Rippon Lodge

Rippon Lodge is the oldest house in Prince William County — the four-room frame house Richard Blackburn built about 1747 on the high ground above Neabsco Creek, named for the Yorkshire town he'd left in 1720. He was a carpenter who became a tobacco gentleman: the plantation stretched 21,000 acres from the creek toward what is now I-95, with its own port feeding the harbor at Dumfries, on the Kings Highway that ran from Newport to Charleston.

His son Thomas made it revolutionary — Burgess, Virginia Convention delegate, Washington's aide-de-camp until a wound at Germantown ended his soldiering. Washington dined at Rippon more than once; the road out front carried the allied armies to Yorktown — the same remnant of the Kings Highway now designated the Washington-Rochambeau Revolutionary Route. Thomas's daughter Nancy married Bushrod Washington — the president's nephew and namesake — and the house passed into the family that ran Mount Vernon.

The house stayed in Blackburn hands into the twentieth century — Admiral Richard Blackburn Black, the Antarctic explorer, bought it back in the 1930s and lived there, his name the same as the builder's two centuries earlier. Prince William County took it in 2000; Benjamin Latrobe's 1796 watercolor of the place survives to compare against the house that still overlooks the creek.

Rippon Lodge is the archive's carpenter file — the 1747 house a Yorkshire carpenter built above Neabsco Creek, where Washington dined at his aide's table and the Washington-Rochambeau road still runs past the door.