The Northside Park Sawmill

Some 200 years ago, a sawmill sat in what is now Northside Park in Vienna. I haven’t seen this sawmill referred to in various accounts of mills in Fairfax County and the Vienna area, and I don’t know when exactly the mill operated. But the existing evidence–even though there are only a few items of such evidence–indicates that a sawmill did indeed sit next to Piney Branch probably on land that today is part of Northside Park.

The most helpful evidence for the sawmill’s existence is the plat in Figure 1. The plat is available as a document in the files for a Fairfax County chancery case, George W. Gunnell Committee of Bushrod Gunnell vs. the extended Gunnell family. The plat shows the partition of a 174-acre property almost entirely on one side of Piney Branch. The sawmill is adjacent to Piney Branch just after a bend in the stream within the boundaries of the 54-acre Lot 1 of the partition (see Figures 1 & 2).

We can establish where exactly Lot 1 was by comparing the shape on the plat to the shape of tracts in the Beth Mitchell map of Fairfax County’s 1860 property owners. Lot 1 corresponds to the property owned in 1860 by Ashbel Hosford, of which a portion is now Town of Vienna park land (see Figure 3 comparison map). The plat itself is oriented with north at the top, judging from the comparison to the Mitchell map.

Thus the sawmill was on the east side of Piney Branch, apparently just after a big bend in the stream. On the plat, the mill is between the bend and a creek that empties into Piney Branch from south to north, at the southeastern extremity of Lot 1. The creek was known at the time as Garrett’s Spring Branch, according to deeds from the mid-19th century (V3:51; U3:62) (see Figures 4 and 5).

A modern-day contour map helps to narrow down the likely location of the mill. With two good-sized hills just to the east of Piney Branch at the big bend in the stream, we’re left with a rough triangle of relatively level ground on the east bank.

When Did the Mill Run & Who Was Associated With It?

I assume the mill was probably operating during the early-19th-century ownership of Henry Gunnell, who died in 1822 and whose tenure seems to have an aspect of stability to it. Perhaps the mill also operated for as much as three decades beyond that. Two deeds from sales of Lot 1 in 1854 note that the parcel was “commonly known as the saw mill lot” (see Figure 7). That description is consistent with the plat’s annotation for a sawmill and suggests that the sawmill had a longtime association with the lot, presumably dating to Henry’s ownership (Fairfax County deeds V3:51 and W3:24). Henry Gunnell’s ownership began circa 1805, when he acquired 190 acres from Thomas Fairfax for $40, judging from Fairfax County’s list of deeds from the era. In his 1821 will, Henry Gunnell bequeathed these “190 acres bought of Thomas Fairfax in two parcels on the waters of Piney branch and broad glade” to sons Bushrod and Joshua (M1:301). The 190 acres included the 174 acres from which Lot 1 would later be partitioned, judging from the records of chancery case 1868-001.

Lot 1 and the 174-acre tract of which it had been a part appear to have been in an unsettled state for years after Henry Gunnell’s death, leaving it unclear to me if the sawmill operated during this period. By 1832, Bushrod Gunnell had become mentally ill, and his brother George W. Gunnell committed him, judging from chancery records. That same year, Joshua Gunnell sued to divide up the various parcels he and Bushrod had received jointly in their father’s will. Under the division ordered by the court in 1832 or 1833, Bushrod received the parcel of which the future Lot 1 would be a part. In the meantime, tenant Henson Kidwell, aka William H. Kidwell, had been living on the 190-acre tract, according to chancery records. I have been unable to determine if Kidwell or someone else associated with the Gunnell family was operating the mill in these years.

And similarly for the remainder of the 1830s and 1840s and into the 1850s. In 1847, George W. Gunnell reported to the court that on Bushrod’s behalf, he had sold what was now a 174-acre parcel, as the court had ordered. Dr. Ira Williams was the buyer. In a memorandum from late 1853, Williams wrote about a parcel “supposed to contain fifty nine acres & known as the Saw Mill tract” (Chancery Records Index Number 1868-001). This tract was part of a larger parcel that Williams had purchased from George W. Gunnell, committee of Bushrod Gunnell, according to the Williams memo. Williams was probably referring to what the subsequent survey would establish as the 54-acre lot. In January 1854, A.B. Williams–Ira’s brother–surveyed the land, and Ira partitioned it into three lots, with Lot 1 at 54 acres, rather than 59. The plat for this survey is the one annotated with the sawmill, indicating that as of early 1854, the mill still stood, whatever its operating status. In a series of transactions with a complicated chronology in early 1854, Ira Williams sold the 54 acres to Reuben A. Strother; George W. Gunnell, as a commissioner of the court and Bushrod’s committee, deeded the land to Strother; and Strother and his wife sold the parcel to John Dyer (Chancery Records Index Number 1868-001; V3:51; U3:62). In late 1854, Dyer then sold the parcel to Ashbel Hosford (W3:24).

It is in the sales to Dyer and Hosford that the deeds refer to the parcel as the sawmill lot, but neither gives a hint as to whether the sawmill was still operating. Hosford was a farmer from upstate New York. The only evidence we have of Hosford doing work other than farming during his ownership is that in 1857, he hauled material for the building of the nearby stretch of the Alexandria, Loudoun and Hampshire Railroad (the future Washington and Old Dominion), according to chancery records (Chancery Records Index Number 1858-037).

The construction of the railroad probably transformed the topography of the ground on the western side of Piney Branch opposite the mill location. In that area, what had probably been a more gradual descent of the land from what today is Center Street to the Piney Branch flood plain was now interrupted by the railroad embankment that exists to this day. The embankment creates a steep drop-off to Piney Branch. Regardless, after the Dyer-Hosford deed, the trail goes cold for the Northside Park sawmill.

The Site As It Looks Today