Annandale village in the 1950s

Anne Sansbury’s former home on Walton Lane was between Hummer Road and Annandale Road. Click to enlarge.

There are many theories about the origin of the name Annandale, but a likely one is that it was named after the valley of the Annan River (i.e., Annan Dale) in Dumfriesshire, Scotland. Over there exists a museum dedicated to Virginiana, so there’s definitely some connection between the two. My family moved to Annandale in 1949, before Little River Turnpike was widened to two lanes. My parents had purchased eight acres of trees on Walton Lane before WWII, but couldn’t get building materials until after the war.

They cut down a swath of trees, enough to determine the perfect location for their house, and they bought plans for a Better Homes and Gardens model home, an open concept house with the kitchen on one side of a breakfast bar and a recreation room on the other and large windows all the way around.  My mother could watch their four kids while working in the galley kitchen that included the laundry area and ironing board. My mother’s sorority sister had recommended Walton Lane, and her family built a house there too.  Later they recommended another family, so my parents sold off some land so the third family could buy a nice big lot, and they built in between the first two families. All the “girls” from these three families got together for lunch recently and have been swapping memories of our childhoods on Walton Lane. There were a few other houses on Walton Lane before we got there, but mainly there were trees, especially scrub pines that surely must have reminded my father of his hometown of Calais, Maine. 

Most of Annandale was a forest back then, with a variety store at the center on Columbia Pike and a small general store at Ravensworth and Little River, the site of a trading post many years before.  At first, we did our main grocery shopping in Arlington, way down Wilson Boulevard, and had to go into DC to buy clothes.  Many residents went to Philadelphia and/or New York to do their shopping for clothes and household items, but we just went to Philadelphia to visit my Russian grandparents and we never went to New York, even though my mother grew up there and adored the city.  We did have electricity and phones, but we shared our telephone lines with a few other people.  If we heard someone talking when we picked up the phone, we quickly hung up and tried our call later.  Nobody talked on the phone for more than five minutes at a time.

A child’s existence in Annandale in the 50s was what we would today call idyllic. When we weren’t in school, we ran around outdoors in a seemingly endless area, from after breakfast to lunchtime and from after lunch to dinnertime.  And yes, we drank out of the hose because we could only go indoors to use the bathroom. Each family had a different way to call the children home for meals; my mother had what she called a cow bell to call us in and some families used whistles.

When we were very young, we played in a pen in the front yard.  It was a fairly large area surrounded by chicken wire (which we now call poultry fencing), and my mother could glance out any front window to make sure we were okay.  Of course we didn’t cause much trouble, because discipline was at the option of the parents back then.  We later converted that area to a turtle pen which at one time housed 40 box turtles. In hindsight, I suspect that was more an attempt to keep turtles out of the gardens than it was entertainment for us children.

Out back we had a large yard and an orchard before we got to the woods, where we had a creek and swimming hole before we got to the Manassas Gap Railroad embankment with a culvert large enough for a young child to stand up in.  In 1854 the MGRR acquired land for their own Independent Line but they ran out of money before the tracks were laid.  We found very old shell casings back there. Most of the kids caught crawfish in the creek but I couldn’t stand the thought of getting pinched. I preferred catching lizards and hop toads in the yard and chasing moles through their tunnels under the grass.

The Hummer Road Park used to cover quite a bit of land on the east side of Hummer Road, and although we were located in the middle of Walton Lane, the park abutted our back yard.  There was a nice big hill and a log cabin at the top where the groundskeeper lived with his wife and daughter.  Although it wasn’t safe because of all the trees in the way, we sledded down that hill when it snowed. Along the edge of the park next to our property was a large area with strawberry plants among the weeds. I have never tasted any other strawberry as delicious as those in the park.  The other thing we chewed on from the park was sassafras twigs. Now they are considered carcinogenic, but back then they were considered the next best thing to candy.

Many years ago we were allowed to burn our trash and yard waste in our back yards, and if we had zoysia grass, which we did in our back yard, we were allowed to burn that off every year. Likewise, we could set off fireworks and fire crackers in our own yards, which we did every Fourth of July.

The three families took turns hosting a picnic and fireworks on the Fourth, which is one of our favorite memories of childhood.  The children ran around with sparklers before dinner and we all gazed in delight at the fireworks displays after dinner.  One of the things that seems to have delighted all the children is snakes, those little black pellets that we set fire to and watched grow into snake-like ashes.  When we were older, we started watching the DC fireworks from the Navy Annex hill at the east end of Columbia Pike.  We would park our car at the bottom of the hill and watch from closer to the top.  It looked like the entire display was for our benefit alone.

Manassas Gap Park, as it looks today.

Back in those days, parking a car in DC was never a problem.  To visit the Lincoln Memorial, we parked anywhere around the building, for as long as we wanted.  At the other end of Memorial Bridge, there was a small patch of land with more dandelions per square inch than anywhere else around. Every year our family pulled the car over there and spent some hours picking dandelions that my parents took home and turned into dandelion wine.  We could pretty much park anywhere in DC and it was okay.

Our driveway was a very long right-of-way that my father covered with rocks from his gardens, year after year.  As he dug and re-dug his plots, he took many a wheelbarrowful of rocks down to the driveway, first to fill in the mud holes and then to fill in the entire driveway. In the process, he found some almost perfect arrowheads and beautiful samples of quartz crystals and fool’s gold. It wasn’t much fun shoveling snow off the longest rocky driveway in town, but it later served as the local Lovers Lane, so we had to keep it in good order.

The other grueling task was raking leaves. We had very large areas to rake and the leaves could be a foot deep in no time if we didn’t keep at it every weekend in the Fall. We lugged the leaves on a huge tarp to various places – the gully in front, the woods next to the turn-around, the leaf bine on the far side of the house from the garage. It would have been helpful to lug them to the woods beyond the back yard, but that’s where the ducks were.  Our friends off of Braddock Road had a goat, and a family at the top end of Walton Lane had some horses, and friends behind the current library raised chinchillas, but my father raised ducks, so we routinely ate low-fat ducks and duck eggs. Otherwise, we ate mainly homegrown fruits and vegetables, almost everything imaginable, from all the regular produce to gooseberries and Jerusalem artichokes and kohlrabi.

We kids also ate whatever we could find outdoors because we would be hungry between meals.  We smashed hickory nuts and ate the meat.  e ate a lot of sour grass.  I don’t even know what that is, but it tasted good. We had mushrooms everywhere, but were warned not to eat them, so when my father brought in some puffballs and announced that we would eat them with steak gravy, I thought he was trying to do away with us. But it turned out to be love at first bite. We continued to have puffballs in our front yard for a couple years, but I haven’t seen one since then. At some point we started buying sides of beef up at the butcher shop in Tysons corner, which was about all there was in Tysons Corner, and everything was nicely packaged to fit into our large deep freeze along with all the frozen fruits and vegetables from my father’s gardens, some ducks, and an occasional rabbit.  After I was grown, my father killed a squirrel that I skinned and my mother and I used to make Brunswick Stew. All the other squirrels my father caught were released in Fairfax, to keep them away from his gardens.

Across from the deep freeze, in the excavated part of the cellar, were shelves stocked with products my parents canned, such as tomatoes, applesauce, bread-and-butter pickles, and a wide assortment of jams and jellies. Part of the cellar hadn’t been excavated and we climbed up in there and crawled around through cobwebs and bugs. I remember doing that when I was a grown woman as well, because that’s how we reached the outdoor water valve. We had our own well and septic system, so the water tasted great, but we couldn’t let anything do down a drain and when our electricity went out, which it did a few times, we had no pump and thus no water. Luckily, that seemed to happen mostly during the summer storms, and we could bathe at the swimming pool. We join HRARA, the Holmes Run Acres Recreation Association pool, when it opened in 1953, and they would like us to know that we can still join their pool! To flush toilets and brush teeth without electricity, we always kept gallon jugs of water in the cellar and around the house.

We all attended Annandale Elementary School, which was located at 7200 Columbia Pike, where the Annandale Adult Day Health Center is now.  There was no fire station next door, and I remember the upset when we learned that it was going to be built. We could appreciate the benefits, but were worried about the noise of sirens so close to home. In fact, I don’t think we ever noticed the sirens, and the one time we did have a fire, my father had to put it out by ripping down the burning curtains and throwing them out in the rain while the fire engine ran up and down Walton Lane looking for our house, which was not visible from the road.

Little by little, buildings popped up around Annandale and every year in school we were challenged to write a theme, “Annandale, the Town with a Future.” I was aghast that any adult would try to glean ideas for the future from a bunch of school children; furthermore, I didn’t have one idea myself and was somewhat embarrassed that I couldn’t join the contest.  I would love to read those themes now.  I doubt anybody nailed the current Annandale.

The library was first located in the Turnpike Press Building but soon outgrew that space and moved to a tiny spot that it shared with the post office. This was where Annandale Watch and Clock is now.  Our dentist, Dr. Goode, was across Annandale Road from the library.  After the library moved to its current location, the tiny spot became Iva Trice, a dress shop, and we could finally shop for clothing locally.  While we had plenty of books in the school library for our routine book reports, once we got to high school, if we had to write a topical report, we would rely on my father to bring us books from the DC Public Library and the Library of Congress.  I’m sure this gave us an advantage over the students who didn’t have a parent working in DC and willing to spend whole lunch periods tracking down books.

I’m trying to think of a downside to living in Annandale in the 50s, but I can’t. At the time, I thought that walking miles and miles to get to a few houses on Halloween was a chore, but we used to end up with whole brown grocery bags full of candy, so I now realize we made out like bandits back then.  At the time, I thought it was a crime that we couldn’t walk to all our friends’ homes, but now I think we got a lot more studying done because we were isolated.  At the time, I thought it was a shame that our father wasn’t President, forcing us to be more refined – Mom used to tell us, “It’s a good thing your father isn’t President, because you could never behave this way” – and now I’m truly grateful that we got to slop around in the mud and scream at the top of our lungs.

Note: This article has been restored to its original version as requested by the author. Here are more stories recently published in the Annandale Blog about growing up in Annandale:
Annandale memories: Unpaved roads, free-roaming kids, and the ‘Jolly-ettes’
Annandale memories: Mom and pop shops, Topps, and donkey baseball
Annandale memories: Columbia Pines’ first residents