Lee-Fendall House

On the corner of Oronoco and Washington Streets in Old Town Alexandria, the Lee-Fendall House has been standing since 1785 — long enough to have absorbed nearly every defining era of American history within a single set of walls. It was built in the vernacular telescopic style common to Maryland but rare in Northern Virginia, constructed by Philip Richard Fendall on land sold to him by his stepson-in-law Henry "Light-Horse Harry" Lee, the Revolutionary War cavalry commander and father of Robert E. Lee. From 1785 until 1903, thirty-seven members of the Lee family lived here. The house was completed by November 1785, when George Washington noted in his diary dining at the Fendall home — one of at least seven recorded visits. Following Washington's death in December 1799, the house became a gathering place where Alexandrians organized their participation in his funeral at Mount Vernon. Former President John Quincy Adams visited in 1841. President Woodrow Wilson was received there in 1914.

The Civil War interrupted all of that. In 1863, Union Chief Surgeon Edwin Bentley requested the use of what he called "the rebel house opposite Grosvenor Hospital" and was granted authority to seize it. The current occupant, Harriotte Cazenove, refused to swear the Loyalty Oath to the Federal Government, so the house was confiscated for unpaid taxes and converted into Grosvenor Branch Hospital. The Army expanded the property with additional wooden ward buildings and constructed a dead house on the grounds. Approximately 1,700 Union soldiers were treated there between 1863 and 1865, and nearly 100 died within those walls. The hospital's place in medical history is singular: it was the site of the first documented successful blood transfusion performed in North America, carried out by Dr. Bentley during the war. When the hospital closed in April 1865, the house was returned, sold, and passed through several families before Robert Downham — an Alexandria haberdasher whose father had twice been the city's mayor — purchased it in 1903.

In 1937, labor leader John L. Lewis bought the house. Welsh-born, Iowa-raised, Lewis had risen from coal miner to president of the United Mine Workers of America for over four decades, eventually defying both Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, founding the CIO, and reshaping American labor law from his base in Washington. At one point during a wartime strike he was strung up in effigy at the corner of Washington and Oronoco — directly outside the house he lived in. He died there on June 11, 1969, at age 89. His son sold the property to the Virginia Trust for Historic Preservation. The Lee-Fendall House Museum and Garden opened to the public in 1974.

The paranormal claims are understated but consistent, and the museum leans into its haunted reputation enough to host annual ghost tours each October. Visitors have reported a female apparition in period dress moving through the interior rooms. A separate figure — a woman accompanied by a child — has been seen appearing on the back stairs. The sound of an antique telephone ringing has been heard by multiple people in rooms where no working telephone exists. The museum appeared in an episode of the television series Ghost Hunters. The weight of what occurred inside — nearly a century of Lee family life, hundreds of soldiers dying during two years of wartime medical care, the passing of one of the most consequential labor figures in American history — leaves the kind of residue that tends to generate these accounts. Open Wednesday through Sunday for guided tours. The garden is free.