The stone section was added to the house in 1840 (taxes on the house made another significant leap in 1839) around the time Birkett opened his tavern. No doubt he needed an extra tavern room or extra storage. Leesburg Court House records note the cost of the bond to run an Ordinary: $150.00. (If you chance to look through the records, keep in mind that the town of Hillsboro is usually listed separately in the back of these record books (all entries are alphabetical - look under "Hillsboro"). An 1856 post-mortem inventory of Birkett's tavern and home are found in the Loudoun County Court House records. Several Kegs are listed, as well as a half dozen tavern table and bedsteads. It also lists the debtors to the tavern-keeper, a list that began the day - perhaps even the minute - the tavern opened.
Soon Birkett's Tavern became known as Birkett's Hotel. In that day, a "Hotel" like Birkett's slept several men to a bed, and a drover's animals - be they goats, cows or sheep - would be kept in pens on the property (or on one of Birkett's many other tracts of land). Easiest to manage were the flocks of turkeys: the drovers encouraged them to flap up into the nearest tree to bed down for the night. The tavern guests must have feasted on fresh oysters brought from the Canal at Harpers Ferry, because hundreds of oyster shells have been found in the backyard. Then there were the kegs. Yes, a few good beers might have helped a man sleep through a smelly, noisy night with strangers - not to mention the noise from flock of turkeys in the nearby tree.
Hillsboro's Charlestown Pike (Route 9) fed into the Leesburg Pike (Route 7) - the main road that led straight to the docks at Alexandria. After Hillboro, a drover would walk a day and stop at Dranesville Tavern. They could make it to Alexandria by late afternoon the next day.
The 1850 slave census of Loudoun County lists John Birkett as the owner of seven slaves, a woman in her thirties and six children ranging from 2 to 17. It is likely the slaves lived in the upper room of the stone section of the house and the first floor area was used for tavern storage (large hand-hewn nails are still there on the open beams).
In the second story, marks on the decaying, original ceiling plaster (now removed) clearly indicated the space was divided into three rooms with a hole cut in one wall for a stove. That one wall is still standing and now separates the bedroom from the hall stairwell. The wall is made from pine boards - some of them 18" wide - that are simply no longer available anywhere. Prior to 1870 (when the stair well was built in the stone section), the only access to the upper rooms was by a stair on the east end of the house - typical of slave quarters. "Owners" separated themselves from the "servants." The outdoor stairwell is long gone, but the doorway is still visible (now a bookcase), and the pre-Civil War door (found by the current owners under plaster) was restored by John Ware, Jr., Stonehedge Restoration of Hillsboro, and serves as a closet door in the upper stone room.
My mother, Maxine Bean, a former interior designer, had the east wall plaster removed to reveal the beautiful stone work. The stone was re-pointed, and then a small stairwell built to give access to a loft standing over the bedroom hall - an excellent writer or painter's garrett or playroom. We also added a gas fireplace to the parlor below.
A note on the 1870 stairwell in the stone section: I painted the walls in the early 19th century Limner style. Limner art was an early 19th century tradition. Roving artists would come to town and take commissions to create quick portraits or decoratively paint a parlor or dining room wall. The techniques used counted on quick work (milk paint is fast drying), and to really save time portrait artists often painted the bodies of unknown future patrons and simply filled in the heads on the spot. Keeping the Limner tradition of working as quickly as possible, I created the wall painting in a day and a half.
I also painted the faux marble on both downstairs fireplaces, and created a primitive pictorial of Hillsboro ca. 1850 on the dining room mantel. This mantel has been dated to 1850 but was not original the house. We bought the mantel (sans its top shelf) from the former owners, installed it ourselves, added the mantel shelf and stained it to match the rest of the piece.
Hillsborough, Virginia, ca. 1850 with Birkett's Tavern (in marbleized white plaster) at center
After adding this 1840 stone addition, Birkett apparently wanted the house to look "all of a piece," so he decided to covere the entire house (brick and stone) with plaster keyed to look like blocks of marble (George Washington used exterior wood panels to simulate marble blocks at Mount Vernon). Each block was then "marbleized" with streaks of gray paint.
When we purchased the house, the plaster was already irreparably damage. So we made the hard decision to remove it from the stone and brick sections. Until then the brick section had never been painted, but we were told by more than one restorer that paint would be the safest way to protect the old brick.
As a side note: smetime after the tavern opened, Birkett moved his family to a two-story stone home two doors down from the Tavern. In 1960, Hillsboro resident and artist Betty Rowe captured the other Birkett residence in watercolors. Two weeks later the ridgepole broke, and the house fell into the road. The home's foundations are now part of a low stone wall for a boxwood and rose garden.
Betty Rowe's watercolor of Birkett's former
residence - a clear view of the broken ridgepole.
Birkett died in 1854 and was buried in Hillsboro's Arnold Grove Cemetery. Court records note the 1876 court order that forced the sale of the house. Apparently Mary remarried within a year after John's death. Her new sons-in-law ran the tavern during the Civil War, but after the war, it began to "gather dust." "Birkitt's Hotel in Hillsboro" was put up for public auction in1876 and sold for $1,000 to one Lydia Hough (likely Lydia was related to the original builder, John Hough).
Around the turn of the last century, the owners added a frame section to the west end of the home. At that time virtually all of the old windows were replaced to match the addition. Gone are the 9-over-six windows with bubbled glass (except for one remnant in the back work room). Now all the houses are set with tall Victorian window panes, 2-over-2. The frame addition became a general store in the early 20th century.
When we moved in, the floor of the long room had been painted, except for a large rectangle of in its center - no doubt where the store's central cabinets sat. Previous Hillsboro residents remembered "The Weller Store." Folks could set their clock by Mr. Weller's 7 p.m. closing time, and, in summer months, he sold ice cream from the front bay windows. Former Hillsboro resident Lucy Roederick once said, "You could get everything at that store - even bananas." We re-finished the floors, and now the long wide room makes a wonderful living room suitable for dancing.
