A Historic Place / Ben Lomond Old Rose Garden

This property originated within the holdings of Robert "Councillor" Carter, III, who inherited thousands of acres in northern Virginia from his grandfather in the mid-1700s, including the 700-acre Cancer plantation tract where enslaved people farmed tobacco. Toward the end of his life, Carter freed all of his slaves in Virginia, and his descendants inherited the plantation. His grandson, Benjamin Tasker Chinn, built the main house and outbuildings in 1832, and after his marriage the plantation was renamed Ben Lomond after his wife's family home in central Virginia. Chinn shifted production from tobacco to raising thousands of Merino sheep, and by the 1850s the Pringle family leased the property and continued sheep raising until the Civil War began. After the Battle of First Manassas/Bull Run in July 1861, the house and grounds became a Confederate field hospital where wounded soldiers were treated until they could be transported or died of their wounds; by the end of August 1861, that use had ended. After Confederate forces evacuated the area in the spring of 1862, Federal troops occupied the region and, suspecting the Pringles of trading with the enemy, destroyed much of the furniture and covered the interior walls with graffiti. By the fall of 1862, the war had shifted elsewhere in Virginia, allowing the Pringles to recover. In the later half of the 20th century, most of the plantation was developed, but the County acquired the main house and outbuildings in the 1980s and restored Ben Lomond Historic Site to a mid-19th-century appearance. Behind the house, the Old Rose Garden now holds one of the largest collections of Old Garden Roses in the Washington Metro area. Larger than the antebellum garden once on the property, it was moved here in 1996 after the death of longtime County resident and rose collector Jim Syring. The garden includes many cultivars of Old Garden Roses and companion perennials, some of which could have been present during the antebellum period, with many cultivated for centuries and bloom seasons extending from late spring through summer and into a second fall flush.

Sudley, Virginia · United States