Mordecai Cooke Fitzhugh built his family’s residence, Fountainbleau, on Ravensworth probably after 1804 and before 1832. The site overlooks Holmes Run near where it flows under today’s Sleepy Hollow Road between Falls Church and Annandale.
The earliest record that identifies the house is the announcement of his daughter Lucinda’s marriage there to Richard Scott in 1832.1 An 1804 letter and map by his brother Nicholas Fitzhugh refer to “my Brother Cooke’s Meadow” and “my Brother Cooke’s Quarter” but not his house. The only structure marked on the map in this general area is labeled “My Brother’s overseer’s House.”
The original house burned before 1870, and Mordecai’s descendants replaced it with a new structure. That house was removed about 2010 and several new houses were built on the land. One-eighth acre is reserved for the Fitzhugh Family Cemetery at 3502 Thomas Ct. In his January 1975 article, “Fitzhugh Plantation House Still Stands,” John H. Moore, Jr. recounted a tour of the house and included a photograph of a basement foundation stone inscribed “MC 1834.”2
- National Genealogical Society, National Genealogical Society Quarterly, vol. 52-53″ (National Genealogical Society, 1964), 213. (Google Books). ↩
- John H. Moore, Jr., “Fitzhugh Plantation House Still Stands,” Echoes Of History V, no. 1 (January 1975): 3-4. ↩