Civil War and Restoration

In 1848, James Green purchased Carlyle House and the first Bank of Alexandria building in front of it, turned the property into a hotel, and in 1855 expanded the hotel across the front lawn of Carlyle House. During the Civil War, when the town was occupied by the Union Army, Green's Mansion House Hotel became a hospital that could hold up to 700 sick and wounded soldiers, with nurse Mary Phinney recalling a constant flow of stretchers in and out. Among the figures connected with the hospital were poet Walt Whitman, Confederate spy Frank Stringfellow, and Sarah Emma Edmonds, a woman who disguised herself as a male Union soldier. By the late 1960s, Carlyle House and its grounds had fallen into great disrepair, but after the Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority acquired the house in 1970, it undertook a six year research and restoration project. The former Civil War hospital, by then an aging apartment building, was torn down, the home John Carlyle had built was revealed again, and Carlyle House Historic Park opened to the public in January 1976 as part of the Bicentennial of the American Revolution.

Alexandria, Virginia · United States