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Kenmore | Fredericksburg, Virginia

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Society members visiting Kenmore during the 2005 Fredericksburg annual meeting found a site steeped in the lore of both the Washington family and of the Garden Club of Virginia (GCV).* This National Historic Landmark features a home and gardens nestled in a three-acre city block and sharing space with several dependencies, offices, and a cleverly camouflaged visitor center. While the name “Kenmore” appeared only in the nineteenth century, the property is firmly linked to the upper-class world of late-colonial Virginia. More particularly, it was integral to the lives of merchant, planter, and militia leader Fielding Lewis and his second wife Betty Washington, the sister of our first president, George Washington. 

Today, their home is set in the middle of a greatly expanded Fredericksburg, but when completed on the port town’s edge in 1775 the Lewis family had a view to the west over largely open Lewis-owned fields and to the east, down sloping ground, to the busy Rappahannock water front. The wealth needed to build one of the region’s finest homes came from both Lewis’s Fredericksburg-based mercantile ventures and a profitable thirteen-hundred-acre plantation worked by dozens of enslaved laborers. 

The exact appearance of the Lewis house’s grounds must be surmised based on general knowledge of early Virginia gardens. Recollections in Fredericksburg of river-side terraces, however, square with the same falling garden pattern found across the colonial Chesapeake region. (See the January 24, 2025 Paca House post for further discussion.) Thus, we might have found a typical combination of ornamental plants, vegetables, herbs, evergreen shrubs for edging, and shade trees offering sun protection, termed by Thomas Jefferson the “Elysium” of Virginians. 

A broader look at Kenmore’s Fredericksburg setting reveals a larger Lewis-Washington family grouping. On the east, this includes the nearby home of George and Betty’s mother, Mary Ball Washington; the residence of Mary Ball’s youngest son, Charles (the building is now known as the Rising Sun Tavern); and the two-story brick-constructed Lewis Store, set near the Rappahannock. To the west, visitors find the Mary Washington grave site and monument, their setting designed for GCV in the late 1930s by landscape architect Alden Hopkins. Across the Rappahannock, moreover, the recently recreated Washington home at Ferry Farm tells the story of George Washington’s pre-Mount Vernon years. 

Soon after Lewis’ home was completed their world saw great change as war erupted with Great Britain, the family subsequently taking painful losses from investments in munitions making and other expenditures. The end of the Lewis-Washington period following the Revolution involved the sale of the plantation and subsequent acquisition of the house tract in 1819 by the Gordon family who adopted the named Kenmore to honor their ancestral Scottish home. Many readers will recall that in the 1860s the home was at the center of major Civil War action, the dwelling being hit multiple times by artillery shells and, later in the conflict, serving as a field hospital.

Facing possible demolition, a new age came with the property’s 1920s purchase by a recently formed Kenmore Association. The group, in turn, began both to preserve or reconstruct Kenmore’s buildings and to provide a landscape setting reminiscent of its colonial heritage. For the latter, the Association approached the newly created GCV, Kenmore then becoming the first of many GCV restorations. Indeed, to quote Davyd Foard Hood writing in the Summer 2005 Magnolia, it was to be “an icon of the garden restoration movement.” 

To begin their work, GCV engaged Boston-trained and Richmond-based landscape architect, Charles Gillette** for the first master plan, funding beginning in 1929 from what became an annual state-wide tour known as Historic Garden Week. Although Gillette would submit several proposals, a final version was implemented only after removal of a group of houses just east of the mansion. Thus, on the eve of World War II a basic layout existed that still survives: brick walks lead to the west facade as well as to other areas of the site, while on the east restored, boxed-lined, terraces face four large parterres used over the years for growing ornamental plants, particularly bulbs and perennials. As well, a finely articulated Gillette-designed brick wall encloses and gives definition to the site.

Kenmore’s grounds today reflect further GCV-supported improvements and additional master plans. The professionals who undertook this work are familiar to readers of this page: Alden Hopkins and GCV landscape architect Rudy Favretti, the latter leaving Kenmore’s shady Wilderness Walk as an unobtrusive legacy that features native plants and offers naturalistic contrast to the formality that characterizes much of the site.    

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Recommended reading: Margaret Page Bemiss, Historic Virginia Gardens: Preservation Work of the Garden Club of Virginia, 1975-2007, 70-80.

*For details on GCV’s history, see: https://gcvirginia.org/about-garden-club-of-virginia/mission-history/

**For more on Charles Gillette, see:  https://www.tclf.org/pioneer/charles-freeman-gillette. The talents of famed landscape architect James Greenleaf were also tapped during the early phases of concept development.

Follow Ken McFarland:
Ken McFarland retired as director of education at Stratford Hall in 2010. He is a past president of the Southern Garden History Society, as well as an honorary board member. In addition, he serves as an editor of the Society’s publication Magnolia, having previously been an associate editor as well as North Carolina state editor. From 1984 to 1999 Ken was the site manager at Historic Stagville in Durham, N.C. Stagville was a long-time co-sponsor of the Restoring Southern Gardens & Landscapes Conference at Old Salem, and thus Ken was also a member on the Conference planning committee. He has degrees in history from Virginia Commonwealth University and UNC-Chapel Hill. In addition, Ken is the author of The Architecture of Warren County, North Carolina: 1770s to 1860s.

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