Named for its immaculately maintained green sward, The Lawn was established in 1855 as a country home for the English-born Savannah cotton merchant Charles Green, following his marriage to Greenwich native Lucy Ireland Hunton. He built here a fanciful complex of Carpenter’s Gothic structures. Green’s Savannah residence, the famous Green-Meldrim house, was also Gothic Revival. The Greenwich buildings appeared quite foreign to the area. One Civil War visitor described the house as “the strangest in Virginia.” The Prince William County property served as a Union camp in 1864. Green was imprisoned, accused of being a Confederate spy. The noted French author Julian Green, grandson of Charles Green, visited The Lawn in his youth and used it as the setting for his novel Maud. The main house on The Lawn property burned in 1924 and was replaced with a Tudor Revival work, completed in 1926 and designed by A. B. Mullett and Co. of Washington, D.C..
Many properties listed in the registers are private dwellings and are not open to the public, however many are visible from the public right-of-way. Please be respectful of owner privacy.
Abbreviations:
VLR: Virginia Landmarks Register
NPS: National Park Service
NRHP: National Register of Historic Places
NHL: National Historic Landmark
Programs
DHR has secured permanent legal protection for over 700 historic places - including 15,000 acres of battlefield lands
DHR has erected 2,532 highway markers in every county and city across Virginia
DHR has registered more than 3,317 individual resources and 613 historic districts
DHR has engaged over 450 students in 3 highway marker contests
DHR has stimulated more than $4.2 billion dollars in private investments related to historic tax credit incentives, revitalizing communities of all sizes throughout Virginia