Mountain View Farm, Lovettsville, Virginia:
Washingtons to the Lowrys

George William Washington built the farmhouse at the turn of the century, the early 1900s, at the edge of Short Hill Mountain, a mountain range of the Blue Ridge. The original owner, Mr. Washington, had chickens, cows, draft horses, and ducks and grew wheat and corn, maintaining the 225-acre Mountain View Farm until he died at home, at 82, in 1952. He was the son of the late Robert and Leah Virts Washington; he had two surviving daughters, Miss Mary Washington at home with him, and Ellen Washington (married to George King); and he had one son Mr. Wright Washington. 
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Interestingly, through my mother's, Barbara Simpson Lowry's, lineage of the Virts family, George Washington's mother, Leah Elizabeth Virts, is a distant cousin; I am a 4th cousin, 3x removed from Mr. George William Washington. Proof of how the German Settlement of Lovettsville is full of close to distantly related families, and the farm ownership came full circle. 
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After George W. Washington's death, the Lowry family subsequently purchased the farm from Mr. Washington's son and wife, Wright and Mildred Washington, retaining the name, as it perfectly fits the large Victorian-style home in a valley next to beautiful views of the Short Hills. Mr. Wright's son George "Doc" Washington, continued to work on the farm every summer, forging his way to college and later becoming a renowned vet in Loudoun County. Little did my brothers and Doc Washington know they were distant cousins working together on the farm.
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At the turn of the century, you could buy almost anything you needed out of the Sears catalog, and amazingly for the period, besides a watch, jewelry, Christmas toys, or clothes, you could order a home. After ordering a kit, they send and build it for you, or you could hire a contractor. According to Sears, they sold between 70,000 to 75,000 homes until 1940, when they discontinued the catalog, and about 70 percent are still standing today. Without the kit, lumber would come from the sawmill, as the first house my father and mother (Norvel Lee and Barbara Lowry, Jr.) lived in did, built by Mom's father, Robert Clark Simpson, a carpenter, contractor, and WWI patriot from Lovettsville, Virginia, and his son Irving Simpson who worked with him on construction projects as well as furniture making. When Mom and Dad were married, Granddaddy Simpson acquired the lumber from William Painter's Sawmill and built the house located just on the other side of the lake from the front foyer of the farmhouse, up the ridge, and next to the dirt road, as a bird flies, on Mountain View Farm. 
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Mr. George W. Washington ordered the blueprints at the turn of the century, who was also the grandfather of Blue Ridge District Supervisor George E. Washington; the lumber and kit came in by railroad in Brunswick, Maryland, were picked up and delivered to Mountain View Farm and put together into a magnificent slate roofed Victorian-style home. The Sears catalog featuring the homes was inside the house for years, but I am unsure what happened to it now. 
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The main entrance to the home through the original front door was from a sweeping wrap-around porch, into a large foyer, with original hardwood floors found throughout the house and a grand staircase. To the right of the foyer was a large 13x15 room with custom built-in bookcases and cabinets along one wall. To the left of the foyer was a grand 15x23 semi-circular formal living room with seven large windows showing off the mountain, front yard, and lake views. From the foyer, there was a long hallway connecting to the 15x19 formal dining room, a doorway for which is also located on the adjacent side of the living room, with original white built-in cabinets with glass inlays covering one wall. Once, a small bedroom was located at the end of the hallway from the front foyer and off to the right but was remodeled into a full bathroom while the Lowrys lived at the farm. In the rear of the dining room was a door leading to a covered back porch with a stone staircase leading to the basement. 
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The basement kept a huge watering trough where pipes leading from the mountain once brought fresh spring water to the house, but while the Lowrys lived there, the house was on well water. The floor was earthen and dirt, and the trough in the basement was used as a vast potato bin where the potatoes were sprinkled with lime to keep them from sprouting and molding while in storage. A coal furnace in the basement heated the house, and my Granddaddy, Norvel Lowry, Sr., would travel to West Virginia every winter to get a load of coal, which would then be hand-shoveled into the basement through a trap door on the front porch.
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A doorway between the two rooms, dining room and kitchen, was a back staircase leading upstairs. A gas stove in the kitchen was where my Mamaw Lowry, Laura, would make her buckwheat cakes. In the mornings, she would go out to the hen house through the back door in the kitchen, stepping onto a stone step and heading to the large pasture behind the house to gather eggs. Under the hen house was an icehouse where slabs of meat were kept and also where she would go down to cut some bacon to add to the breakfast table in the kitchen. The icehouse under the hen house was underground with no sunlight, and under the floor, ice was kept keeping the room cool from winter, lasting until the end of July or August. The ice would come from the Potomac River, just down the gravel road from the farm, where they cut 3' x 3' chunks, hauled it back to the farm, and placed it under the floor in the icehouse. 
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At the top of the formal steps was a landing with a three-foot wooden spooled railing. The two front bedrooms were rounded with lake views; the remaining three rooms were used for a primary suite, a sewing room, and an additional bedroom. Farmhouses were notorious for one bathroom, which was located upstairs, complete with an original porcelain clawfoot tub.