Long before Ravensworth Shopping Center, Ravensworth Estates, Ravensworth Elementary School and other places were built in southern Fairfax County, William Fitzhugh's 21,996-acre tobacco plantation, Ravensworth, encompassed three mansions and their support buildings, including two now-joined log homes that stand as a quaint reminder of the colony's largest cash crop.
The Burke home of Phillip and Jan Mengel, built from two circa-1780s cottages, supposedly has a ghost, buried tunnels and the last standing outhouse in Northern Virginia. It definitely has a provenance stretching back to two famous Virginia families, as well as to the tobacco farm and namesake manor Ravensworth, which burned in 1926. "It's all that's left of a property once visited by George Washington Parke Custis, Mary Custis Lee and General Robert E. Lee," said Dan Thiewes, the Mengels' real estate agent.
That claim is a bit of a stretch; the Custises and Lees probably never crossed the threshold of the humble abode that belonged to Ravensworth's farm manager. But the eclectic four-bedroom house is old, with a pristinely preserved Colonial summer kitchen, batten doors and chestnut columns so hard "you can't drill a nail into them," said Jan Mengel, who bought the house in 1994.
The house, on the market for $1.395 million, stands on 2.3 acres on Bronte Drive, south of Braddock Road and about four miles west of where the three great Ravensworth homes stood. The youngest of the three mansions, Ravensworth, was a Palladian-style house built in 1796 by a Fitzhugh descendant. It stood at the intersection of what are now Braddock Road and the Capital Beltway and is described on its state historic marker as "one of the most imposing residences in Fairfax County until it burned." That luxurious house was the summer home and honeymoon site for Mary Custis Lee and her husband, Robert E. Lee.
The other mansions in the Ravensworth estate were Ossian Hall, a sprawling house built in 1783 that was burned to the ground in 1959 to make way for a subdivision, and Oak Hill, a Georgian-style mansion that still stands at 4716 Wakefield Chapel Rd. The Mengels' link to those great houses involves its land and the period structures that make up their home. Over 200 years, Fitzhugh's nearly 22,000 acres were passed on to heirs or sold, and by 1903, the parcel on which the Mengel house stands had dwindled from 1,300 acres to 125. Now it's less than three, but it feels huge by modern standards, a bucolic throwback to the days of candlelight and carriages.
"When I first moved here, I wondered who walked here before, what happened to them and how did they think about things. I was quite fascinated by what their lives would have been like," Jan Mengel said. The property has seven working fireplaces (four inside the main house); a stable; a four-car garage; a detached office; and the two-story summer kitchen, with its own brick floor, phone lines and electricity. For Jan Mengel, who attended the College of William and Mary and collects 18th-century antiques, it feels like a bit of Williamsburg in Northern Virginia.
"I really love the living room at Christmastime and in the evening for entertaining. It's a fun house," Mengel said. According to local lore, the home also has a resident ghost, though the Mengels say they have never encountered her. A woman named Sarah Fairfax, who lived in the house from the early 1900s to 1936, died peacefully in her bed, and later owners Richard and Patricia Ruffner, who ran a riding academy from the property from 1955 to 1977, claim to have seen her and otherwise felt her presence. But in 14 years, the Mengels and their two now-grown children have never witnessed supernatural activity. "Maybe she knows I'm a skeptic. Sadly, she doesn't come out for me," Jan Mengel joked.