September 2024
This post provides a short history of the house at 128 Nutley Street NW, long the site of a popular annual Christmas display in the Town of Vienna. According to a FFXnow report from August, the owners of the house approached a developer about rezoning and redeveloping the property, and the developer has since provided a proposal to the Town’s Planning Commission to build townhouses on the lot.
Since the house was built circa 1909, it has had only four sets of owners, one of which was a de facto transition ownership. The current owners acquired the house 54 years ago, and their extended family has owned it for more than 100 years, according to Fairfax County property records (3311:604; F8:174). Other than this family and the interim owners who preceded them, the house was owned by just one other person, the original owner. (The family of owners of the past 100+ years is not related to the house’s original owner).
The family’s ownership began 107 years ago this month. On 19 September 1917, Carson B. Thomas purchased from interim owners what at the time was described as a ¾-acre lot with improvements “lying in Block twenty (20) of Salsbury’s Subdivision of land known as ‘Windover Heights’” (F8:174). Mr. Thomas paid $440 for the property (F8:180). In 1924, he conveyed an undivided half-interest in the property to his wife, Martha Dade Thomas (J9:220).
Carson Brown Thomas was born in Loudoun County on 4 July, 1878, according to his WWII draft registration. He completed four years of college, according to the 1940 census. This was probably at some point between 1900 and 1907, because in 1900 he was working on his father’s farm, according to the census, whereas by 1907 he was teaching in Fairfax County’s racially segregated public school system. For the 1907-08 school year, the county’s Dranesville District School Board “[c]ontracted with the colored teacher, Carson B. Thomas, to teach the Floris Colored School for $35 per month,” according to the school board’s minutes. Mr. Thomas taught at Floris at least through the 1912-13 school year, judging from the Dranesville minutes and a history of black education in Fairfax County by Evelyn Darnell Russell-Porte. By 1917, Mr. Thomas was working as a skilled laborer for the Government Printing Office (GPO), according to his WWI draft registration. During his career at the GPO he worked as an operator of a binding machine and as a messenger, according to census records.
Meanwhile, from a least 1920 to 1924, Mrs. Thomas worked as a teacher at the Vienna public school for black children, according to Russell-Porte’s history. This school was at the corner of Lawyers and Malcolm Roads. (Judging from Russell-Porte’s data, at least two of the Thomas daughters also taught in the county’s public schools at some point).
Mr. Thomas lived at 128 Nutley Street NW with his wife until his death in 1951, judging from census records and his death certificate. Census information indicates that the Thomas daughters, a son-in-law, and some grandchildren also lived with them at the house at different periods. Mrs. Thomas continued to own the house until her death in 1963, judging from her death certificate. She died intestate, so it wasn’t until 1970 that the five Thomas daughters conveyed the property to the family members who have owned it since (3311:604).
When Carson Thomas bought the house in 1917, it had been under the ownership of two partners and their wives. These interim owners had acquired the property in the aftermath of the trial of the house’s original owner in the Fairfax County Circuit Court in 1913. That year, the original owner of the house pleaded guilty to the homicide of his wife on a Vienna-area road in 1912, according to the Alexandria Gazette. The original owner and his wife had lived at the house at least since 1910, judging from census information. In 1909, the original owner had bought the parcel from H.L. and Lucie M. Salsbury for $75 (D7:396). The deed indicates that the lot was already improved, suggesting that the house was in place by that time. Today’s Fairfax County online property tax database lists the year of construction as 1900, but that database sometimes features estimates that have been rounded to milestone years such as 1900, judging from other entries I’ve encountered during research. Regardless, the parcel itself was part of Salsbury’s 1894 Windover Heights subdivision (R5:82).
The wife of the original owner was Janie Eliza Borgus (maiden name), according to marriage and death records. She was Vienna-born. In 1902, her father, Silas L. Borgus, bought two properties in Windover Heights, the larger being Block 12 on the northwest corner of today’s West and Lewis streets (J6:236, J6:237). Janie Borgus worked as a domestic worker. She was 24 when she died.
It appears that the original owner used the property to pay for his legal representation at the trial. On 4 January 1913, a few weeks before the he went to trial, the original owner pledged the property as collateral to secure a $500 note that he had drawn in favor of his lawyer, the Alexandria attorney Lewis H. Machen (O7:592). The note was payable in 30 days on Machen’s demand. At the start of the trial on 31 January, the original owner pleaded not guilty, but on 3 February, he entered a guilty plea and was sentenced, according to the Alexandria Gazette. Meanwhile, he had just defaulted on the $500 note, so Machen directed the trustee to sell the property. In mid-March, the property was auctioned on-site, and the highest bidders, at $575, were F.D. (Frederick Dawson) Richardson and E.M. (Edgar McCarty) Wiley. Richardson was a Fairfax County attorney from a prominent local family; his father at the time was serving in his longtime roles as the clerk of the county’s circuit court and the clerk of the county’s board of supervisors. Wiley over the years held a variety of government and other positions (Q7:42). As of the 1910 census, Wiley was a deputy sheriff in the county, so perhaps he was working in that position at the time of the trial in 1913. In fact, two days before the trial began, the accused “was taken to the scene of his crime…by the jail officers,” according to the Alexandria Gazette. Perhaps E.M. Wiley was among those jail officers.
It is presumably lost to history as to what enticed Richardson and Wiley to buy the property and hold it for a few years before selling to C.B. Thomas. Perhaps in the meantime they had tenants in the house from whom they earned rent. The purchase was unusual for the two men in that they were not wheeler-dealers in real estate. Richardson was involved in many real estate transactions as a trustee for deeds of trust, but he had few outright purchases, as the Nutley Street property was, judging from a review of Fairfax County property records associated with his name. In the period of the Nutley Street acquisition, these purchases usually were at auction from trustees or commissioners or from fellow members of the local legal establishment or his parents. They often related to parcels in what is now Fairfax City along Cedar Avenue and Center Street and near the electric railroad. Wiley in turn was involved in only a half dozen real estate transactions as a grantee in the first quarter of the 20th century. If the two men had thought that the distressed circumstances of the original owner’s selling would allow them to get the property for a steal, thereby setting up a bigger profit from a resale, then such a plan would have ended up not bearing fruit. Richardson and Wiley sold the property to Thomas in 1917 for a good deal less than what they paid at the auction in 1913.
The two men did have roles in financing the Thomas purchase. Wiley lent $160 at six percent with the first of four monthly payments due a few weeks after C.B Thomas took ownership, and Richardson was the trustee for the related deed of trust (F8:180). However, the Thomases made their payments on time, so Wiley’s gain was limited to the interest he earned rather than, say, a repossession from a default. In the mid-20s, the Thomases refinanced with Richardson again as the trustee, so Richardson had the benefit of repeat business with the family (J9:219).
Whatever the case may be, it was with the sale from Richardson and Wiley that the extended Thomas family began an ownership of 128 Nutley Street NW that continues as of the fall of 2024.
Interesting. Thank you.