This is the third in a series of posts on the Snowden Family and their contributions to our community. Previous articles can be found in the archives on the right hand side of the page.
On the morning of Tuesday, February 18, 1941, The Snowden School, located at the intersection of Fort Hunt Road and Chadwick Avenue was burning. High winds whipped the flames as firefighters from Franconia and Alexandria fought in vain to save the building. The loss of the two-room school house was mourned by adults and children as it represented approximately 70 years of community cooperation.
The origin story of the Snowden School is similar to many others in Fairfax County. In 1870, the Virginia General Assembly passed the Public Free Schools Act as part of the Underwood Constitution setting up publicly funded schools with mandatory attendance. Richard L. Nevitt was charged with dividing Fairfax County into the six townships each operating as a separate school district. He also served as one of the 3 initial Trustees of the Mount Vernon District School Board with E.E. Mason and F.F. Triplett. Unfortunately, very few records of the Mount Vernon District School Board remain.
The Snowden School began at Wellington on River Farm (now home of the American Horticultural Society). In the early 1870s, the home was owned by Valentine Baker, a Quaker from New York. From 1872-1878 the school was operated out of the Baker home and served children from neighboring farms. Attendance records from the time period listed the following family names: Thompson, Baker, Frost, Ballinger, Boughton, Graw, Hunter, Snowden and Eckhart. Valentine’s daughter, Josephine was in her early 20s and was the school’s first teacher. We don’t know the exact date of construction for the Snowden School building, but it appears on the Hopkins map published in 1879.
Kate Snowden, Stacy Snowden’s daughter-in-law, recounted that the one-room school house was “…erected by Theron Thompson, Sr. of Hollin Hall, Valentine Baker of Wellington, William Hunter of Cedar Hill and Stacy Snowden of Collingwood, on a piece of land donated by Snowden. The benches were crude and the only desks were boards around the sides of the room. Children worked facing the wall.” Stacy and Sarah Snowden’s gift to the community was formalized with a deed dated 1900.
After the tenure of Miss Baker, Alice Dove served as a teacher, likely in the 1890s. She was the daughter of Caroline Devers and James Tyler who had a farm in Franconia. (While the Devers and Tyler families found themselves on opposite sides during the Civil War they are buried in a joint cemetery that has been preserved in an office park at the intersection of Metropark drive and Beulah Rd.)
1885-1915
Funding and fluctuating population were continuing threats to the consistency of schooling in the county. Through the 1880s funding for public schools was a contentious issue tied to the repayment of Virginia’s post-Civil War debt. School taxes of 7 ½% on each hundred dollars of property were collected in each district. At a point, attendance could not be maintained at Snowden School. Daniel D. Thompson, who lived with his Father-in-Law Isaac Snowden at Riverview, took matters into his own hands. He “secured desks from the County and school was held in his home with Miss Alice Dove as teacher.”
Nellie Lee Nevitt also taught at Snowden. She was a descendant of the McCarty/Chichester family of Mount Air and Newington. Her family was very committed to education. Her Great Uncle, Richard L. Nevitt and her father Robert Guest Nevitt both served long terms on the Fairfax County School Board and many relatives were teachers. Nellie, herself, taught more than fifty years in the county. The Nevitts also had a long history with Pohick Church and are represented well in their cemetery.
Around the turn of the century, the original one-room building was destroyed by fire. It was rebuilt in the same location in 1903. It was described as having “a pot-bellied stove, oiled wood floors, a well and a ‘necessary’ outside.” News of the Snowden School appeared regularly in local newspapers reporting upkeep of the property (removal of fencing, digging of wells) as well as lists of Teachers working at the school. A second room was added to the building around 1918. In 1922, Fairfax County consolidated its assets and eliminated the District School Boards.
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church at Wellington
The changeover in control of the local schools may have resulted in some confusion as Mildred Lozano “Aggie” Finks, who began teaching at the Snowden School in the late 1920s, worked for two years without pay. Reportedly, the county school board was unaware that the school existed. In 1929, Aggie saw an opportunity to teach Sunday School classes out of the Snowden School. She and several other teachers were holding non-denominational Sunday School classes at Sherwood Hall on the Accotink Road (now Sherwood Hall Lane). In order to reduce the distance that children had to walk, she chose to begin again at Snowden, this time in the Episcopal faith. She worked with students from the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria to lead the classes. Aggie Finks’ idea resulted in the founding of the first church on Fort Hunt Road, St. Luke’s Episcopal Church.
What began as Sunday School classes soon grew to include worship services, baptisms and confirmations, all held at the Snowden School until 1933 when a brick chapel was completed on what is now the current site of St. Luke’s Church. Holding church services in a school was not without its difficulties. Bishop Marmion recounted “Since it was difficult for some of the women to slide out of the desks in which they sat…we stood only once during the service, and that was to recite the Apostle’s Creed.”
In 1933, work was completed on the third Groveton Elementary school building, this one at Route 1 and Memorial street. Students of the Snowden School were transferred to this larger brick school that boasted six classrooms and an auditorium. The Fairfax County School Board took steps to sell the Snowden School property. For whatever reason, the Snowden School continued operating, announcing new Teachers every year through 1936.
Both St. Luke’s and the Wellington Villa Association continued to use and repair the Snowden School for a variety of purposes. Vestry and Youth Group Meetings, Red Cross work, and even a surprise party for a young enlisted man headed to Camp Meade were held at the school within months of its demise by fire. The History of St. Luke’s Church reports that “the young people expressed great sorrow at the loss of their “Ark.” Kate Snowden memorialized the school in an editorial piece for the Alexandria Gazette entitled “The Passing of a Landmark.”
Acknowledgements: Thank you to Jeff Clark, a video producer in the Fairfax County Public Schools Office of Communications, for his help getting started on researching the Snowden School. His works “What’s in a Name?” and “Schools of Yesteryear” can be found on YouTube and are an excellent source of historical information on our local schools.
Thank you also to the staff and members of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church past and present. They have done an outstanding job as stewards of not only their own history, but that of the area once known as “Snowden.”