Growing up in a log cabin – in Annandale

The log cabin, before it was expanded and enclosed. [Brenda Gemmell]

When Brenda Libeau Gemmell grew up in Annandale in the 1950s, the area was still quite rural.

Her house was a log cabin at the end of Libeau Lane off Gallows Road. Libeau Lane is still a country lane, although it’s now in the middle of a very built-up area.

Brenda’s father, Virginius Councill Libeau, who went by his middle name, bought land in Annandale in 1937 from Nellie Sorg for $150, Brenda says. He married Pauline Fox, Brenda’s mother, that same year. They lived in Manassas until he finished building the log cabin. [The assessed value of the property in 2020 was $398,000.]

The Libeau house today.

The log cabin is possibly still there, as Councill later built a brick house around it in 1963 or 64, Brenda says. Councill was a bricklayer who built houses for a construction company. He later had the road named Libeau Lane.

“We thought we were in the country when we lived there. There were no other buildings around,” says Brenda, who was born in 1947 as a middle child in a large family.

Until she was in high school, heat came from a wood-burning stove. They had electricity and gas for cooking, but no heating system. Brenda remembers it being so cold in the winter, the kids ran to the potbelly stove in the kitchen as soon as they woke up.

Councill Libeau chops wood to heat the house. [Brenda Gemmell]

Councill hand-dug a well outside the back door. There was a coal bin in the basement, a vegetable garden, apple and peach trees, and a chicken coop in the yard. In the early years, they relied on an outhouse; later, Councill installed a bathroom in the basement.

The original log cabin had a living room, dining room, and a small bedroom divided in two. Councill built an addition at some point in the early 1950s.

In keeping with the Cold War fears of that era, he built an underground bomb shelter with a trap door.

Brenda recalls playing outside, collecting crawdads and frogs in a creek, building forts, and having sword fights with the neighborhood kids. “You had to use your imagination,” she says.

Indoors she played board games and pick-up sticks and tried (unsuccessfully) to beat her mom in checkers.

She used to visit a white pony at the Powell family’s White Front Riding Stable where the beltway was later built near Gallows Road. In the winter, the kids sledded on aluminum foil on Woodburn Road. In the summer, they went to the Annandale Swim & Tennis Club, where it cost just 50 cents to get in.

From the left: sisters Brenda Libeau Gemmell, Betty Libeau King, and Sandra Libeau Davy in 1981. [Brenda Gemmell]

Brenda walked to Woodburn Elementary School and rode a school bus to Whitter Junior High School and Woodson High School. She remembers riding the bus with schoolmate Dave Marsden, who lived on Woodburn Road and now represents Annandale in the Virginia Senate. Marsden’s farm was later transformed into the original Woodburn Elementary School. Whittier later became Falls Church High School.]

The family did their grocery shopping every Friday at a Safeway in Annandale, Brenda says. They did most of their clothes shopping from a Sears catalog, but she also remembers trips to stores in Annandale and Jefferson Village.

When her family got a TV, it was a small black-and-white one with a fuzzy screen. Some of the shows Brenda recalls watching are “The Mickey Mouse Club,” “The Lone Ranger,” “Sky King,” and “American Bandstand.” The Rocky and Bullwinkle show was a particular favorite as they could watch real flying squirrels from the dormer windows on their house.

“I don’t have any bad memories,” she says.

Her older sister, while attending Annandale High School, worked at Shirkey’s Drug Store on Little River Turnpike at Ravensworth Road. Brenda’s first job was at F.W. Woolworth Co., in Seven Corners, which was “THE place to be!”

Libeau Lane today, looking toward Woodburn Elementary School on Gallows Road.

Her mother, Pauline, was a homemaker who ironed clothes for a neighbor lady for 10 cents apiece. She later got a job as a housekeeper at Doctors Hospital in the City of Fairfax.

After Councill died in 1984, Pauline couldn’t stay there alone – hauling wood was too hard – so she sold the property and moved to a trailer park in Chantilly. She died in 1989.

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Brenda lived on Libeau Lane until she married Jim Gemmell when she was 18. They’re still together, living in Bristol, Va., and have three children and four grandchildren.

As she grew up, she watched the area become more built up, as Holmes Run Acres, Raintree, and other housing developments went up all around Libeau Lane.

Brenda is glad the hidden-away lane might well stay that way for the foreseeable future. In January 2019, the Fairfax County Planning Commission indefinitely deferred a proposal for a 72-unit housing development that would have destroyed Libeau Lane.