you light a fire, have a glass of wine or sherry and just enjoy everything around you.” There was not much joy when half the original property’s acreage in the Tysons area was taken over by eminent domain in the early 1980s by the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority to make way for more development, with plans to bulldoze the house and a barn, as well. Nevertheless, Norman Smith was determined to save the log house. It was literally taken apart, log by log, nail by nail by Charles McRaven, a Charlottesvillebased restorer, with each piece meticulously numbered before it was loaded on a flatbed truck and moved out to its
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current location. It took three years to put it all back together in its original state. Fairfax Found, accessible off the Snickersville Pike by a short driveway leading to a pine-covered circle, is now surrounded by trees, shrubbery, rolling lawns and fields. The entire estate also is lined by a perfectly constructed stonewall, built by captured Hessian prisoners after the Revolutionary War. “We did it for the love of history, the love of nature and the love of this kind of artistry. It just had to be preserved,” said Tillotson-Smith, adding that eight acres of the property are in easement and anyone who ever purchases the property must agree that the house will always be preserved. After all, the Tysons Corner land and home that Fairfax owned was part of the huge land grant given to him by King George—thousands of acres from the Chesapeake Bay west and long before there were “United States.” He was therefore presumed to be the builder/owner/occupant, and was often accompanied on his forays overseeing the grant acreage by his surveyor, the young George Washington. Tillotson-Smith said the home somehow also managed to survive unscathed through the Civil War. It was actually abandoned at the start of the conflict, with troops both blue and grey trading the property back and forth, and the house stood empty for many years after the war ended. “When my husband purchased the property, he was told by the then-owner that when he had purchased it, there were still dishes on the table from the family’s breakfast,” TillotsonSmith said. “Troops from one side or the other were advancing, so they just left the house and didn’t come back. But it was never harmed. No one tried to burn it, and it was never really affected by the weather. Now the logs are petrified. You can’t even get a nail into it.” Tillotson-Smith has gotten plenty of other things into it over the years—European antique furniture, thick Oriental carpets, period paintings and porcelains on the walls as well as vintage quilts and samplers. There’s even a Chickering baby grand piano that doubles as a playerpiano and the reconstruction also preserved a grand-double-sided native stone fireplace. “Everything is old,” Tillotson-Smith said. “And everything we did was a true labor of love.” n
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he late Norman Longfellow Smith always had a sense of history. He was the fifth great-grandson of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and when he first saw the old log farmhouse located on land that is now known as Tysons Corner, he knew he had to have it. Never mind that the house had been painted over in white, with red asphalt shingles and many other out-ofcontext modern amenities. He was in the CIA back then in 1956, a war hero with a Bronze Star and Photo by Leonard Shapiro a Purple Heart who signed up Carolyn Tillotson-Smith to fight in World War II when he was 16 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery after his death in 2008. The house, he had learned, was one of the oldest log homes in Virginia, dating back to 1732 and built on land originally owned by the Fifth Lord Fairfax. Smith’s goal “was to restore it to its original state,” said his widow, Carolyn Tillotson-Smith. “He wanted to get rid of all the modern trappings except for central heat and air conditioning so we could live in it. How do we know it was that old? When we decided to save the house, we called in a state historian and architect from Richmond. They started in the basement and went all the way up to the attic and they were able to date it within five or six years.” The property in Middleburg is named Fairfax Found. These days, the log house sits on 11 lush acres on the Snickersville Turnpike, and Tillitson-Smith has turned it into one of the more unusual bed and breakfasts in the area, the Lord Fairfax Country House. Upstairs in the saltbox home (two stories in front, one in back) is a king-sized bedroom suite perfectly suited for couples. If they want to bring family or friends along, there is another suite available in the more modern “California House,” connected to the log structure by a breezeway. “I’ll never mix two groups of strangers,” Tillotson-Smith said. “We treat it as a private house, not a hostelry. It’s a one-of-a-kind place, with a big common room (with a vaulted ceiling) and dining room for guests to gather for breakfast. It’s just such an intimate house, where
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Once Almost Lost, It’s Now Fairfax Found
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