The Colchester Road – which ran between the old tobacco port town of Colchester on the Potomac River through Loudoun County to Williams’ Gap (later called Snickers’ Gap) in the Blue Ridge – disappeared about a century ago, when it was renamed “Braddock Road.”
The name change was brought on by the mistaken belief that British Maj. Gen. Edward Braddock and his troops traveled over the road on their way to fight the French at Fort Duquesne (Pittsburgh) in 1755, during the French and Indian War.
Actually, the Redcoats under Gen. Braddock took a different route, going through Maryland; a brigade under Sir Peter Halkett that passed through Loudoun on the old Vestal’s Gap Road on their way to a camp northwest of Winchester.
It was only a detachment carrying Braddock’s army’s payroll that traveled northwest on Colchester Road. This fate of the gold coins that they are believed to have left along the way later became the source of a fascinating local legend.
Villages along the Colchester
Things were relatively quiet in the small farming communities along Colchester Road in Loudoun County during the 18th and early 19th centuries. Starting about 1768, a mail route was established between Colchester and points west that passed through the hamlet at the intersection with Gum Spring Road that later became Lunette.
West of Lunette was Goshen, originally called “The Post,” since it was the first stop for mail coming east from Fairfax and Alexandria. Mail was processed at The Post, with the letters and packages going to Leesburg sent north on the Leesburg Road, and mail destined for Prince William County sent south, on Gum Spring Road.
East of Lunette on the Colchester Road, between Ticonderoga and Elk Lick roads, was the small farming community later known as Conklin. Aside from Goshen Road, which includes part of the old Colchester Road, Conklin Park and the restored Settle-Dean cabin in South Riding, these two villages are just a memory.
Loudoun County historian Eugene M. Scheel believes that the peculiar name “Lunette” adopted by the village when a post office was established there in 1895 goes back to the Civil War.
“At the time, popular usage of the word referred to a two-sided fortification, generally earth, shaped like a ‘V’” wrote Scheel in “Eastern Loudoun: Goin’ Down the Country,” published by the Friends of the Balch Library in 2002. “Lunettes often guarded vantage points along roads and river crossings, and it’s a good bet there was a lunette by the Carter house during the war.”
While no specific incidents happened along the Colchester Road in Eastern Loudoun during the war, it is known that at least one casualty left by a Confederate force passing through after the Second Battle of Manassas was buried in the Carter/Foley family cemetery.
The early years of the 20th century were perhaps Lunette’s heyday. It had a post office and store, and around 1900, Charles A. Thomas, who owned the old Carter place, built a gasoline-powered gristmill next to the house, where he ground local feed. The mill was demolished in 1911.
“Late in 1911, Theodore Linton moved the store onto his farm and converted it to a granary,” wrote Scheel. “It burned along with a barn when it was struck by lightning in 1942.”
The last business to serve the Lunette neighborhood was a small store operated from 1920 to 1946 by Frank Byrne, which was located at “Byrne’s Corner," at the intersection of Braddock and Gum Spring roads.
The Last Relics of Lunette
Ironically, it is the Carter house that has survived as the one of two physical reminders of Lunette. The brick section of the house was built in 1761, with a later addition that served as a store for several years and the post office from 1895 to 1907. The other relic of Lunette is the Carter/Foley family cemetery at the end of as cul-de-sac in Kirkpatrick Farms.
As part of its proffer agreement with Loudoun County permitting the development of Kirkpatrick Farms, Greenvest LLC was required to preserve the venerable structure now known as the “Lunette House.” After it was used as a Greenvest field office for several years, the house was cut in half and moved back from Braddock Road when the road was widened.
Later, in preparation for a planned move to another part of the development, the roofs of both the 18th century brick section and the 19th century addition were removed, so that the structure could pass under the power lines on their way to a new site elsewhere in the development, where it was to be reassembled.
After sitting roofless on heavy timbers for several months while the county the developer and the homeowners’ association debated the situation, the house was moved to what will hopefully be its final site at the end of Kinsale Drive, not far from the Carter/Foley family cemetery.
Greenvest representatives did not respond to requests for information regarding the future of the Lunette House.
The Legend Lives On
And what about Gen. Braddock’s missing payroll?
Fearing that they would be attacked by robbers as they reached what was to become Lunette, the Redcoats guarding the payroll put most of the gold coins in the muzzles of two brass cannons and buried them along Colchester Road, “…with muzzles upward, wooden plug in each. Two feet under. Fifty paces east of a spring, where the road runs north and south,” according to a Braddock document found in the British Museum, uncovered by Scheel.
The reference to the road running “north and south” fits the description of Colchester Road at Lunette, which once made an S-curve there. Scheel writes of different efforts over the years to find the buried treasure, involving searches and excavations along the old Colchester Road from Fairfax into Loudoun. But nothing has ever been found, which may lead one to believe that the real treasure is the Lunette House and the Foley family cemetery, both awaiting salvation.
this house is junk and needs to be torn down.
Everything building that has ever existed has history.
That doesn't mean we need to renovate every old POS house.