History Thursday: 110 Caroline Street
A home for working-class families from 1887 through the 20th century.
By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
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Editor’s Note: We are republishing this story, which initially ran last week, to include new information provided by the descendant of someone who lived in the home.
This house is located in the Hazel Hill subdivision, which was formed in 1854 from a larger 35-acre parcel known as the Hazel Hill tract that was owned for many years by General John Minor.
A report about the Hazel Hill estate was published by the Virginia Works Progress Administration’s Historical Inventory Project in 1937. It states that Minor, who was born in Caroline County, was a soldier in the Revolutionary War “as a young boy” and was given the rank of General during the War of 1812.
He served as Fredericksburg’s first Commonwealth’s Attorney and received a salary of “two thousand pounds of tobacco.”
In 1782, Minor was “the first to offer any legislative body of this country a bill for the emancipation of slaves … with the provision that the emancipation be gradual with compensation for the owners.”
In 1854, the Hazel Hill estate was sold at a public auction and subdivided into four residential lots. According to research conducted by William Shorter in 2022 for the Historic Fredericksburg Foundation’s marker program, the house that now stands at 110 Caroline Street was most likely built in 1887 by William Walker, and valued at $300.
Walker was a baker originally and then was hired to work at the gas works, which were located along the Rappahannock River near the house. He was the first of a series of working-class families to live at 110 Caroline Street “from the time of its construction until the 20th century,” Shorter wrote in the marker report.
J. H. Hawkins, a carpenter for the government—it’s not known which level—and his family resided at 110 Caroline in the 1920s.
The house was also near the train station and several railroad workers lived there over the years—a telegraph operator named Samuel Gentry, a signal foreman named Raymond Bailey, and a signal clerk named E.N. Donahoe.
Donahoe came from a line of railway workers, according to his granddaughter, who reached out to the Advance. Donahoe’s father had been station master for RF&P Railroad in Ruther Glen, Caroline County.
Donahoe moved with his family to the Caroline Street house in the 1930s.
“My mother [who lived in the house until she was about 12] often talked about the Caroline Street home, sometimes driving me by and showing me where she lived when she was a little girl,” Donahoe’s granddaughter told the Advance. “She talked of walking to school to Lafayette Elementary School, which is now the Central Rappahannock Regional Library.”
The reader said she thought her family rented the Caroline Street home, but found out that they owned it from a classmate, who conducted his own research into the home.
It was valued at $4,000 at the time of the 1940 Census, according to his research.
In 1947, Margolas Lowery bought the house, and he and his wife lived there for 10 years. They added a one-room addition and covered the house with asbestos siding, improvements totaling $1,600, according to a building permit.
Lowery was a foreman at the American Viscose Company plant, which was located south of town and was a major industry in the area. He also worked for six years as program supervisor for Fredericksburg Parks and Recreation.
Lowery grew up in Fredericksburg and attended Fredericksburg High School, graduating in 1931. He was known as “one of the most outstanding all around athletes the area ever produced,” a triple threat in football as well as a basketball and baseball star, according to a 1975 Free Lance-Star article written when he retired from the parks department.
According to his 1987 obituary, Lowery might have been signed by the Washington Senators, “were it not for the well-known thriftiness of owner Clark Griffith. “Griffith contacted Mr. Lowery several times but never offered enough money for Lowery,” the obituary states.
The Lowerys sold 110 Caroline to Milton Boger, a bricklayer, in 1957. Boger and his wife Katherine lived there longer than any other resident, until their deaths in 1995 and 1996, respectively.
It was a rental property then until it became owner occupied again in 2021.
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