Weaver family leaving Front Royal for Gooney Lodge circa 1915 or 1920
Source:
Mary Blanton
Information about this photo:
Taken in front of the “Weaver House” on Blue Ridge Avenue, Front Royal. On the left is Henry Weaver who was born in Front Royal in 1883. A servant is holding the reins of his horse. On the right, riding in a carriage, is his wife Beatrice Petty Weaver with their children and another servant.
The Weaver family owned Gooney Lodge, two miles north of Browntown, from 1902 to 1959. For 33 years Henry Weaver was one of a small core of experts who served House Committees and recorded debates in the House of Representatives for the Congressional Record. During this period the Weaver family would relocate to Gooney Lodge every summer. In 1944, when Henry retired, they moved permanently to Warren County.
QUOTES FROM “As I Live and Breathe”, 1959, a book written by John Downing Weaver (Henry and Beatrice’s son) in which he describes his family and what it was like to grow up in Washington DC and Glen Echo.
“My father acquired the first automobile in his native Warren County, Virginia… A dashing Case touring car, it came complete with isin-glass curtains and a natty English racing driver who spent the summer with us, trying to teach my father how to handle the strange machine”
“I was born in Washington DC, where my father – a lawyer, a parliamentarian, and one of the fastest shorthand writers in the world – had been appointed to the six-man corps of experts who took down the debates in the House of Representatives for the Congressional Record”
“My father was always something of a dandy, perhaps the last man south of Lucius Beebe to wear spats. He wouldn’t think of crossing the road without first selecting the appropriate walking stick, which he carried with a dash of elegance and gallantry. (He was rather vain about his resemblance to Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.). Every morning in Washington he stuck a white carnation in the lapel of a superbly tailored suit which, even in the depths of the depression, set the family back $150……every June, however, when we moved to our summer place in the Shenandoah Valley, Dad shed his Washington finery and went native, blossoming out in bizarre costumes…which always ended in his black and white golf shoes.”
“When he turned up in the Virginia hills that summer, wearing his plus fours and the black and white shoes, our neighbors took it in stride. They were much too jealous of their own independence to question the eccentricities of others.”