By Sandra Fleishman
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, March 15, 2008

Gwynn Park Manor, a Prince George's County plantation house that dates to 1857, is on the market for what might be considered a bargain in many places -- only $575,000.

Of course, as they say, she ain't what she used to be. The exterior of the 2 1/2 -story side-gabled brick Georgian off Dyson Road in Brandywine has been restored, repointed and power-washed, and the roof has been replaced. However, the interior might best be described as having "potential."

Only the center-hall floor, with its heartwood pine planks "restored by a Bolivian craftsman," according to the sales brochure, gives witness to what once was.

The double parlor, the grand central staircase, and the six bedrooms and eight fireplaces "need work," as people also say. During a recent visit, the walls stood stripped of wallpaper, some with patches of plaster missing and others painted electric colors to suit tenants of years gone by.

Except for the center hall, the original wide-plank floors were scuffed and dark. An occasional hole in the ceilings showed where pipes have recently been repaired; the owner says there are no leaks now. Not helping was the smell from litter boxes for the owner's six cats; he's planning to address that.

The house, designated as a historic site 20 years ago by the county's Historic Preservation Commission, also has the challenge of being smack in the middle of a new housing development, instead of presiding grandly over its original 700 acres.

But an acre and a half of land remains, and the Hamptons subdivision's developers, after negotiations with county historic officials, also have left open in front of the mansion what might be called a town green, a square block of land that is to be landscaped and kept off-limits to development.

Long & Foster Real Estate listing agents Louise Senires and Gerri Ross acknowledge that the property isn't an easy sell. "It will take somebody that's really into history and likes old houses," Senires said. "Or somebody that's looking to fix up something historic."

Still, the house is one of a kind, they say, with 10-foot ceilings on the ground floor, a built-in china cabinet in the dining room and grand double-hung windows. Plus, it has the original fireplace in the kitchen, complete with the iron hooks from which the cooking pots hung.

"Certainly, we would try and work with the potential new owners to identify those elements that needed to be preserved and the strategies to accomplish that," said Alfonso Narvaez, chairman of the Prince George's County Historical and Cultural Trust.

Owner Robert Brinckloe, who bought the plantation house from the subdivision developers in 2006 for $417,000, is happy to recite its history; he says he's sad that he can't afford the restoration himself.

"I don't like leaving this," he said, "because the house has a soul . . . and I don't like to betray it." The previous principal owner, developer Steven Athey of Capital Properties, "spent $60,000 on the exterior" before he died in 2005, Brinckloe said. Athey had let Brinckloe move in as a caretaker in 2002 to protect the house, Brinckloe said. Athey's successors sold it to him. "I did the roof myself," said Brinckloe, who added that he has "stabilized" the property.

In a long historical narrative that Brinckloe wrote about the house, he says, "The preservation, restoration, and embellishment of Gwynn Park Manor was a product of the diligence of the Prince George's County Historic Preservation Commission -- notably its staffer Howard Berger -- and the imagination of Steven Athey."

The house "is a rare surviving example in Prince George's County of a mid-nineteenth century brick plantation house," according to its historic-designation paperwork. "The only comparable dwelling in [the] county is Connicks Folly," built in the same year, about eight miles southeast.

But Gwynn Park "is distinguished by a particularly fine decorative molded brick cornice" and "is the only surviving building in [the] county" of this type.

The land originally was part of the holdings of a Col. Thomas B. Gwynn, the county says. His son, William H. Gwynn, married Christiana Summers and built a house there in 1857. It burned that same year, and a new, grander one was built on the site. The original meat house survived the fire and is part of the property being sold.

"It was in this handsome house that [the Gwynns] raised their eleven children," the Gwynn Park Manor designation says. The home was the "center of much social activity in the Brandywine area" until the Civil War, when Gwynn, like many other local planters, went broke. He sold the house and 510 acres to J. Eli Huntt. The property remained in the possession of Huntt's heirs until 1986. Dyson Road is named after the family into which Huntt's daughter, Susie Huntt Dyson, married.

Brinckloe said the history is more colorful than that; he maintains that Gwynn Park Manor was a Confederate "safe house" during the Civil War and that "spying and battles were planned here." An Andrew Jackson Gwynn, he said, founded the Maryland Brigade in 1862 to fight the Union. He also said he thinks that John Wilkes Booth "probably did stop by here" in his journey through the county after he assassinated Abraham Lincoln.

Howard Berger, the county's planner coordinator for historic preservation, said he can't vouch for anything but the documentation submitted for the historic-site registration. The house is one of 300 individual buildings in the county with the designation. But Berger said: "A person sensitive to the character of this historic house would likely really appreciate the opportunity to live there. It's quite a large house."

But, unfortunately, with only one bathroom.

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