A Store Of History
What Do You Think You're Looking At? #276
Here is a little biographical information about an old building in Oakton, in Fairfax County, Virginia:
The schoolhouse was built about 1897 on Chain Bridge Road near its intersection with Hunter Mill Road and had additions put on in 1904. By 1912, the school had outlived its purpose and was converted into a single-family house, then a two-unit apartment in 1933 and later a hardware store.
The schoolhouse most recently served as the home of Appalachian Outfitters, a store created by Daniel Couch as a means of supplying high-quality camping gear for his son Kenny’s Scouting troop. The Couch family sold the property to Chevy Chase Bank after the store went bankrupt in fall 2003.
The site also had additions to the schoolhouse building and a two-story structure, formerly Payne’s general store, but these were demolished. Pieces of those structures’ trim, siding, flooring and ceiling will be used as spare parts for the schoolhouse, Adams said.
Take a second to look at that first paragraph. Only 15 years into its life, it was decommissioned as a school, and it was over time used as a single-family house, a duplex, and a commercial building (and with the additions, possibly more than one of those things at once). As I noted in last week’s “What Do You Think You’re Looking At?”, you often find a surprising amount of flexibility in how buildings were used, in places where now the zoning is very strict and would prohibit most of these things in the same building over the years. (I’m rather sure that Oakton is one of those places.)
Think of this way: the separation of uses not only disassembles the elements of a town or city geographically, but it also strips any given building or neighborhood of the ability to evolve organically according to circumstances.
The building, now over a century and a quarter old, is still standing, at a park just a quarter mile or so from its original spot (where now stands a bank). As the Google Maps images show, sometimes the old schoolhouse is even open for events or visitors, and there’s a little plaque about it:
That’s really nice.
The building’s last use, before becoming a historical artifact, was as a store. It closed in late 2003 or early 2004, and was written up in a Washington Post article titled “A Fairfax Wilderness Outfitter’s Last Stand.” It was an outdoor/sporting goods store. There were probably more of those smaller, more specialized stores back then, as there were of most types of stores. This was apparently an independent business, not part of a chain.
A lot of these little stories I document here are not really told anywhere, at least not in the physical world, like with a plaque or monument. This one of course is, but I still thought it was a neat bit of still-living history.
Related Reading:
What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #23
This piece brings back wonderful memories! My dad and I did a lot of hiking and camping when I was a kid, and we spent plenty of time at Appalachian Outfitters. It's where I got my first pair of hiking boots! I remember the giant rack of freeze-dried/dehydrated meals; one of the highlights of any camping trip was picking out the food. (Chili mac was my favorite.)
When they put up the bank, I assumed that they'd just demolished the old building. Turns out I've been driving past it for years without even knowing it!
1897 was probably a weird time for a building on the periphery of the city. When it was built it was a lot farther away. Within a few decades cheap and common automobiles changed your market entirely.