s transactions. The deed of correction doesn’t explain how it was ascertained that the parcel had reconveyed to B.F. Clarke. As we have already seen, however, the original deed conveying the property to the school system had included a reversion clause clearly relevant once Fairfax County ceased schooling at Clarke, so perhaps reference to the original deed would have been enough.

Epilogue 2: Also in the mid-60’s, as the area to the northwest of the Town of Vienna was approaching widespread development, Fairfax County was proposing to reestablish a public school presence in the general area of the former Clarke School, judging from planning documents of the era. The county looked to build a high school and middle school presumably together on the same campus. The location was about one-third of a mile to the northeast of the former Clarke School site (see Figures 12 and 13). This of course never came to be, and the land apparently under consideration now houses the Hawthorne Estates, Frances Young Estates, Chestnut Farm, and Starks Crossing subdivisions (see Figure 14).

Figure 12: In the mid-1960s, Fairfax County planners envisioned a middle school and high school south of Clarks Crossing Road and east of Beulah Road, not far from where the Clarke School once sat. The schools were never built. Perhaps the idea was for something akin to the county’s Hayfield, Robinson, and Lake Braddock public schools that opened between 1968 and 1973 and feature combined middle and high schools. Children who live south of Clarks Crossing Road and west of Beulah Road are now served by Kilmer Middle School and Madison High School. I believe the symbols on the map provide an accurate representation of about where the planners were thinking of placing the schools, rather than merely a very general positioning, because the graphic accurately represents the future location of Wolftrap Elementary School. See the circle to which my green arrow is pointing. The base map is from “The Comprehensive Plan For The Difficult Run Watershed” by the Fairfax County Planning Commission and published in January, 1966. The volume is available at the Virginia Room of the City of Fairfax Regional Library.
Figure 13 shows that in 1967, Fairfax County planners continued to envision the new middle and high schools in the area of Clarks Crossing and Beulah Roads. The map was published in February 1967 in “A Comprehensive Plan for the Vienna Planning District,” by the Fairfax County Planning Division. Note that the schools do not seem to be placed as precisely as in the 1966 map in Figure 12.
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5 Responses to Clarke’s School House, North of Vienna, Virginia

  1. Peggy Clarke-Nealon says:

    Wow! This is awesome to read and remember. Thanks to you and Barbara for sharing. My current source for history is my other “dear and sweet cousin”, Virginia Rita. My regards to all of you who have shared their “gifts of memory” with us.

  2. Karen Adams Speight says:

    I enjoyed reading about the school. My Great Aunt Ethel Adams always pointed out the location when she took me and my cousins on an Annual hike down Clarks Crossing Road and up to the Family Farm. Thank you for your interest and research and sharing this history.

  3. John Stumbaugh says:

    I enjoyed reading your history as a boy who grew up in Vienna in the 70’s. Regarding your piece on the abandoned road off Lawyers, I lived there and remember it well as well as the old house that was falling down back there near the WO&D. There used to be a family who let their horses pasture on what is now an athletic field.

  4. Dena Lee Carter says:

    I really enjoyed reading your well-researched article and images. Thank you for sharing such interesting local history!

  5. Pete says:

    Thanks, Greg, fascinating research as usual. There’s a rather large house and property today on that south corner of Clark’s Crossing and Percussion, on a nice bit of high ground, probably sitting on the location of the old school.

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