Banker, Developer Leo M. Bernstein

Leo M. Bernstein, 93, a Washington banker and investor whose passion for Americana prompted him to purchase Middletown's Wayside Inn in the 1960s and to restore a number of historic properties in the Shenandoah Valley, died Aug. 29 of congestive heart failure at his home in the District.

For more than half a century, Mr. Bernstein was chairman, vice chairman or principal stockholder in seven banks and one savings and loan institution, including D.C. National Bank, Washington National Bank and Security National Bank, where he served as chairman until 1984.

In 1983, he purchased 51 percent control of Women's National Bank, the first national chartered women's bank in the country. He transferred the bulk of his shares to his wife and granddaughters to permit the bank to maintain its minority status.

In 1985, he relinquished control of the bank, which became Adams National Bank, and began to devote more of his time to historic preservation in the Shenandoah Valley.

He had been involved with Middletown since 1960, when he drove through the town on a day in May and noticed the crumbling Wayside Inn, in business continuously since 1797. He turned around in a service station driveway, pulled into the inn's parking lot and within a few hours was the owner of the historic hostel.

Over the next four decades, he bought and restored a number of historic properties in Middletown, helping to revitalize the venerable village in the process. He also reopened the town's shuttered movie theater as a summer stock stage.

He later founded the Wayside Foundation of American History and Arts, which operates the Museum of American Presidents, the Stonewall Jackson Museum and Crystal Caverns. He also helped salvage the Burwell-Morgan Mill in nearby Millwood, the Battletown Inn in Berryville and the Hotel Strasburg.

He traced his interest in Americana to the influence of an elementary school teacher who shared her love of District history with her young students. In 1945, he renovated Washington's oldest house, at 2618 K St. NW., later razed to make way for the Whitehurst Freeway.

For years, he tried to interest the District in his collection of early presidential letters and artifacts, including a lock of George Washington's hair, but the collection remained scattered until he formed his own museums in the Shenandoah Valley.

Colorful, indefatigably curious and an unabashed believer in the supernatural, Mr. Bernstein was proud of the fact that he was Jeane Dixon's banker. Dixon, a celebrity clairvoyant who famously predicted in print the assassination of John F. Kennedy, frequently stayed at the ghost-friendly Wayside Inn.

In 2002, he opened the Jeane Dixon Museum and Library in Strasburg as a tribute to the psychic and astrologer, who died in 1997.

"Jeane thought I was a psychic just like her. And she was right," he told The Washington Post in 2002.