05 May 2009
The Wall at Hall’s Hill
(Remaining revetments on 17th Road)
Sorry for veering off into 1971 yesterday. It was a formative moment in a young life, that riot here in Washington, and it is entirely possible that in the process of fleeing the national capital with the Regular Army on my heels, I might have passed the Touchdown Jesus who blesses the traffic on Route Fifty from St. Thomas Moore Cathedral, and the looming bulk of the duty mauve apartment building we now call Big Pink.
It would not have occurred to me at that moment that the view was anything special, nor that what will eventually be the remains of me are likely to be part of this soil for as long as the broad Potomac flows down to the Chesapeake and the sea.
I’m not sure it will work out that way, I’m not in any hurry to find out. Other folks around here have had the same plan, but it didn’t work out that way. Dying has a way of making you lose control of things.
Sunday, I found the exact spot where one Man with a Plan was murdered. It was not a nice plan, and the spot is not marked. It is part of the story of the missing Buckingham Swimming Pool and the Buckingham Neighborhood, and trying to unravel all the strands is what had me pouring over aerial photos at the Virginia Room of the Central Library in Ballston, and then in the rain looking at a concrete wall.
This is a little dense, and I can only give you the broad brush this morning. The aerial photos and the County platt book helped me identify the years that the pool was operational, and that led me to the stacks of the Washington Post for the year 1966.
A global search for the neighborhood led me to a series of stories that summer and fall about the demonstrations down at the corner of Glebe and Pershing, and another very curious article that mentioned The Wall.
Trust me, I will get around to the continuing demonstrations and the counter-protests at Buckingham. I have sworn to a long-suffering editor that I will clear up the loose ends about that.
But the story of the Wall dragged me away, and I think I can tell you the tale in one shot, and it has a murder and everything.
Looking at the aerial photos of Arlington County in 1934 is pretty amazing. It is hard to get the reference points right, since the bulk of the land was unscarred and undeveloped.
That is not to say that people did not live here; they just lived in little enclaves around the old great houses that were the backbone of an agrarian society.
A fellow named Bazil (or Basil) Hall lived on the road that we now call the Lee Highway. He had a great house and slaves in the days before the Civill War, and a commanding view from the high ground of the land in cultivation to the south. Naturally enough, his place was called “Hall’s Hill.”
Bazil was an unreconstructed member of the old Whig party, and a staunch Unionist even though he owned slaves. For all that, he was not a nice man, and neither was his family. His neighbors remarked often that he was a hard master to his people, and a skinflint to boot.
In 1857, a lurid account of the murder of his wife was reported on the property in the Washington Star. According to her deposition taken before she expired, she was savagely attacked by one of her slave women named Jenny.
It is curious in the account that Jenny has no last name, and Mrs. Hall no first.
Bazil was off walking the grounds while the other members of the family were at church. Mrs, Hall came on Jenny, who she observed putting an armful of dried planks on a fire. A thrifty woman, Mrs. Hall ordered her to take it off. Jenny complied, but quickly put it on again. There was some increasingly violent back and forth about the wood and the fire, and in the end Jenny forced Mrs. Hall into a leg-lock and backed her right into the blaze.
Mrs. Hall managed to escape three times, but wound up back on the coals, and her screams brought the family and other slaves to the rescue.
Despite the best efforts of local Doctors Wunder and Locke, Mrs. Hall expired that night from her injuries, but not before telling her story.
Jenny denied he whole thing, of course, saying that Mrs. Hall had stumbled and fallen in the fire. Mr. Hall tried to shoot her as she was being taken away, and some bad feelings remained. Some of his outbuildings later burned under suspicious circumstances.
Four years later the war came to Arlington, and Hall was compelled to evacuate the plantation with his surviving family as the Federals fortified the high ground all around the capital. The forty-foot rise in elevation made his place particularly attractive for observation and fields of fire, and the troops cut his timber and burned fences to stay warm, just as Jenny had.
They also confiscated his animals for beasts of burden, or slaughtered them for food.
Before the war, the tax rolls assessed Bazil’s property as being worth $10,000 dollars, with personal property worth $15,000.
After the fighting was done and the troops gone, it was not worth much. The Hall on Hall’s Hill was stripped of its furniture and eventually it burned down, too.
Hall, along with neighbor William Marcey, sold most of their land to freed slaves for about sixty cents an acre. The parcels up by Lee Highway were known as Hall’s Hill, and the ones further down toward "the bottom of the hill" became known as High View Park.
Four generations of African Americans stayed right there, many descended from the original slave populations of the two plantations.
The sprawling farmland was crossed with narrow dirt roads. No sidewalks of curbs, of course, and the houses were small but with large yards and bountiful gardens. No running water supplied the village of Hall’s Hill, but the residents were hard-working and devout.
In 1866, the community's first church was consecrated- Calloway United Methodist. In 1918, community residents organized the County's first fire station with a two-wheeled cart that took six men to pull along the rough roads and muddy streets. Now known as Fire Station #8, the station was recognized for its tradition of fast and diligent service.
With the coming of the streetcar on Lee Highway, residents could pay a nickel to get to jobs in the District.
The interesting thing was what happened as Arlington County began to develop as the bedroom community to the Federal Government. Hall’s Hill and High View park was separated from adjacent white communities on three sides by a continuous 8-foot- high wooden fence installed along l7th Road North.
Residents of the Hill were free to leave the neighborhood on the Lee Highway, but there was no pathway out to the south.
The article I found in the Post was from 1966, and reflected the breeching of the wall at Culpeper Street. It was reported without the celebration of the Fall of the Wall in Berlin, but it was just as significant in its way.
I drove over on Sunday to see if anything remained of the walled village, and I was startled to find that it does.
You can now drive south out of Hall’s Hill now, but the fence along the back lot-line of the trim little houses south of High View Park are as high- and quite as continuous- as they were in 1966.
Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com