A Kenyon Family Photo From the 1920s: Who Is In the Picture & Where Are They?

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Introduction

At Thanksgiving 2024, the Town of Vienna posted a photo of a gathering of the Kenyon family from the early 1920s (see below). Here, I am posting some educated guesswork on who in particular is in the photo and where it was taken. (I defer to Kenyon descendants, however, for an authoritative take.)

Who

I suspect that people in the photo are the adult children of George L. Kenyon and his wife, Charlotte “Lottie” Marian Smith, based on the number of men and women in the image and the timing. There are nine people in the photo, which matches the number of George and Charlotte’s children, according a list of the Kenyons’ heirs in Fairfax County property records (L8:39). All of the nine children were still alive in the 1920s and were well into adulthood, according to public information such as death certificates, gravestones, and census records. Moreover, the male/female breakdown of the nine Kenyon children matches the breakdown in the photo: five women and four men.

The nine children of George and Charlotte Kenyon in order of oldest to youngest:

  • Ida Kenyon Bowman (1868-1966)
  • Alma Kenyon Berry (1869- 1959) 
  • Retta Kenyon Commins (1871-1935) 
  • James Talmadge Kenyon (1873-1937) 
  • Paul Smith Kenyon (1874-1957) 
  • Howland Daniel Kenyon (1877- 1949) 
  • Alice Blanche Kenyon Maffett (1879-1960) 
  • Marian Kenyon Maffett (1881-1948) 
  • Archibald George Kenyon (1886-1955) (Sources: death certificates & findagrave.com)

If I’m wrong, then the people in the photo could be a subset of George and Charlotte’s children along with their spouses, or a mix of such children and spouses with the children and spouses of Benjamin Kenyon and his wife, Sophia E. Schnapp aka Snapp. Benjamin was George’s younger brother and, like George, a Vienna resident. 

George and Benjamin Kenyon were New York natives who settled in Vienna after the Civil War. The brothers had fought in the war on the Union side. George served in the same New York outfit as Vienna’s first mayor, O.E. Hine. In fact, Kenyon and Hine traveled together from New York in 1866 to find a place to live, eventually settling on Vienna, according to an unpublished Kenyon family history quoted by Connie and Mayo Stuntz in their “This Was Vienna, Virginia.” Charlotte and her family had moved from the New York to Fairfax County before the war and remained loyal to the Union, according to the Stuntz book. George and Charlotte married after the war. In contrast, Benjamin and Sophia had married in New York before the war.

Where

George’s and Benjamin’s properties were out of the families’ hands by the 1920s, so the photograph presumably was not taken at their houses. George and Charlotte had made their home on an approximately 100-acre tract that they had acquired in 1866 (F4:491). Most of this parcel is today’s Westwood Country Club. Widowed Charlotte sold the tract in 1909, according to Fairfax County property records (C12:42). Benjamin’s approximately 50-acre parcel sat between today’s Follin Lane and Wolf Trap Road, immediately to the south of George’s and across what today is Maple Avenue. Benjamin had acquired this parcel from George in 1870 (L4:544). After Benjamin’s death in 1903 and Sophia’s in 1904, a suit among their children culminated in the parcel’s sale out of the family in 1906 (U6:576). See Figures 1 and 2 for a joint obituary of the two brothers in the Fairfax Herald in December 1903. George and Benjamin had died within a month of each other.

Figure 1: From the Fairfax Herald, 25 December 1903, page 3.
Figure 2: Fairfax Herald article, continued.

Thus the house in the picture most likely belongs to one of the children of George and Charlotte Kenyon. In the early 1920s, four of George and Charlotte’s children resided in Vienna. Presumably the photo was taken at one of these locations. (See Figure 3 below for a map from 2024 that shows the locations of the various former Kenyon properties mentioned in this post). Through a process of elimination, my best guess is that the photo was at either Map Location 2, which is Marian’s house on Park Street SE, or 4, Howland’s farm off Lawyers Road, as explained below.

  • 1) Retta and husband Moses Commins owned a house on Park Street just south of Maple Avenue (R8:214). This sat at the location of today’s Park Street entrance to the Whole Foods parking lot. See Figures 4 and 5 for, respectively, a 1937 aerial image of the house and what is located today at the site of the former house. A circa 1920 photo of the house is on page 344 of the Stuntz book. Although the photos bear some resemblance to each other, the photo in the Stuntz book shows a railing on the porch that’s not present in the family photo, and features on the vertical supports of the porches in each photo don’t seem to match. 
  • 2) Marian and husband William Henry Maffett owned a house across Park Street from Retta. Today it is the site of a medical office building. See Figures 4 and 5. The couple lived in the house until moving to Maryland probably in late 1923 or perhaps early 1924, judging from local newspaper items. In November 1923, the Fairfax Herald reported that the Maffetts would be moving from Vienna because they had just purchased a business in Maryland; friends and family consequently had thrown them a surprise party. A Washington Post story from September 1925 confirms that the couple was living in Rockville by that point. The Stuntz book shows this house at the bottom of page 344 but is not sufficient for confidently comparing and contrasting with the family photo.
  • 3) Archibald Kenyon and his wife, Bessie Newlon, were living at her parents’ house on Mill Street NE as of the 1920 census. After Bessie’s father died in 1921, the couple continued to live there with her mother and remained there through the 20’s, according to the Stuntzes. Today, the location is part of the Presbyterian Church parking lot and carries the address of 109 Mill Street NE. See Figures 4 and 5. The Stuntz book has an undated photo of the house on page 355. This photo does not match the appearance of the front porch we see in the family photo, suggesting to me that the location of the family photo was not Archibald’s residence. 
  • 4) Howland Kenyon and his wife, Lena Gunnell, owned an approximately 70-acre farm at the northwestern extremity of Vienna (K8:62). At the time of the family photo, almost all of the parcel was on the Fairfax County side of the Town line, but a small portion was within the then-boundary of Vienna. In the late 1960s, the tract was developed as the Barristers Place subdivision. See Figures 6 and 7. (1215:251; 1917:294, 2511:722, 3116:230, 3142:630)
Figure 3: For the four Kenyon children who lived in Vienna in the early 1920s, this map shows where their residences were in relation to a map from our era. The map also shows the general location of the first generation of Vienna’s Kenyons. Three of Kenyon children lived in Vienna’s core, including two on Park Street SE. Earlier in the 20th century, Archibald had lived on this same block of Park Street as well as another one of his siblings, Alice Kenyon Maffett, and her husband, John D. Maffett (see the diagram on page 343 of “This Was Vienna, Virginia”). Retta had acquired her house (1 on the map) from her mother, Charlotte, who had purchased the property several year’s after George’s death and lived on it until her own passing in 1919.
Figure 4: this image from April, 1937 gives us an overhead view of the former Kenyon residences on Park Street and Mill Street as well as their immediate surroundings. The aerial image was taken more than a decade after the photo of the Kenyon family gathering; as such it is an imperfect proxy for what the area looked like in the early 1920s. At the time this photo was taken, the Kenyon siblings no longer lived on the properties. Marian by this point was living in Falls Church with her second husband, Tyler F. Maffett. Her first husband, John D. Maffett, had died in 1931. Archibald was living in Washington or Arlington, judging from 1940 census information. Retta had died in 1935; her husband, Moses Commins, continued to own the house until 1940.
Figure 5: this overhead photo shows what sits today at the sites of the former Kenyon residences on Park and Mill streets.
Figure 6: Howland Kenyon’s farm sat between Lawyers Road and the Washington and Old Dominion Railroad (off-photo to the upper right). At the time of this photo, the property remained under Howland’s ownership.
Figure 7: The former farm house of Howland and Lena Kenyon would have been located in the vicinity of the cul-de-sac for today’s Statute Lane, judging from a comparison of aerial imagery from 1937 and 2024. The base map of this graphic is from the Fairfax County Map Wizard.

One final nugget to note: a Kenyon Lane is still on the books in Vienna and represented on maps, as with Figure 8, serving to memorialize the Kenyon name. Kenyon Lane is a 30-foot unimproved right-of-way (see Figure 9) between the Westwood County Club–the former Kenyon homestead–to the east and, to the west, the Wolftrappe Square townhouse development and Council Square I subdivision. Kenyon Lane dates to the ownership of George and Charlotte Kenyon.

Figure 8 shows Kenyon lane on a Fairfax County digital map of Vienna. The red “X” marks the approximate location of the photo in Figure 9.
Figure 9 shows a portion of the Kenyon Lane right-of-way as it exists in December, 2024, looking up the path of the “lane” as it extends to the northwest. It parallels the western fence line of the Westwood Country Club, a portion of which is observable at the right-center. A deed from 1978 describing a boundary of an adjoining property puts it well: “there is not now being any physical evidence on the ground of where the bed of said street was at the time of the aforesaid deed….” (5081:145).
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3 Responses to A Kenyon Family Photo From the 1920s: Who Is In the Picture & Where Are They?

  1. Karen says:
    January 5, 2025 at 9:01 am

    Thank you again for sharing more history of my hometown which seems lost but not forgotten by a few of us .

    Reply
  2. Karen says:
    January 5, 2025 at 8:17 am

    Thank you again for sharing more history of my hometown which seems lost but not forgotten by a few of still remaining.

    Reply

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