Nestled in a Grove, a Manor Still Stands
This Old House Has Survived Development Tide

By Amy Gardner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 14, 2006

Like so many subdivisions cropping up across rural Loudoun County, the 212 homes of Locust Grove are too new to disguise that they rose on the rolling farmland on the outskirts of Purcellville just six years ago.

Locust Grove's trees are still young, its shrubs still small. Its streets are smooth and its sidewalks uncracked. Only the name of the neighborhood bears evidence of age: Like developers before them, Locust Grove's creators took the title from the dairy farm and manor home that had occupied the land.

Except, in this case, the house still stands.

At the center of a sea of new roofs rises a mature stand of towering trees, including a 175-year-old Siberian elm. Through the trees winds a long driveway lined with stones. At its end stands an elegant, white-stucco Federal-style home with black shutters, a tin roof, a spring house and a barn.

This is the real Locust Grove, a rarity among Loudoun County's explosion of homes: an older structure that was allowed to stay.

"I had seen this house about a year before I bought it," recalled owner Don Kraper, 42, "and what had turned me off about it was the neighborhood. It was like, what a shame -- this great old house in the middle of this neighborhood.

"But actually," he added, "I've got the best of both worlds. When it snows they plow the street. I've got trash service. And Courtney" -- his 8-year-old daughter -- "has friends in the neighborhood."

Kraper, then living in Ashburn, bought Locust Grove almost on impulse.

"I watched all those farmhouses in Ashburn getting burned to the ground to make way for all those houses," Kraper recalled, and he thought that saving even one might somehow make up for those losses.

The story of Locust Grove's preservation actually goes back three owners before Kraper, and it begins with a bit of happenstance. About 20 years ago, an heir to the 135-acre farm began renting the land to an adjacent farmer. Since the farmer didn't need a house, too, the heir -- Edward E. Nichols of Nichols Hardware Store in downtown Purcellville -- rented the house to a separate tenant.

But eventually Nichols, now 86, grew tired of renting the house to successive tenants, "some of whom were satisfactory and some of whom were not," he recalled.

Although the house had been in his family since 1873, Nichols sold the house and a three-acre parcel about 15 years ago. In 1998, he sold the surrounding 112 acres to developer James M. Jost. As he was planning Locust Grove, Jost approached the owner of the home, too, but he struck no deal with her.

The Locust Grove house was probably built in four phases: first, what are now the kitchen and study, in 1812; next, a larger wing in the 1830s. Nichols and Kraper say they think the home's two bay windows were probably built in Victorian times. Nichols said his father used to say that she was 4 when the windows were added, which would put the date at about 1893.

"I think they just kept building west," he said.

Kraper, the owner of a Sterling insurance business, bought Locust Grove in 2004 for $640,000. He figures he has spent about $200,000 fixing up the place. He has gutted the kitchen, repaired walls, painted and combed flea markets for furniture and paintings to fill his new home.

"I was always into old houses," he said, tugging the beaded string of an ancient light fixture in a hallway half-bath. "I could have put a new fixture in here, but I think that pull string's neat. I mean, I remember that from my grandmother's house."

Kraper hopes to earn the house a berth on the National Register of Historic Places and the Virginia Landmarks Register. He beams as he points out such details as the hash marks in the attic ceiling beams, used by workers nearly two centuries ago to assemble the structure, or the "halo" on the second-floor porch -- the diagonal shadow along the wall of a long-gone roof.

He has become active in the Purcellville Preservation Association. He hosted a garden party last fall to show off the property's stunning array of trees and shrubs. At the party, he ceremoniously donated to Loudoun County a 1774 King George III copper half-penny found on the property.

Yet Kraper, a divorced father whose shoulder-length hair and ski-bum sunglasses belie his insurance-man day job, has had some fun with Locust Grove, too. He installed a hot tub in the back yard, within view of the stone spring house, through which clear, cold water still gurgles. He loves the name his daughter bestowed on a small upstairs chamber -- the "sneaky" room, so named because a hidden staircase leads to it.

Then there's the naked bald lady, greeting visitors from the second-floor bay window. Kraper picked up the mannequin for fun while hunting for items for the house.

"I saw her and I just said, 'How cool would that be,' " he said, " 'to have a naked bald woman in the window.' "

For additional pictures and information about the house, visithttp://www.locustgrovehouse.com.