The Second Main Office of the Vienna Trust Company

Introduction

I recently read a local media report that the lot on East Maple Avenue between Anita’s restaurant and Berry Street is up for redevelopment. While doing unrelated research, I then stumbled on a 1961 press item with an artist’s pre-construction rendering of the now-vacant bank building that sits on the lot (below). With that, I felt compelled to do a quick post about the lot, the bank building, and the financial institution that originally built it to be its new main office, The Vienna Trust Company. The Town of Vienna’s newsletter for July 2025 (see page 6) covers the early years of the Vienna Trust Company and its first office, still standing at Dominion Road and Church Street. This post will therefore focus on the post-Depression years of the company.

The Vienna Trust Company Outgrows Its Original Office

By the 1950s, The Vienna Trust Company was getting too big for the building at Dominion and Church, which had housed the institution since its founding in 1929. The rate of growth in the value of the company’s assets continued to accelerate as it had on an almost-uninterrupted basis since the late 1930s. During World War II, Vienna Trust crossed the threshold of $1 million in assets. After the war, business was so good that in 1949 the company built a parking lot and an addition to the bank. In the early ’50s, Vienna Trust opened a branch in McLean, and thus the building in Vienna became the company’s main office, even as it continued to serve customers. So many customers, in fact, as to cause the local media to call out how crowded and busy it was. To accommodate demand and the needs of customers, late in the decade, Vienna Trust started to offer extended hours on Fridays.

With all this, the company decided it needed a new building in Vienna. Already in 1957, the company had held discussions with the Town of Vienna about selling the original building to be the new Town Hall. That didn’t work out. (Although almost 70 years later, a possible purchase of the original building from its current owner is back under discussion, according to the Town’s newsletter). Thus Vienna Trust bought three lots at the intersection of Maple Avenue and Berry Street between February 1959 and March 1960.³ At year’s end for 1959, the company announced it would build a new headquarters at Maple and Berry. 

The Three Lots

The three lots intended for the new headquarters were—and remain—a part of the 23-acre Northeast Section of the Murmuring Pines subdivision that Katrina Hine Echols dedicated in 1946. Echols was the only daughter of Vienna’s first mayor, Orrin Hine. In 1931, Hine’s widow, Alma DeLano Hine, had transferred the 180 acres of the “Hine Home Farm,” as the deed put it, to her sole remaining heir, daughter Katrina. The tract included the future 23-acre-section.

Orrin Hine had acquired the tract that included our future three lots of interest either in 1870 from Noyes Dennison⁵ or in 1886 at auction after a foreclosure on land that Frederick Weston had acquired in 1871.⁶ In both instances, the land had been part of a 55-acre parcel that Dennison acquired in 1870 after the courts had partitioned the 338-acre Follin tract on behalf of the heirs of John Follin.⁷ Follin had acquired the tract in 1822.⁸ After his death, his second wife, Mary Barker Follin, owned the parcel until she died in 1863.⁹ 

Building the New Main Office

Test-borings at the Maple and Berry site revealed a complication that presumably delayed the start of construction. The soil in the two lots fronting Maple Avenue, 102 and 103—today’s parking lot—would be unsuitable for the footings for the new building. Consequently, the builder needed to set the structure back further from Maple Avenue on Lot 105. That in turn required a rezoning of Lot 105 to a commercial classification in early 1961. Actual construction of the new headquarters began with the groundbreaking in June 1961 and was an approximately 11-month process. In late March 1962, the new headquarters for the Vienna Trust Building opened for business.  The new building and its parking lot had replaced the three houses previously on the lots.¹⁰

The Final Years of The Vienna Trust Company

The Vienna Trust Company continued to grow in the 1960s with new branches in Great Falls, Tysons Corner, and Reston. In Vienna itself, the company in 1963 established a “Mid-Town” branch on West Maple Avenue in the Commonwealth Building. That, however, was paired with the closing of the original building at Church and Dominion. Sales of the original building through 1979 included the bank fixtures,¹¹ suggesting to me that the structure operated as a bank for some other institution until then. If so, does anyone remember which bank or banks?

In 1962, Virginia enacted banking legislation that included a provision to protect the territory of “unit banks” like Vienna Trust from competition by branches of banks based out of the local area. However, that provision had the “significant side effect” of incentivizing the formation of bank holding companies, according to Washington & Lee economists Harmon H. Haymes and Charles F. Phillips, Jr.¹³ And that’s what happened with the Vienna Trust Company. In December 1962, regulators approved the establishment of United Virginia Bankshares, Inc. (UVB), with Vienna Trust as one of the six original affiliates. By mid-January 1963 UVB was up-and-running as it had met the statutory requirement of owning more than half of the stock of Vienna Trust and the other affiliates.

Epilogue

The building at East Maple and Berry remained in the banking business for decades after the demise of The Vienna Trust Company, but it was a banking business undergoing frequent change. After transfers in 1962 and 1968 from Vienna Trust to The Vienna Holding Corporation and back, there were no property transfers involving the building and its lots until the sale from Truist Bank to two Florida LLCs in October 2024, judging from a review of Fairfax County property records.¹⁵ However, in that period, the building had a series of seven owners in the banking industry, courtesy of various mergers and acquisitions.¹⁶

After Vienna Trust Company:

United Virginia Bank/First & Citizens National

United Virginia Bank of Fairfax

United Virginia Bank

Crestar Bank

SunTrust Bank

Branch Banking and Trust Company

Truist Bank.

Photo Gallery of the Building, August 2025 (Author’s Photos)

Written August 2025

[Note about the endnotes: because of some sort of glitch in WordPress, the endnote numbers below won’t go beyond single digits. Consequently, after endnote 9, the endnote numbers in the text do not match do not match to an endnote with the same number. Thus, for instance, endnote 16 in the text above corresponds to the second of two endnotes numbered as “6” below. My apologies].

1. Providence Journal, 16 June 1961, p4. ↩︎
2. Fairfax Herald, 17 January 1930 p6; 16 January 1931 p6; 15 January 1932 p4; 13 January 1933 p4; 19 January 1934 p3; 18 January 1935 p4; 17 January 1936 p4; 16 April 1937 p4; 28 January 1938 p6; 3 February 1939 p3; 19 April 1940; 24 January 1941 p3; 23 January 1942 p4; 22 January 1943 p3; 21 January 1944 p4; 19 January 1945 p3; 25 January 1946; 31 January 1947; 30 April 1948; 21 January 1949 p4; 5 May 1950 p3; 19 January 1951; 18 January 1952; 16 January 1953; 15 January 1954 p6; 14 January 1955 p6; 13 January 1956 p11; 11 January 1957 p2; 10 January 1958 p9; 15 January 1960 p4; 13 January 1961 p9; Falls Church Sun Echo 15 January 1959 p1; Providence Journal 19 January 1962 p1. ↩︎
3. Fairfax County Deeds 1747:534, 1774:633, and 1862:363. ↩︎
4. Deed 504:274. ↩︎
5. M4:99 ↩︎
6. F5:447 ↩︎
7. L4:351 ↩︎
8. D4:379 ↩︎
9. Stuntz, Connie Pendleton; and Stuntz, Mayo Sturdevant. “This Was Vienna, Virginia: Facts and Photos.” 1987; 2015 reprint of First Edition, Historic Vienna, Inc.; pp 61-62; James Follin v Heirs of Edward Follin et al., Chancery Records Index of the Library of Virginia, Index Number 1871-022, p.2 of 236, https://old.lva.virginia.gov/chancery/full_case_detail.asp?CFN=059-1871-022#img ↩︎
10. A review of aerial imagery from 1953 and 1960 at Fairfax County’s historical imagery viewer. ↩︎
11. 2983:53; 4148:608; 5141:669. ↩︎
12. 5141:669 ↩︎
13. Haymes, Harmon H. and Phillips, Charles F. Jr.. “Banking in Virginia: The 1962 Legislation,” Washington and Lee Law Review, Vol 21 Issue 1, Spring 1964, pp. 48-69, https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3769&context=wlulr. ↩︎
14. “G. Norman Cobb Retires as Vienna Trust Chairman,” Providence Journal, p2, 27 December 1968; Findagrave.com record for George Norman Cobb. Accessed via the Library of Virginia’s Virginia Chronicle. ↩︎
15. 2121:62; 3128:132; 28259:785. ↩︎
16. 28259:785. ↩︎