House Which Does Not Look Its Age, Stirs Rambler to New Digression
Sympathetic Interest in Such Structures Fails to Induce Investment
Or Payment for Repairs. Visit Is Made to Old Home of Joseph Trimble.

An old house stands in the valley of Oxon Run, about half a mile south of the intersection of Bowen road and the District line. Other old houses stand in the valley, and some may be as interesting as that ti which I point, but it is my business to tell of this house. The others must wait their turn.

The Rambler would like to write the biography of every old house and put it in the Hall of Fame. Nearly every old house has something interesting in its story.

Many persons who feel or affect an interest in old houses do not let their interest carry them away or cost them money. Hey like to look at an old house and talk sympathetically bout it, but if they are asked to buy it they open the garden gate and hurry off. The old house is a fine subject for conversation and an easy text for expression of lofty sentiments, but most persons, after a flow of soft words about “tender memories,” “happy recollections,” and all that, will say, “I wouldn’t have the place at any price,” and “It would cost more to make the old thing habitable than to build a new house.”

Perhaps you have observed that some folks are more sympathetic in conversation involving only words than in action involving money. A man will praise an old house and seem raptured with the poesy of his words and the sweet romance of his thoughts, but a chill strikes him when he is told that the house needs a roof. One has known men who lecture with deep feeling on the grace of charity, but on whom dynamite is needed to get a dollar from their jeans. One hears a man, as he eats a salad or smokes a rich cigar, ooze rhetoric on the beatitude of helping orphan asylums and homes for old people. Well, fellows, such things are here.

An old house once opened its door to me and said: “Rambler, human nature on the whole is good, and it is an interesting study even if you do not call it psychology, but you have perhaps observed that there is a trace of insincerity in some persons. A lovely woman motored out to see me yesterday, and, looking at me with glorious and sympathetic eyes, said: ‘Poor house! What a beautiful home it must have been! See that frayed and dusty box-hedge! See the wide hall through the middle of the house! Ah, what happy girls have danced the polka in that old parlor and hall - dear girls who’ll dance no more! What merry feats of quail, rabbit, shoat and turkey, with golden cornbread and honey, have been eaten in that dining room! Let me dwell on the beauty and simplicity that have been sheltered by that leaky roof! Ah, what memories cluster here! What a beautiful place it could be made! Hen her husband said, ‘Suppose we buy it?’ And then the lady said, ‘Not on your life, John. It would cost too much money to make it modern. And look at the neighborhood! Out on the road is a woman who does her own housework! Her husband wears overalls and makes $6 a day instead of being a clerk at $40 a month. Impossible, John, our friends would never forgive us!’

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”And so,” said the old house, “another hope went out. The lady and her husband passed through the broken gate and I dropped another shutter in despair. Many persons have handed me a dish of apple sauce, but what I’m waiting for is a friend who will pass me a bucket of paint and phone for a carpenter.

”The only way an old house, crippled by time and tenants, can ‘come back’ is to get some historical associations. Historical associations, like antique furniture, are often made to order. That old house across the field was more down and out than I. Its roof was without a shingle and it caqrcely had a clapboard to cover its nakedness. But it was a wise old house. One day it whispered to a real estate man that George Washington once slept in the room at the head of the stairs. The report spread, and a rich man bought it. He gave it a new roof, new rafters, new floors and new walls, and filled the garden with flowers. The house was built long after George Washington died. I knew the carpenter who built it, and I watched them put it up.

“The other day the chimney of that house wigwagged this message to me: ‘Get a historic association. See what George Washington and a rich grocer have done for me. Tell the neighbors that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in your back parlor, and your life will be saved. From a wretched ruin you’ll become one of the “show places” around Washington.’ But I haven’t got the nerve to pull that Thomas Jefferson stuff. I never was very keen in business. The most famous man who ever lived in me was Squire Jones, constable of this district before the Civil War.”

The house you are to visit in this story is old, though it does not look so old. When a man is getting old his younger friends, to give him courage, say, “Really, you don’t look your years.” Or “You don’t look as old as you are.” Another tactful friend may say, “You are right spry for your years.” Then you reply. “Yes, I feel as young as I ever did.” You hobble off with a feeble attempt at seeming gay, and the friends you just left say, “My, but John is looking old.”

But in the matter of this house, it is said with truth it does not look its age. It has had plenty of paint. Carpenters and tinsmiths have beer, called in like doctors and dentists to fix up broken joins and put in new parts. There is a wide, green plot around it, and a big walnut tree and three locust trees lay their shade upon the lawn. There are many acres - I will not estimate them - of cleared land adjacent, and an extensive view is closed on all sides by woods.

It was the home of Joseph A.Trimble, who inherited the property under the will of his uncle, Matthew Wright, in 1847, and I have the belief that it was the home of Matthew Wright from the time he bought this tract, called Marshall’s Adventure, in 1818, till his death, in 1847. I believe it was the home or site of the house of Samuel Marshall and his wife Drucilla, who sold the property to Matthew Wright. I have no knowledge as to when the house was built, but its plan and materials indicate it to be at least 70 or 80 years old, and it may be much older.

The site testifies that it has been very long inhabited. The locust trees are a foot and a half thick and are close upon a century old, and their situation offers evidence that they are scions of trees that grew old and perished so long ago that no trace of their stumps is left. The turf is deep and compact, and the situation is like that which pioneers in this part of the country would choose.

The house stands on the south face of a slope, far enough below the crest for some protection against the north wind, and it looks over most of the arable land included in the tract, Marshall’s Adventure. It is on that part of the tract which Richard Marshall, who patented this land in 1731 would most likely have chosen for a house site. There is nothing of these things to be learned in the neighborhood. Few of the men living for 20 miles around will admit that they have passed 40, and the Rambler met no woman who would confess to more than 30, but information may come from some of the Marshall family, which is numerous and still prominent in Maryland and Virginia, and members of which are scattered over less desirable parts of the world.

Joseph Trimble’s will was probated in 1885. He directed that his bank stocks, bonds of the District of Columbia and other securities be sold, and of the proceeds $2,000 be given to his niece, Mary Blakely; $600 to Mary Stoddert, daughter of his deceased niece, Margaret Isaac; $500 to his nephew, Joseph Blakely; $500 to John Trimble of Ireland, and $500 “to the children of my deceased niece, Margaret Gaddis, share and share alike.”

To Mary Blakely he left the “two northernmost houses on Seventh street southeast” in square 881, which is bounded by K, L, Sixth and Seventh streets southeast, “to hold in trust for my nephew, Joseph Blakely.” To Mary Blakely he left real estate in square 667, which is on Buzzard Point between U and V streets and First street and the Eastern Branch southwest, and real estate in square 904, which is bounded by G and I, Seventh and Eighth streets southeast. He “leaves to Mary Blakely the house in which I now reside and also my rockaway carriage, bay horse and harness for same, and also proceeds of the claim I have against the Government for having cut wood off my farm called Marshall’s Adventure during the recent war.”

He made other bequests to Mary Stoddert, daughter of his deceased niece, Margaret Isaac, and his nephews, James Trimble and Matthew Trimble, and his nieces, Mary Trimble and Jane Trimble. The will was dated March 22, 1880, and witnessed before Judson T. Cull, John Morris and James Hoban. There is a codicil dated September 4, 1885, under which he leaves $600 to his brother, James Trimble, in Ireland, and the codicil was witnessed by Judson T. Cull, James Hoban and Frank D. Johns.

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It was about thirty years ago, though I have not the date of the deed, that the Joseph Trimble house and part of Marshall’s Adventure were bought by John Reilley, dairyman, and John sold to Washingtonians thousands of gallons of milk from cows fed on the grass of Marshall’s Adventure.

I followed path down the slope of Oxon Run and it led to a house and garden. It was necessary to cross the garden to get on the road to the Trimble house, and a kindfaced woman was in the garden. A dog chained to one side of the house was broadcasting an alarm that tramps were loose.

I called to the woman, “Where is the Joe Trimble house?”

”Look out for the dog,” she answered.

”Where did John Reilley live about here?”

”Look out for the dog,” she said.

The dog was animated - animated with the desire to make the writing of this story impossible. He was irritated that he could not break his chain. He was saying things in the loudest tone and which, if translated, would be unfit for publication. I tried to calm him with some “nice doggey - nice doggey” stuff, but I could not change his opinion that I had come to rob the house. I passed him at a greater range than the chain allowed him to reach, and went on to the house, the picture of which you see.