Potter’s Hill

Potter’s Hill was the site of several schoolhouses, long family landholdings, and changing businesses near the intersection of Telegraph and Beulah Roads. Early local historians believed there were at least three different schoolhouses there, with the original probably dating to at least 1870 when public education became mandatory under state law. A second Potter’s Hill School, a typical one-room schoolhouse, was used until the 1916 school year, serving children from families including the Baggetts, Allens, Landstreets, Petitts, Jacobs, Browns, Smiths, Schurtzes, Dorseys, and Talberts, with Lelia Milstead as teacher. Local residents from the Potter’s Hill area and the village of Accotink later dug a basement and persuaded the county to build a modern third schoolhouse on the site across from the one-room school; it burned in 1932. Marjorie Baggett Tharpe recalled that it had a wide hall, an auditorium, classrooms for grades 1 through 7, and a large basement with bathrooms, with Mrs. Schurtz or Schartz, Miss Nellie Nevitt, and Miss Wrenn Biller teaching there. The land itself was used over time by the Potter, Riston, and Gailliot families to support multiple families and provide educational and employment opportunities, serving first as an agricultural farm, then a chicken farm, a sand and gravel business, a landfill, and later recreational and commercial or office uses. James Potter and his wife Susanna, both born in Fairfax County in the 1780s, owned a large tract along what became Telegraph Road by 1850, including the hill that gave the place its name, and lived there with three of their sons and their sons’ wives. The Millan or Potter Cemetery lies on Telegraph Road about one-half mile east of Beulah Street. Around 1920, Henry and Franceska Gailliot and their sons Joseph, Charles, and Clem arrived and began raising chickens and selling eggs to Chestnut Farms Dairy in Washington, D.C.; the enterprise eventually grew to eight thousand chickens laying four thousand eggs a day. During the Depression, the family shifted to broiling chickens for food, but the operation ended in the early 1950s after a fire killed seven thousand chickens and a virus decimated the flock the following year. The Gailliot family then continued adapting the land’s uses, and brothers Clem and Albert developed its gravel deposits into a business that became Hilltop Sand and Gravel, supplying Irwin Concrete with gravel used in part for construction of the first Woodrow Wilson Bridge.

Kingstowne, Virginia · United States