History Thursday: 708 Littlepage Street
Home is tied to the Freeman family, who owned several businesses in the area that was known as "Freeman's Corner."
By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
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Editor’s Note: History Thursday is an occasional feature highlighting a historic building in the Fredericksburg area. If there is a building that you’d like to know more about, email us!
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This house, along with several other properties nearby on Littlepage Street, is associated with the Freeman family, who were a prominent family in Fredericksburg in the 19th and 20th centuries.
708 Littlepage was built in 1919 for John Freeman and his family, according to information compiled by Janet Waltonen for the Historic Fredericksburg Foundation’s marker program.
John Freeman had been gifted the lot that year, when he was 22, by his father, George Freeman. It was located two lots down from his parents’ house, the “Stratton House” at 700 Littlepage.
George Freeman had owned the store at 720 Littlepage Street (now the Sunken Well Tavern)—which purveyed “general grocery, country produce, [and] railroad ties” according to a Fredericksburg City Directory—since the 1890s. His sons John and Cephas joined him in that business, as well as in Freeman Distributing, which they established after the end of Prohibition, and a gas station and car servicing business.
With Freeman Distributing located at 712 Littlepage Street, the gas station at the corner of Littlepage and Hanover, the grocery store at 720 Littlepage, and several Freeman homes nearby, the entire area of town was known as “Freeman’s Corner.”
The house at 708 Littlepage is a typical American Foursquare with two full stories and four rooms on each floor. According to Waltonen, this was a popular style from the 1890s through the 1930s and could be purchased by mail-order from a catalogue company like Sears. “They came in a boxcare with a book of directions and all parts pre-cut and numbered for self-assembly,” Waltonen writes.
The Freeman’s house, though, was probably built by Charles Heflin, who was a local carpenter and the older brother of Ernest “Peck” Heflin, the architect and builder of the Central Rappahannock Regional Library and other buildings around town.
John Freeman and his wife Ethel lived at 708 Littlepage for 23 years and raised four children. Members of the family were often the focus of newspaper articles. One daughter, Mary Frances, died at the age of 4 when she tried to light a candle from her sister’s birthday cake and her clothes caught fire.
Another daughter, Ethel, was a lead cheerleader at James Monroe High School and acted in high school and community theater productions—but she was also written up in the paper for running away from home at age 15.
According to the Free Lance-Star, she and a friend went to a store and bought “sailor’s clothes.” They crossed over the Chatham Bridge into Stafford, put on the new outfits, and were picked up by a truck driver, who took them “up Mountain View.” At a later point, they were seen getting into a bus at Gaithersburg, Maryland. Eventually they were discovered in Baltimore and returned home.
The Freeman’s son, John Jr., was featured in the paper when he was 16, for rescuing a 17-year-old girl from drowning at the bottom of a pond near 708 Littlepage. He received a certificate of merit from the American Red Cross for his actions and Freeman Street—a short street that runs parallel to Littlepage between Kirkland and Mercer streets—is named after him.
Unfortunately, later in his life, John Freeman Jr. appeared in the paper again, this time after being apprehended in Florida, where he went to escape prosecution for unpaid debts. No one, including his mother, knew where he was for two years, according to Waltonen.
John Freeman Sr. and his family moved out of 708 Littlepage in the 1940s and turned it into a duplex. It was not returned to single-family use until the early 2000s, according to Waltonen.
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