Curator's Choice

Episode 47: Lee-Fendall House

• Ayla Anderson • Episode 47

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Step into the whispered secrets of the past and uncover the echoes of history within the walls of the Lee-Fendall House. With our guide, Jenny Waters, we stroll through the timeline of this architectural marvel, from its conception in 1785 by Philip Richard Fendall to its dramatic roles during the War of 1812 and the Civil War. We'll weigh the gravity of a potential name change for this historic house museum, contemplating the delicate balance between historical accuracy and the enduring legacy of its name as we near its 50th anniversary as a cherished public space.

🕵️‍♂️ Whispers of the Past: Intrigues and Intricacies within Lee-Fendall's Walls  📸

The lives that intertwined with the Lee-Fendall House are as varied as they are compelling. We trace the ownership from the poignant story of Dr. Robert Fleming, whose chapter at the house was cut short by tuberculosis, to Robert Downham, a Freemason and business titan whose Prohibition-era adventures still linger in the home's aura. As we reveal the storied past of these walls, you'll hear about the high-profile guests, the whispers of undercover liquor trade, and the curious mysteries left behind, culminating in our annual fundraiser that draws inspiration from these Prohibition tales.

🏛️ From Cane Chronicles to Prohibition Tales: Unveiling the Legacy of John L. Lewis 🔍

Closing our exploration, we delve into the complex persona of John L. Lewis, the final private owner of the house, whose leadership in the labor movement left an indelible mark on American history. His intriguing cane collection offers a physical connection to the past, with each piece holding its own hidden narrative, including a cane with a secret message that sheds light on the intimate bond between historic figures and their cherished possessions. Prepare to connect with history in a way you've never experienced before, as these artifacts bridge the gap between yesterday's stories and today's reflections.

🔗 Episode Links:
Lee-Fendall House Gardens & Museum: https://leefendallhouse.org/

The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, (1861-65): https://archive.org/details/b21934629_0003

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Curator's Choice - A podcast for history nerds and museum lovers

Jenny Waters:

Lea Fendle House is one of, I would say, a few historic house museums that's open to the public as a museum in Old Town, alexandria and we have a very wide range of history that I think someone, like everyone, is going to find some topic of our history interesting, because it was built in 1785 and it continued as a private residence all the way to 1969. So tons of history and all of our owners, I would say, had very prominent roles in history. With different, bigger American history points like War of 1812. We have an owner who talked with the British basically to convince them not to burn Alexandria down in 1814. That's a good move. That's a good move. Yeah, we had a local liquor businessman who had to close his business during prohibition. He was living here during that time and we were a Civil War hospital. So we got like a little bit of history everywhere that I think everyone will. Someone somewhere will enjoy some part of our history.

Ayla Sparks:

So can you kind of talk us through a little bit of why the house was built, who kind of was the OG owners and how it ended up becoming into a museum?

Jenny Waters:

All right, so our history. I said 1785, but the half acre property was actually purchased in 1784 by a man, Light Horse Harry Lee. He was a very big Revolutionary War figure, friend of George Washington. He purchased the half-faker property but then he just soon sold it to his relative, Philip Richard Fendle. And then it's Philip Fendle who went and had this house built in 1785.

Ayla Sparks:

So he owned it for a year, but yet still his name remains on the exact title, absolutely.

Jenny Waters:

Yes.

Ayla Sparks:

That's making your mark.

Jenny Waters:

Yeah, so Philip Richard Fendle, before he moves here he's living in Maryland and he actually have kind of a testimony in Maryland through the architecture. The house is built in kind of a telescope style. So when you kind of see a good panorama of the house, the largest part of the house is the tallest, and then there's like subsequent smaller sections, all made to look like the smaller sections can fit into the larger section of the house. And that was quite popular in Maryland where Philip Fendle was from.

Ayla Sparks:

That's a really interesting style as well. I didn't even think about it when I was looking at pictures, because I haven't been there myself, but when I was looking at the pictures I was like, oh, it's just like an add-on and add-on and add-on, but that it was purposely built to look like that.

Jenny Waters:

Yes and all of those sections are the original 1785 structure.

Ayla Sparks:

yeah, I'm going to view old houses when I go through Maryland so differently now, because I thought for sure that that was just a sign of their original house was the largest piece and the add-ons were less. That's really interesting.

Jenny Waters:

Yeah, yeah go, philip Fendle. So he had it built in 1785 and he kind of had different business ventures all around Alexandria had a big banker, part of a real estate business, he had a blacksmith shop. But due to some economic depressions and stuff that happened during this time when he was living in Alexandria, lost quite a bit of money, went into some debt, went to debtor's prison in Fairfax County just a few miles away for a few years. Yeah, so by the time he passed away in 1805, he passed this house down to his wife, mary Lee Fendle not only the house but also all of his debts as well.

Jenny Waters:

Mary Lee Fendle owns the house for a little bit, but then, once she passes away, we then kind of have the next kind of big figure who owns the house and it's actually her brother, edmund Jenningsley. He kind of had a role in during the War of 1812 a little bit. He was a part of the city council, so that's how he kind of had that power to talk with the British when they were coming down the Potomac. He was also a very big lawyer around Alexandria. We actually have his entire law library consists of about 35, 40 books in our collection. That's actually on display today if anyone wants to see that. But he lives here until he passes away, until about 1843.

Ayla Sparks:

Is this any relation to Robert E Lee that we all are very familiar with?

Jenny Waters:

Going back to Light Horse Harry Lee, who just had bought the land in 1784,. He was the father of Robert E Lee.

Ayla Sparks:

Okay, what an interesting, fun title too.

Jenny Waters:

It's Lee Fendle, of course. That's when they opened as museum everyone knew the Lee's and Fendle was the first owner of the house. But kind of the more proper way is to kind of do Fendle Lewis that's kind of common with historic houses to kind of have the first owner of the house and the last owner of the house. So we've been kind of talking, perhaps doing something like that. But everyone knows well, everyone, all of the small historic house. People know it as Lee Fendle.

Ayla Sparks:

So we'll see. That's kind of an interesting point as well, something that maybe, when you're talking about a historic house nowadays and you're dealing with promotion as a museum yourself, I feel like it's kind of got to be a battle between really staying true to the first and last or calling it by something that the general public will really recognize, to kind of draw people in.

Jenny Waters:

Right, yeah, and I mean 2024, we're actually celebrating our 50 years as a museum, so 50 years as Lee Fendle. So it'll be hard to kind of get that change. But it is this thing, like everyone knows it, as Lee Fendle. It's been like that for 50 years, but technically we should switch it. We just keep going back and forth. Who knows when it'll be decided, I'm not sure, but we will see.

Ayla Sparks:

So it seems kind of like it wasn't necessarily a family heirloom type home where it was just passed down from family to family. There's a lot of little tiny chunks of different people living there and that's where a lot of the different history comes from.

Jenny Waters:

We could do a whole tour actually on just the renters of this house, because pretty much every single time an owner either passed away or moved out of this house, the house was then rented out for a few years. Until then someone else owned it. So that's gonna be a theme. When we keep talking about the history. We got tons more history.

Jenny Waters:

There's a man, Louis Kezanov, who purchased it in 1850. We kind of highlight him because he actually did a huge renovation to the house that lasted two years, pretty much anything you can think of new floorboards put in, he installed gas lighting, central heating and he actually put in a call bell system. So if you take a tour of the house, there's these handles just kind of randomly on the walls. They connected to call bells in the kitchen. There were about eight or nine of them and each call bell had a different frequency to signify the different rooms in the house.

Jenny Waters:

He went through this whole two-year renovation and as soon as it ended he died suddenly and it'll be a theme. Just wait for our next owner again. So he passes away and then yet again, the house is passed down to his wife, but then the civil war breaks out. You lived in Alexandria. So you probably know, during the civil war Alexandria was part of Virginia and therefore Confederacy. But a few days into the civil war breaking out, union troops came into Alexandria and this became a Union-occupied territory throughout the duration of the war.

Ayla Sparks:

And a very desired location as well, all of Alexandria. I mean it's right at DC, which was still a hub.

Jenny Waters:

Yes, Of course we had a ton of Confederate sympathizers because this was a very southern city. Harriet Casanova was a Confederate sympathizer. She left, the house was empty and this house actually became a Union Army hospital During the Civil War. We like to say that our biggest history point there is that the first successful blood transfusion in the Western Hemisphere happened right here in the Lee Fendle House in 1863 or 64.

Ayla Sparks:

I'm not entirely sure, but one of those Claimed to fame right there and I was reading a little bit about it before we got on today, and it's just amazing that it happened to be the right blood type. Yes, because if it was the wrong blood type, it probably would have taken a lot longer for that technology to even begin its track of evolution.

Jenny Waters:

Yes, and it blows my mind, the surgeon who did that, Dr Edwin Bentley. He had a diary and he wrote that he took blood from a healthy young German and just put it into the leg of that private who wasn't doing well. Actually, he had his leg amputated. He wasn't getting any better. So that's when they stuck the blood in him and Bentley said that he immediately got better. He wrote that.

Ayla Sparks:

So I wanted to go on a deeper dive and find out a bit more about this young man who got the blood transfusion. So his name was Private George P Cross and he was a 19-year-old from Massachusetts. He was wounded on his right leg on June 16th of 1864 during the siege of Petersburg in Virginia. By August 12, the flesh wound had become infected and gangrenous. And then Cross reached the Lee Fendle House on August 15, where the doctors decided they had to amputate his leg. Cross was not recovering well from that surgery, so Dr Edwin Bentley, who was then the director of the US Army General Hospital Complex in Alexandria, took blood from as Jenny said, quote a strong, healthy German volunteer and injected it into Cross using a syringe. Doctors recorded that the patient's pulse immediately became stronger and firmer. Cross apparently recovered and was eventually discharged penchant and given an artificial limb. Sadly, though, he dies just a few years later from an unknown cause.

Ayla Sparks:

So this and many other stories of medical procedures during the Civil War is documented in the medical and surgical history of the War of the Rebellion 1861 to 1865, which was published by the US government shortly after the war. So if you are interested in hearing more, I can provide a link in the show notes for those volumes. But then I decided to go even deeper and farther back to find out who is credited with performing the first ever successful blood transfusion in history. So this was done by a man, dr Jean Baptiste Deneze, who was a French physician, and this took place in Paris in 1667. So Deneze transfused blood from a sheep into a 15-year-old boy who had been suffering from a condition known as melancholy, which likely was just referring to some form of severe illness that they didn't diagnose.

Ayla Sparks:

This was back in the 1600s. Deneze had previously conducted experiments on animals, including dogs and sheep, to refine his techniques before attempting the procedure on a human. Now, the success of this early blood transfusion was relative. The patient initially showed signs of improvement, but ultimately he experienced complications and did not survive long after the procedure. So, though it was not technically successful, deneze's work kind of laid the foundation of further research and experimentation in the field of blood transfusion. All right, let's get back to Jenny.

Jenny Waters:

And kind of, wouldn't we even just say that we were a Civil War hospital? People's minds are blown. But there were just so many like that, wounded soldiers, just so many wounded soldiers coming into Alexandria. So I can't remember the number. I think about 20 or 30 hospitals were originally set up in Alexandria. We were not one of those original ones but we were called the Grovener Branch Hospital, mainly because we were a branch of the Grovener House Hospital which was just across Washington Street. So started with a number for hospitals during the Civil War and then that just grew because there were just so many wounded soldiers coming in.

Ayla Sparks:

What happened after kind of the Civil War clears out.

Jenny Waters:

So after the Civil War we kind of enter that reconstruction period in America. Yet again we have some renters, some two notable renters during that time post-Civil War. We're actually two radical Republicans, as a few books called them Radical.

Ayla Sparks:

Radical Republicans.

Jenny Waters:

They rented out the house for about two years and then the house is then purchased again in 1870 by a man, dr Robert Fleming. His wife is Mary Lee Fleming. So, keeping to the theme here, as soon as Dr Robert Fleming purchases the house he dies of tuberculosis. This house is bad luck, I know.

Ayla Sparks:

I guess we probably should say that on the podcast, but it's just seeming a little.

Jenny Waters:

But Fleming passes away very early on into purchasing the house and passes it down to his wife, mary Lee Fleming. She lives here for quite a number of years and she moves away to Washington DC around 1900, and then passes away around 1902. And then in 1903, we have Robert Downham. So Robert Downham is a pretty big Alexandrian. As well as the Downham family they own a local liquor business. We have a photograph of members of the Downham family. Robert Downham was the one who purchased the house in 1903. He purchased the house as a wedding gift to his new bride, may Greenwell. Ok, I didn't get a house.

Jenny Waters:

Even though he purchased it in 1903, they didn't move in for a few years. The house went through some renovation. They installed some bathrooms on the second and third floor and they actually installed all the radiators that are still around the house today that you'd be able to see. Robert was a pretty big figure in Alexandria. Like I said, he owned the family's local liquor business that was started by his father, ee Downham, a few years earlier, and he was a pretty big Freemason. So one of the biggest, most iconic buildings, I feel like, in Old Town today is the George Washington Mizzonic Temple, and Robert actually helped to raise funds to build that temple. It's a little point I like to highlight. Is that the one that is in Alexandria.

Ayla Sparks:

That's kind of like the square pillar that goes up and changes colors depending on what's going on in the town.

Jenny Waters:

Yes, it's on a hill and like from 495, you can see it from miles away and it does change color about, I think, like every month or something. May was a pretty big singer and actress so she had continued her successful singing career after moving in here and she even taught music lessons in the Well. Now today it's furnished as the Victorian parlor, but the front parlor in the house. During the time they lived here In 1914, the Downham's hosted President Woodrow Wilson to the house for the George Washington birthday parade and fun story I read a few months back. But they had purchased this enclosed clear box that was heated because the parade was in February and it was pretty chilly out and that way they could have President Wilson themselves and whoever else they had invited into this heated box so that they could be nice and warm and toasty while the parade was going down Washington Street. Okay, this makes sense.

Ayla Sparks:

These people who bought a house for the wedding gift for his wife. His alcohol business was booming. I mean, if I was ever going to go watch the Macy's Day Parade, I guess I would want to do it in that style. Give me a glass box.

Jenny Waters:

That's right. So was his money mostly made from his distillery business.

Jenny Waters:

Yes, it was a pretty booming business that his father had started. Actually, during the Civil War he sold liquor to Union troops that were around Alexandria and that was just a booming business. They had a store on King Street and that's where they had most of their money. But then Virginia State Prohibition is enacted in 1916 and he did have to close it. We don't have any solid evidence, but we do like to say that the basement was expanded during that time and like a pretty big, tall fence was put in all around the house. Suddenly a need for a privacy fence.

Ayla Sparks:

Hmm, suspicious, yes, so I will leave it at that? Do you guys have any records, by chance, of him? Are we basically inferring that he continued his business because of those strange interesting renovations that he made, or do you guys have any kind of ledgers, or is it just kind of like a mystery that we're not sure about?

Jenny Waters:

Pretty much a mystery. That's about the only, not really solid evidence, but that's all that we found.

Ayla Sparks:

So he was either a good citizen and closed his business, or a really good bootlegger.

Jenny Waters:

Yeah, a mystery, but we still keep it alive. We do have a. Our biggest annual fundraiser is called Sips and Secrets a Speakeasy Night, and it's inspired by the Downums and what they may or may not have done during Prohibition Era. That is fantastic, I love that Alright.

Ayla Sparks:

so we've talked about the blood transfusions. We've got potential speakeasies really just a bootlegger, possibly. I know we are going to move into another interesting aspect of the Lea Fendle House's history that stems from a cane that looks like it's got an animal gobbling up the cane.

Jenny Waters:

Yes, that was a cane used by the last owner of the house, john L Lewis. He was a very big leader in the labor movement in the 20th century, kind of like. The main points I like to say was he was president of the United Mine Workers of America and he was one of the founders of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

Ayla Sparks:

And he has humble beginnings because he started out as a mine worker.

Jenny Waters:

Yes, he left school very early to work in the coal mines and just kind of saw how dangerous coal mining was and took it upon him to make it safer and get better living and working conditions for coal miners. So for all of his work he actually set up the first federal safety standards in the coal mines and put in place health care and pension systems for coal miners. So very big figure there. So while he was mainly focused in coal, he did also help unionize the auto and steel industries as well. So very big figure.

Ayla Sparks:

So he must have worked his way up pretty efficiently then to be a coal miner. When I'm assuming this was when you say he left school, it was probably he was in his teens or even younger.

Jenny Waters:

Yes, yeah, I think it was around middle school.

Ayla Sparks:

Wow, and so I mean he obviously was very successful, but interestingly that makes him sound fantastic, right, like what a great guy. He did great work. But it's strange because he is quite a controversial figure in the history of Alexandria. Why?

Jenny Waters:

So when World War Two broke out, he did not agree that America should go into World War Two, and so he actually called for coal strikes during the war and that made him very unpopular with FDR, who was president at the time, amongst many others, including local high school students. We actually have a picture during that time in World War Two of local high school students from used to be Lee High School Now it's Lewis. They came and picketed outside this house where Lewis was living.

Ayla Sparks:

They did not agree that he should call for coal strikes while a war was going on, so I'm surprised that it worked, because if I was a coal miner I would be pretty upset that all of a sudden the boss, who lives in the fancy Lee Fendle House, is like hey, you're actually not going to work because I don't agree. So I can see a little bit more about this controversial figure coming through here. How long were they on strike for?

Jenny Waters:

Ooh, that I'm unsure of. But I do know he actually did it twice during the war, One pretty early on and then one around 1942 or 1943.

Ayla Sparks:

Did FDR ever? Did he message this guy and was like what do you want? Look, help us, you are an American.

Jenny Waters:

Pretty much. He was mad at him from the start, and so that was FDR. But I do know that later on JFK was actually supposed to give him the presidential medal of freedom. But it was actually Lyndon B Johnson, a few years later, that he, lewis, did receive the presidential medal of freedom. So not from FDR but from from LBJ for all of his efforts in the American labor movement.

Ayla Sparks:

Oh, wow, okay, Half one sticks a dozen to the other, depending on what president you're talking to. Yeah, I also would like to just touch on a little bit more the cane itself. What, what is the significance of the cane to bring into the story of this unionizing coal miner, the?

Jenny Waters:

cane is one of very few personal objects of John Lewis that we have, so I did really want to highlight that, because then it of course also brings up the entire life and work of him. Unfortunately, when he passed away, his son had sold pretty much all the family furniture to a auction house, so the cane and then one other object is pretty much the only thing that we have. And if you look closer at the cane, our collections team looked a few months ago and of course it has this very interesting animal figure as its handle.

Ayla Sparks:

Is it like a crocodile or like a jack? It's hard to tell what it is.

Jenny Waters:

You know it does have. I don't know if it's drawn on, but it does have spots on it which does make me think it's along the lines of like a jaguar, or.

Ayla Sparks:

I'm trying to think like a cool tycoon you know power yeah. Gobbling up the handle of a cane. It's interesting.

Jenny Waters:

Yes, and it's very heavy when you hold it. Of course you got to hold it horizontally but you got. You really got to hold on to that portion because it is a very heavy handle, clearly like a different material than the rest of the cane. So if you're just kind of looking at the cane from afar, you wouldn't, you would just think, okay, that's just some glossy wood.

Jenny Waters:

But we looked closer and it does say President Lewis of the UMWA, which is United Mine Workers of America. Clearly they, they, someone, had scratched away a little bit of the cane and either put this text it kind of looks like from a newspaper, like glued it on or something like that, onto there. And then we looked a little further down the cane and then someone had actually written on the cane hand me down my walking cane. So I feel like it's the cane not only brings back like a great tie to John L Lewis it was his personal walking stick brings us to his life and work, but then also kind of these mementos that either he or someone very close to him had had put on the cane.

Ayla Sparks:

That's fantastic. Well, thank you so much for sharing so much of the Leafendle house with everyone here.

Jenny Waters:

Thank you.