Gayle and Tom DeLashmutt are like any elderly couple trying to downsize, only their transition is a tad more complicated: The home they’re leaving is a 1,200-acre Virginia estate that once belonged to a Founding Father.
Among the decisions the DeLashmutts have had to make about Oak Hill, as the former plantation is known, is what to do with the 15,000-square-foot mansion built 200 years ago by America’s fifth president, James Monroe.
Gayle and Tom DeLashmutt are like any elderly couple trying to downsize, only their transition is a tad more complicated: The home they’re leaving is a 1,200-acre Virginia estate that once belonged to a Founding Father.
Among the decisions the DeLashmutts have had to make about Oak Hill, as the former plantation is known, is what to do with the 15,000-square-foot mansion built 200 years ago by America’s fifth president, James Monroe.
There was also the not insignificant matter of deciding the fate of a few significant relics — Dolley Madison’s canopied bed, for example, and two fireplace mantels that the Marquis de Lafayette gave to Monroe. There’s also a pullout couch said to have been designed by Thomas Jefferson.
“We’re up to our 16th dumpster,” Gayle DeLashmutt said last week, reclining in a first-floor parlor on that Jeffersonian couch. She was recounting the ongoing ordeal of off-loading a smorgasbord of stuff that has accumulated since her husband’s family bought the Loudoun County estate more than 75 years ago: old clothing, linens, books, records, tables, chairs, hunting rifles, washer/dryers and automobiles, including a couple of Jaguars, a Chevy Vega and a 1955 hearse.
Not to worry: Madison’s bed, the mantel pieces and Jefferson’s couch are not going to Goodwill. In a deal announced Monday, the DeLashmutts sold the estate for $20 million to the Conservation Fund, a preservationist group that is hoping to persuade Virginia’s General Assembly to convert the property into a state park.
Until the sale, Oak Hill was the last of the homes in private hands that had been owned by a presidential Founding Father.
The DeLashmutts are leaving behind some of the more noteworthy artifacts, including a red brocade chair and several tables that belonged to Dolley and James Madison, as well as Monroe’s bed, still in a palatial bedroom on the second floor.
“We didn’t want this to be a place for a data center or a development,” said DeLashmutt, citing the types of industrial projects and subdivisions that have chewed up many of Loudoun’s once pastoral vistas. “It just shouldn’t be.”
With Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s backing, the Conservation Fund earlier this year lobbied in Richmond to remake Oak Hill as parkland, an effort that stalled because of lawmakers’ concerns about potential taxpayer costs. The group plans to renew its campaign when the Assembly reconvenes in January.
Successful or not, the Conservation Fund’s purchase guarantees that Oak Hill — located in Aldie, about 40 miles from Washington — will remain untouched. That means no developer can alter the place where the president sat in the generously apportioned dining room and drafted the Monroe Doctrine that declared, among other things, that Europeans could no longer meddle in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere.
Oak Hill also has hosted milestones of a different sort — births and birthdays and annual holiday celebrations that are the stuff of family lore. Here is where Tom DeLashmutt grew up and he and Gayle had their wedding. Here is where Melinda, Tom’s sister, learned to ride bareback, married her husband and still lives in the modest cottage that Monroe occupied before the mansion was built.
To walk Oak Hill’s three floors is to understand the meaning of the phrase “on and on.”
Abigail DeLashmutt, Tom and Gayle’s 43-year-old daughter, said she and her sister, India, thought of Oak Hill as a “normal” farm when they were teenagers, although their boyfriends “had a tough time pretending the same” as they wandered the 29-room main house, where the ceilings are as high as 14 feet and visitors have included Civil War generals and John Quincy Adams.
“My brother in law describes coming home for the first time to what he expected would be a farm — because that’s what we called it, ‘the farm’ — and basically having a panic attack,” Abigail recalled in an email. “He’s used to it now, but I don’t think he ever mistook it for normal!”
Over the years, it fell to Gayle DeLashmutt to oversee the cutting of the grass and tiered formal gardens and 11 cottage rentals, which were fully occupied until recently. She described the responsibilities as a “full-time job” that had grown more arduous now that she’s 80 and her husband is 84.
“None of us can take the stairs anymore,” said Melinda, 81, who stopped by on Friday.
“We can but we don’t want to,” Gayle replied.
Seated on the Jeffersonian couch, Gayle’s expression brightened when Heather Richards, the Conservation Fund’s Mid-Atlantic vice president, told her that the sale had been finalized and the family was no longer responsible for the property.
“Can I leave now?” she asked. “I’ve got my toothbrush.”
Tom and Melinda DeLashmutt’s parents bought Oak Hill in 1948 after the owner, Frank Littleton, a stockbroker, went broke and the estate ended up in foreclosure. The price was somewhere between $225,000 and $250,000, according to the DeLashmutts, or about $3.3 million in today’s dollars.
Monroe had taken sole possession of the estate in 1805 after his uncle, Joseph Jones, died. By then, Monroe had established himself as a political heavyweight, representing Virginia in the U.S. Senate and the United States as a minister in England and France. He would win the presidency in 1816 and serve two terms.
For a time, the house Monroe occupied at Oak Hill was the cottage in which his uncle had resided. But he wanted something larger — a lot larger — and hired architect James Hoban, who had designed the White House. At one point, according to preservationists, Monroe sought aesthetic advice from Jefferson, who recommended that the mansion’s south side be defined by a neoclassical portico supported by 30-foot-high columns.
A crew of Monroe’s enslaved laborers built the house, which took three years to complete. Monroe lived there until 1830, when his wife died. He then moved to New York City, where he remained until his death in 1831. By the time the DeLashmutts bought Oak Hill more than a century later, the president’s bed was still around, although no one was eager to slip under the covers.
“The mattress was made of horsehair,” Melinda said. “Who wanted to sleep in that?”
When they were kids, she said, her brother claimed that he saw a ghost in the cottage Monroe had occupied, although no one else reported the same. What no one disputed was the presence of dinosaur tracks in a quarry on the property, slabs of which Littleton had used to make a floor in one of the mansion’s enclosed porches.
The dinosaur prints are remaining with the house.
A couple of years ago, as Tom DeLashmutt’s health was declining, the family began seeking a preservationist group to buy Oak Hill and chose the Conservation Fund.
Richards said the fund has raised $46 million, or about $6 million shy of the project’s $52 million cost. A total of $20 million is slated for an endowment that would finance the park’s year-to-year operations.
Although the proposal died in the state Senate in February, Richards said she is optimistic that supporters will fare better in January. “We have more time to educate folks and to talk about why this is important,” she said.
Senate Majority Leader Scott A. Surovell (D-Fairfax) said the DeLashmutts “have gone above and beyond to minimize the burden on the state,” and he hopes “we figure out a way to start the process of making this a reality.”
“This project is the number one priority of the Northern Virginia conservation community,” he said.
Yet some of Surovell’s colleagues have reservations, especially as they anticipate budgetary constraints.
“Issues like this are not going to have the priority that they would’ve had in times of plenty,” said Sen. R. Creigh Deeds (D-Charlottesville). “We’re entering a time when our needs exceed our means. I want a state park, sure, but there are lots of places that want a state park.”
Gayle and Tom DeLashmutt aren’t going far. Their new home is two miles down the road, a 4,000-square-foot converted barn that is less than a third of the size of Monroe’s mansion. There are stairs in the new place, too, and an elevator.
“Thrilled about it,” Gayle said of the move.
Not everyone is leaving. Several cottage tenants have renewed their leases, including an elderly man who lives in the same house his parents inhabited when they were on Oak Hill’s staff decades ago.
John Leydon, a retired aerospace executive who has lived at Oak Hill for 25 years, is also staying in his rental, a four-bedroom house with sweeping views of farmland. For years, Leydon functioned as a de facto leader of Oak Hill’s tenant community, hosting annual barbecues and maintaining a list of residents and their pets.
Now 84, he said the idea of moving again is difficult to fathom. He wonders if the state will turn Oak Hill into a park and, if so, how long it would take.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said. “If someone says you can stay another year, why not?”
Melinda DeLashmutt also is not leaving her cottage anytime soon, though she is building a new house near where Tom and Gayle are moving. Still, she worked out a deal to retain ownership of 40 acres at Oak Hill and hopes to eventually return.
“We devoted our lives to this place,” she said. “I’m attached to the land.”
So attached, in fact, that she and her brother and sister-in-law have arranged that when they die, their ashes will be spread in a memorial garden at Oak Hill.
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