Quakers from Pennsylvania and New Jersey founded the meeting that became the Alexandria Monthly Meeting at Woodlawn, Virginia, in 1848, shortly after immigrating to northern Virginia to create a farming community south of Old Town Alexandria.
Impetus for the community came from a visit to northern Virginia by Quaker timber scouts searching for mature oak trees to supply to a prominent Philadelphia Quaker ship builder, Joseph Gillingham. In 1846, Gillingham had contracted a group of Friends to locate a fresh supply of timber for building new clipper ships to employ in the tea and wool trade between China, Australia, and the United States.
The timber scouts searched the tidewater of Virginia for hardwood forests suitable for ship timbers and, at the same time, for land for a new community to be colonized and run on Quaker principles. They found the trees they needed on land that once had been part of George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate, near Alexandria. Washington had given the lands of Woodlawn Plantation as a wedding gift to his niece, Nelly Custis, and her husband, Laurence Lewis. Later inherited by their son, Lorenzo Lewis, Woodlawn Plantation came up for sale in 1846.
Five Friends working together as the Troth-Gillingham Company purchased all 2,000 acres of the Woodlawn Estate and another 1,000 acres of neighboring Mount Vernon Estate. In addition to supplying trees for timber, the Woodlawn land ’s fertile soil and healthy climate allowed the Quaker families to found a farming community without slave labor, following their belief that such a venture could be economically sound as well as ethically right.
The leaders of the Woodlawn experiment, Jacob and Paul Hillman Troth and Chalkley and Lucas Gillingham, divided the property and sold plots to other Friends from Pennsylvania and New Jersey. A steady influx of settlers moved into the community at Woodlawn, all of them dedicated to the principle that they would farm without slaves.
Within a few years, the Woodlawn Quaker community was thriving. The families established sawmills, flourmills, a store, and smith shop. Founder Chalkley Gillingham wrote in 1848 that, “We find no difficulty in getting along without the use of slave labor. This was one object in coming here, to establish a free labor colony in a slave state. It works quite well as we expected, and the influence it exerts upon the black workers is very encouraging – elevating them to a much better condition than they were before our establishment went into operation.”
In 1848, the Woodlawn Quakers established a school for girls and boys in one of the rooms of the Woodlawn plantation house. In another room, they began a meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. The following year, the Woodlawn Meeting of Friends sought approval to become an Indulged Meeting under the care of the Alexandria Monthly Meeting in Old Town Alexandria.
According to Alexandria minutes, “In third month, 1849, the committee appointed by Alexandria Monthly Meeting to consider Woodlawn’s request for an indulged meeting to be held in that neighborhood report that they have twice met and after serious deliberation have united in proposing that the meeting be held on the First and Fourth days of the week, the meeting to be called Woodlawn Meeting of Friends.”
As the Woodlawn Meeting prospered, it moved several times to accommodate new members – first to a building that housed the miller who had ground corn and wheat at George Washington old grist mill on Dogue Creek, then to Gray’s Hill Farm, and in 1853, to a newly-built meeting house constructed on land donated by founding member, Chalkley Gillingham.
Although Virginia’s Quakers prospered as citizens of the United States, their opposition to slavery eventually led to the laying down of the Virginia Yearly Meeting. The remaining meetings clustered around parent meetings in Philadelphia and Baltimore.
Their major test of survival came with the outbreak of the Civil War. The wood-framed meeting house at Woodlawn fell into the no-man’s-land between Federal lines south of Alexandria and Confederate troops stationed a few miles farther south. Pickets from both armies overran the area, and the Quaker families lost their crops, livestock, fences, barns, and houses to marauding soldiers from both armies. The Friends, being by religious conviction both abolitionists and pacifists, would support neither side in the conflict and were given scant consideration by military forces.
On July 21, 1861, Confederate and Union armies clashed at the Battle of Bull Run in nearby Manassas, Virginia. Sounds of the battle punctuated the silence of meeting at Woodlawn, prompting Chalkley Gillingham to write in his journal, “This was the celebrated battle day at Bull Run and the first day of the week. All day at our place we heard the roar of the cannon distinctly. While we sat in Meeting, we heard the noise of war and the roar of battle, and on the next day, just before noon, we heard that the Union troops had all returned from the battle in a panic.”
As the war continued, the Woodlawn meeting house was alternately in territory of the North and South. In 1862, Confederate guerrilla fighter John Singleton Mosby and men stabled their horses outside, while the Friends of Woodlawn sat in silence.
In 1862, the minutes of the women friends’ meeting noted that, “All our meetings for worship and discipline have been held, except one on first day, which was omitted on account of wounded soldiers being brought to the meeting house near the usual time of gathering. It was considered unsafe for men or horses to assemble at our Meeting house, on account of being pressed into service.”
When the death and destruction of the Civil War ended in 1865, the Friends of Woodlawn turned once again to promoting education and social change. During 1869, the meeting doubled the size of its meetinghouse to accommodate the 60 members who normally attended first day meetings.
During the 1870s, the legendary honesty of the Quakers was sought out by the U.S. Government. National political leaders found that problems of corruption among Indian agents in the American West could be countered by hiring Quakers to oversee the distribution of goods and education to Native Americans. Several members of the Woodlawn Meeting moved west to serve as agents and teachers, especially among the Pawnee of Nebraska.
The Friends colony at Woodlawn continued to flourish through the end of the 19th century. Members founded dozens of businesses and associations and were key figures in transforming Fairfax County from an area of agricultural decline into the leading dairy and crop-producing county of Virginia.
In 1917, war once again interrupted this peaceful life, and the United States Government absorbed farmland around the Woodlawn Meeting House to establish Camp A.A. Humphreys, later called Fort Belvoir. Although many Friends saw their farms and homes expropriated and converted into the military base, the Friends of Woodlawn transformed their meetinghouse into an island of peace in an ocean of support for war.
During the Second World War, Fort Belvoir further expanded its boundaries, and the meeting property was completely surrounded by the army post. Nonetheless, one of Woodlawn Meeting’s members, Horace Buckman, was prompted to write that, “the small, plain, white frame building stands serene in its shady green plot of lawn, a quiet testimony to a belief in peace and love as a way of life.”
When the monthly meeting in neighboring Old Town Alexandria was laid down during the 1940s, the Woodlawn Meeting took up the mantle of responsibility to become the Alexandria Monthly Meeting at Woodlawn. Today, as in the early days of its founding, the Alexandria Meeting at Woodlawn is a lively, thriving part of the Northern Virginia community, with an active program of children’s education and a diverse, expanding adult membership.
In the words of Christine Buckman, granddaughter of one of our founding members, “During the years of its existence, the Woodlawn Meeting House has seen the surrounding community develop from wilderness to farming area to suburbia. Now circumscribed by a modern, active military reservation, the modest, white frame building sits serene and aloof on its plot of hallowed ground—a symbol of peace, a reminder that ‘God’s in His Heaven,’ a renewal of hope for the future.”
James D. Nations
Clerk, History Committee
Alexandria Monthly Meeting at Woodlawn