Qualla: Ellanor C. Lawrence Park

Ellanor C. Lawrence Park: Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0. When Caroline Machen stood barricading the door of her sick husband's house against Union soldiers on August 30, 1862, she was defending a farm whose history was already long. The land had been worked by Algonquian-speaking peoples for thousands of years. It had been leased to her great-grandfather Thomas Brown in 1742 in exchange for 530 pounds of cured tobacco a year and a two-hundred-tree apple orchard. It had been bought by her husband Lewis in 1843 as a refuge from the political volatility of his job as a Senate clerk. The next day, September 1, 1862, the Battle of Ox Hill broke out in their cornfield. Lewis was still ill. Caroline kept the family alive.

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Image: Famartin | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ellanor C. Lawrence Park: The Three-Lives Lease

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0. Willoughby Newton, an absentee Virginia planter, bought 2,500 acres around Centreville in 1739 and leased the land to tenant farmers. Thomas Brown took a so-called three-lives lease for 150 acres in 1742 - the lease ran for the lives of Brown, his wife Elizabeth, and his eldest s...

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Image: Famartin | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ellanor C. Lawrence Park: The Senate Clerk's Experiment

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arthur Machen (Life time: 1915), Public domain. Lewis H. Machen bought 725 acres of the Brown farm in 1843 for $10,879. He was a clerk for the United States Senate - a politically precarious job, and Machen knew it. The farm was meant to be his retreat and his insurance. The Machens never sold their Washington house, so Lewis ...

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Image: Arthur Machen (Life time: 1915) | Public domain

Ellanor C. Lawrence Park: The War in the Cornfield

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the winter of 1861-1862, more than 40,000 Union troops camped in the Centreville area near Walney, cutting down trees for firewood, fortifications, and shelter. The Machens housed sick soldiers in their stone house and the women nursed them. In August 1862, immediately after t...

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Image: Famartin | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ellanor C. Lawrence Park: From Dairy to Estate

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tom Mills, CC BY-SA 2.0. James Machen rebuilt the farm after the war. In December 1874 a faulty chimney burned down the frame house where his family was living, and he moved into the stone house after restoration in 1875. By 1880 James was producing 3,000 pounds of butter a year. In 1881 he expanded into...

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Image: Tom Mills | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ellanor C. Lawrence Park: The Park That Followed

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit VA Student4, CC BY-SA 3.0. Ellanor C. Lawrence died in 1969. She left the property to her husband David with the explicit wish that he convey it to a public agency for preservation. In 1971 David Lawrence deeded 640 acres to the Fairfax County Park Authority in Ellanor's memory. The Walney Visitor Center w...

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Image: VA Student4 | CC BY-SA 3.0