History Thursday: 101 Fauquier Street
House was rebuilt by a formerly enslaved Black man after it was abandoned during the Civil War.
By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
When Samuel Grant, a Black man who had been born enslaved by the Gordon family of Falmouth, bought the lot where this house is located in 1872, it had been sitting abandoned for 10 years.
There was a two-story white home on the property, built in about 1848 by Richard Allen, a carpenter, according to research conducted by Dick Hansen for the Historic Fredericksburg Foundation’s marker program.
Allen bought the lot for $138 and by 1851, the lot and the house he built on it were valued at $600. The house appears, “snuggled into the corner of Sophia and Fauquier streets” in an 1856 drawing titled “View of Fredericksburg.”
Six years later, in 1862, Union troops crossed the river into Fredericksburg and many residents left town, including Allen. Troops apparently stripped the siding from the lower half of the house to burn as firewood, according to Hansen, but the house survived and appears in an 1863 photograph of the riverfront taken shortly after the battle.
However, Allen never lived in it again. He sold the property for $150 to a New York couple who also never lived there, and who sold it in turn to a local man for $80. This man also never lived in the house.
The lot was only worth $75 by 1868, according to Hansen’s research, but Samuel Grant paid $140 plus back taxes to buy it in 1871.
The structure was in such poor shape that Grant had to rebuild it from Allen’s original brick and mortar foundation. The two-story front structure that can be seen today is the one Grant built. He also added a one-story addition at some point before 1878.
Grant and his wife Jane lived in the house for more than 15 years and Grant died at home in 1889 after “a lingering and painful illness,” according to his obituary in the Free Lance. The obituary describes him as “a worthy and highly respectable colored citizen of the city.”
Grant is also mentioned in the 1915 obituary of his son-in-law, Henry Wigglesworth, which describes him as “one of the ante bellum faithful servants who belonged in the Samuel Gordon estate.”
Between 1919 and 1927, 101 Fauquier may have been rented out as doctor’s offices, since it’s across the street from the original Mary Washington Hospital building, constructed in 1899.
In 1948, the house was sold at public auction for $4,850 to David Hancock, who used it as a rental property for more than 35 years. After it went to Hancock’s descendants, it was still rarely lived in until 1997, when a local teacher, William Lontz—known as “Mr. Bill” to his chemistry students at North Stafford and James Monroe High schools, according to his 2008 obituary—renovated and enlarged it.
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