Vic Socotra

17 April 2009

Ball-Sellers

(Arlington's Oldest House)

So, it is a day with brilliant sunshine and the air so clear it hurts. Spring cannot be denied much longer, regardless of pouring rain and insidious chill.

The time is here.

I got in the Bluesmobile to check out something right in the neighborhood- or what would have been the adjoining farm on the other side of the junction of Lubber and Four Mile Runs, here on the lip of the Fall Line from the Peidmont down to the coastal plain.

If you were to walk it, I would allow about ten or fifteen minutes. No problem, really, and you might not be out of the smell of frying salt pork for much of the trip.

You can still do it that way, though, the big concrete barrier of Route 50 might provide the opportunity to be crushed by an in attentive motorist yacking on a cell phone.

When the Colonists began to settle this part of Virginia, they did not look east and west. They looked up the fall line from the big river, and to the valleys carved by the water coming down the Fall Line.

Four Mile Run is one of the more prominent ones here abounts, and that is how John Ball would have come up the trail from Alexandria.

In the mid 18th century, yeoman farmer John Ball built a one-room log cabin with a loft on a bluff above Four Mile Run. Later, he added a lean-to and covered the structure with clapboard. Amazingly, this primitive cabin survives today. The house is a rare example of the dwelling of the ordinary person during the 1700s. Plus, it is the oldest house in Arlington.

Ball obtained the 166-acre land grant from Lord Fairfax in 1742. His Lordship actually came to America to oversee his property, much to the discomfort of the others who were already here and had plans for it. Fairfax fought for- and won- and interpretation of his claim that extended his lands almost to the headwaters of the Potomac River.

Ball had much smaller dreams. To construct his cabin, he felled trees and hewed logs. He notched the logs and chinked the cracks with mud daubing. You can see the original logs with the daubing, as well as the wide plank floors. The rare oak clapboard roof is among only a few board roofs preserved in the nation.

John, his wife Elizabeth, and their five daughters lived in this little house. An inventory of Ball’s estate indicates they lived a simple life in the sparsely furnished dwelling. They farmed, raising wheat and corn, and kept sheep, cows, pigs, and bees. Ball also had a mill on Four Mile Run, and some of his mill stones remain on the property.

Following John Ball’s death in 1766, William Carlin bought the spread. He was a tailor whose clients included George Washington and George Mason among his clients, purchased the house. Three generations of the Carlin family owned the property for more than 100 years. The third generation, brother and sister Andrew and Anne, ran a dairy farm and built the 1880 house that adjoins the Ball cabin.

This was the placid heart of old Arlington. Cows and cash crops, and a lot of quiet. If it had not been for the great paroxysm of the Yankee occupation, you could say that nothing much happened here at all.

When the Carlins sold the property in 1887, the land was subdivided into a community known today as Glencarlyn, the oldest subdivision in Arlington. It is composed of modest homes designed to accommodate modest people. They shoulder one another on streets narrower than is the custom now, though the grid is laid over the old farm that hugs the edge of the valley carved by Four Mile Run.

The house survived and was used as a school, a summer cottage, and a home. It is located at 5620, on 3rd Street. If you look it up on Google Earth, you can see exactly where the boundaries of the farm once were, just as Lord Fairfax would have known them.

We have poured a lot of concrete, but the earth abides.

Marian Rhinehart Sellers was the last private owner of the house. She gave the place house to the Arlington Historical Society in 1975. It is just about a mile, as the crow flies, from one of the District Stones that Benjamin Banneker and Andrew Ellicott placed as the first monuments authorized by the US Congress in 1791-2.

It is all right here, if you know where to look. It is a great thing to do on a Spring day when the earth seems new again.

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