In 1843, two nineteenth-century houses stood at Walney: a stone house built in 1780 and a wooden frame house beside it. That April, Lewis Machen, a clerk for the United States Senate, bought the dilapidated 725-acre farm near Centreville and lived there with his wife, Caroline, and their children Arthur, James, and Emmeline. The family used the wooden frame house as their primary residence, though Lewis considered it outdated and in need of repair, while the stone house, also in poor condition, served as a study and family library. Over the following decades, the Machens improved the property until the Civil War began. Both houses were still standing by the end of the war, although Federal troops raided the property in August 1862, damaging it and taking supplies. The farm took years to become profitable again under James's management, and after the frame house was destroyed by a chimney fire on December 30, 1874, James, his wife Georgina Chichester, and their four children renovated the stone house and made it their primary residence.