Hammering Out the Fate of the 'Watson House'

To some neighbors, the 90-year-old Dutch Colonial Revival home on a leafy street in Silver Spring is the Watson House, an architectural gem that defines a neighborhood and must be preserved. To the three siblings who inherited it two years ago, it's their dilapidated but not-very-old childhood home, and it sits on a property the siblings would like to develop.

"No one had ever heard of a Watson House," said Mary Jane Checchi of Bethesda, one of the three siblings. "It's simply 9206 Watson Road."

Tonight, the Montgomery County Historic Preservation Commission is expected to decide whether to recommend designating the house a historic site. County staff members have recommended against such a designation.

"It's a very attractive house, but we don't find that it rises to the level of being architecturally significant," said Clare Lise Kelly, the county preservation planner who recommended against the designation. "It would need to be really outstanding."

The home, in the Woodside Forest neighborhood, has sat vacant behind a locked chain-link fence for more than two years. It was built about 1918 by a D.C. patent lawyer, James Angus Watson, and his wife, Mary Clement Watson.

The home doesn't meet any of the commission's criteria for a historic designation, such as being the site of a historic event or home of a significant person, Kelly said. And similar architecture can be seen in Takoma Park, Chevy Chase and elsewhere in Silver Spring, she said.

But residents nearby quickly became historians and activists in October 2006, when a sign on the property announced that the lot might be developed. They raised money and awareness through a neighborhood Internet list, hired a private historic preservation firm and filed the application for historic designation one year later.

The neighbors say they want to prevent large homes from being built in the middle of their tree-filled enclave, a patchwork neighborhood of zigzagging streets anchored by three old homes and accented with smaller homes built in the late 1950s through the early 1990s.

But citing county records, newspaper articles and documents, they have also said that the house is architecturally unique, that it complements two historic homes nearby and that it sets the historical character of the neighborhood.

"This house is kind of like the mother of the neighborhood," said Loetta Vann, who lives nearby. "Every neighborhood deserves to have its own history."

The 2 1/2 -story house sits on a large lot atop a hill, close to the Civil War-era Condict House and the late 1880s Second Empire Wilbur House, both of which have historic designations.

If the property were subdivided, neighbor Jim Cassell said, "the entire character of this neighborhood would change overnight."