We're stepping back to Colonial Times in Virginia, touring a historic home that dates back to 1747.
Rippon Lodge in Prince William County is a site that you can visit,
and it's located about 45 minutes from our nation's capital.
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, Rippon Lodge was owned by Thomas Blackburn,
who served in the Revolutionary War.
During the American Revolution, it would serve as a landmark along the King's hHghway,
a route that the American and French army traveled on their way to Yorktown.
The family that lived here, the Blackburns, they were very active during the American Revolution and actively fighting.
They worked. Thomas took an active role in both the political and the military spectrum,
but also to provide things like food, forage for horses, feed for men, corn, wheat,
really the backbone of what's going to allow the Allied armies to take Yorktown.
Site interpreter Nate McDonald is guiding us through this home to give a sense of what life was like during the American Revolution.
As we lead up to 2026, the 250th commemorations in the founding of the United States
we'll be exploring a number of Revolutionary Road Trip sites in this travels with Darley Podcast
and in the corresponding PBS and streaming series.
Sites to share American history in a more dynamic way.
So let's walk through a well-preserved home that reveals how families and individuals played a role in America's complicated struggle for independence.
I'm walking with Nate McDonald outside of Rippon Lodge Lodge.
It's starting to sprinkle, so we're walking along a granite slab sidewalk through the lush green grass towards the covered porch of this white,
one and a half story wooden colonial home, accented with green shutters.
So we're glad to have you here, Darley, at Ripon Lodge, second oldest home in the county,
but in a lot of ways, a little bit more original in some places than the oldest home in the county.
Because a lot of that old fabric hasn't changed very much here since the 1740s.
It's seen a lot of life, a lot of living. Was a family home until the mid 1990s.
From colonial times to the present?
All the way up to present day from being a plantation to the home of someone who worked in the Pentagon.
So it's got a lot of connection here and it really illustrates how Prince William County's changed in the last 250 years.
From that rural farming county to what it is today, a little bit of everything.
What's beautiful to look out from this wonderful porch onto the gardens?
It is, you know, this is a lot in thanks to the Ellis family who lived here in the 1920s.
They used it pretty much as a vacation destination.
They came down out of the city of Washington.
Mrs. Ellis really liked a garden.
So she had their assistance, their gardeners here, lay out the beds,
and then she picked the flowers and planted them along with the boxwoods and everything else to really pretty it up for being a old farmhouse.
What was life like here in the early days of Rippon Lodge?
In colonial times, this place would have been a very upper-class residence here in Prince William County.
There aren't very many neighbors around here, up through the 1770s.
Prince William is not really the frontier, but it's not very heavily settled.
So between here, across the river is the Lysolvania plantation and a little bit inland, the Tayloes Lees plantation.
Tayloes Lees Iron works on the Neabsco Creek.
It was pastoral, no way.
It was very much a place where the Blackburns had done quite well for themselves.
The original owner, Richard, had been a carpenter, but he made a ton of money building homes, churches, and various other projects throughout the state
and lived the life of a wealthy planter here.
But for the Blackburns themselves, it's pretty good living.
Richard Blackburn had been a carpenter, but had made a ton of money between himself and his enslaved laborers and built this great big home on about a thousand acres of land.
So they would have lived connected to the river.
All of their supplies, their ordering from Europe and everything would have come in.
Tobacco and everything being grown here would have gone out that way, all the way to Europe in that sense.
Otherwise, it's kind of rural pastoral living like you see sometimes in the Jane Austen novels.
You know, their life's a lot of socializing.
It's going back and forth between the big grandees of the county.
But then there is a whole other life here.
You know, the Blackburns are slaveholders.
There are enslaved people here on the plantation that are also going about their lives, whether that's working in the carpenterian contracting business for Richard or farming tobacco, keeping up the house and things like that.
During Thomas Blackburn's ownership.
This is also on the Washington Rochambeau Trail.
It is, you know, and that's actually parts of that trail are not very far from us.
A tenth of a mile.
We have two segments that are still preserved of that old roadway that were used from Native American times all the way up through the 1920s when Route 1 was paved.
So it preserves that story as well as this house is actually a landmark during that Washington Rochambeau March, both as the generals came down and then as the supply columns that followed them reunited a little bit to our north from crossing the Ockichon River and then passed down past the lodge on the way to their next camp at Dumfries.
And then on the way back, the French army headed north, brought with them prisoners captured supplies and another Ellis story. Mr Ellis found an original Hessian bayonet here on the property when they were doing that gardening work.
Well, it's so well preserved and I see listed on the National Registrar of Historic Places.
It's weird. We'd love to take you inside and show you around a little bit.
Let's do it.
Come on inside.
So as we come into the house here, we're actually in one half of the old colonial home.
Rippon was basically built, like they call a hall in Parler House and where we are now, we're leaving the family side of the house and coming into what was called the best room.
The old wooden floor is creepy a bit beneath our feet as we walk into a room to the left of the center hallway that's lined with wooden walls, old paintings of family members adorn the walls, and a small table is set for what looks like morning breakfast, a hard boiled egg and a white porcelain egg cup and sterling silver candle holders beside coffee cups.
Now this would have been the main place for entertainment or public affairs. The Blackburns as one of the wealthiest families in the county, as I kind of mentioned outside, one of the things they had to do to entertain themselves were parties and things like that.
So this is a great place for the Blackburns, whether it's Richard or Thomas, whichever generation, to really bring together connections with their neighbors, with other prominent residents of Northern Virginia.
A place to meet and make those social and military links that are really going to help propel, especially Thomas, on to office in the House of Burgesses and then the House of delegates during the Virginia Conventions and then to military office as a lieutenant colonel of Virginia state troops.
And then as a gentleman volunteer in the Continental Army when he's wounded in 1777 in Pennsylvania, the Battle of Germantown. But it also had the double effect of really making those political and military connections.
Thomas Blackburn, who lived here during the Revolutionary War years, it's those connections he's going to be able to use to become a member of the House of Burgesses, a member of the new Virginia House of delegates during the Virginia Conventions.
And then also to become an officer and then later volunteer in the Continental Army. It was originally served in Virginia state troops, but after resigning he went to serve active duty in Pennsylvania during 1777 when he was very badly wounded and unfortunately that ended his active career.
But the rest of the war he was active within the county as a militia officer raising troops to serve in Yorktown during that campaign, but also to provide things like food, forage for horses, feed for men, corn, wheat, the really the backbone of what's going to allow the Allied armies to take Yorktown is being able to draw upon this bread basket essentially here in Virginia that hadn't been damaged by war like New Jersey in New York.
So the family that lived here the Blackburns they were very active during the American Revolution and actively fighting.
They were. Thomas took an active role in both the political and the military spectrum and we also believe that one of their young sons, Richard, briefly served in the Continental Army as well in the 13th Virginia. He shows up in some of the records, but he would have been a fairly young boy.
He was in his 30s, Richard would have been about 16 or 17 when he possibly served in the army as well. But then after his wounding his wife Christian took her part in the in the war by managing the farm and also taking care of him following his injury after he was discharged from the military hospital.
He wasn't really fully recovered. He was brought home and she would have had to take care of him for several years until he recovered. So it really was a whole family effort here.
These are paintings I assume of members of the Blackburn family.
Yes, up on the fireplace there on that side is Thomas Blackburn the Revolutionary War veteran and behind me on the wall is Christian his wife.
These paintings were done we think about 20 years after the revolution in the 1790s. Now these are copies very high resolution copies. The originals are still in a sentence of the families hands.
But yep, that's Thomas and that's Christian. They met as kids here in the area her father was a local church of England minister that was also a revolutionary war supporter, Reverend Scott.
And then of course Thomas's father is the one who built this place. And we believe we have copies of the original receipts for the fabric for Mr. Blackburn's outfit there.
It shows some purchase of striped ticking which would have made the vest and red wool which would have made the coat.
But appearances were very important especially in the colonial age. You often times might only have one real chance to make that first impression on people.
Doublely so because there really wasn't an easy way to follow up on a lot of connections then either.
I see they're having an egg and maybe some coffee for breakfast.
Only one place set of course with the newspaper from Williamsburg. Northern Virginia was nothing really like it is today so that was the closest newspaper in those days.
Was either Philadelphia or Williamsburg.
So that was how the news passed and then from whoever got the paper passed on the paper or the word itself out through the community.
We walk further back into the home passing through the parlor with its white walls, accented in a bright green trim.
It's in the parlor that the Blackburn's would have had business meetings, entertain guests with games and smoked pipes.
Beyond the parlor is a back room where travelers can see a timeline of Rippon Lodge.
Nate were walking into what we would consider the back of the house but at the time during colonial times it was actually the front of the house.
That's right, Darley. This would have originally faced the King's Highway or the Potomac Path as it was usually known.
Today we also call it the Washington Rochambeau National Historic Trail.
Marks the route that was taken by the French army on its way back from Yorktown but also supplies and some of the amount of troops on their way actually to Yorktown.
The logistics train that supported that great big battle down there that really secured the American victory in Allied victory for the war.
It's actually this house is on those directions on the French called the itinerary.
They mentioned on the 7th March you would pass the house of Colonel Blackburn to the left and then down into a valley about a mile wide full of pasture land and hay, which of course very important for the oxen and horses along the route.
Colonel Blackburn may also have been involved in Prince William County's big contribution which was fixing the roads of the French army could actually travel on it.
It was in very rough shape from the Occoquan River flowsdown all the way through the county, very marsh and ground.
So Prince William County and militia troops were called up not to fight but to bring pick and shovel and horse teams and actually repair and regrade the road through here, including the past, right past this house.
What was happening in the area at the time when the French troops were passing through on this king's highway?
So in North and Virginia it had been not really necessarily a backwater but it had been a quiet part of the state.
Most of the war had been bypassing this area before the arrival of the supply trains and the French army on their way back north.
This had mainly been a bread basket. It was a place for grain, corn, horses for those supplies to be provided for the army, a place for them to draw on that material.
And places like Newport, Rhode Island where the French army came from or New York and New Jersey had experienced years and years of hard campaigning.
Much of their supplies had been already used up. So, especially northern Virginia were able to supply those needs to the army even before they arrived to the area.
So just to Maltros time and it's really significant that this house has stood the test of time through all of many houses were burned down, anything's happened, not just during colonial times with them during the Civil War.
And here we have this wonderful example of a colonial property that exists today.
Here we do, we are lucky that this plow did survive not only the revolutionary war but as you mentioned the British fleet comes past during the War of 1812 after the burning of Washington.
It's on the front lines of the Civil War, kind of a no man's land in the winter of 1861 between the Confederate and US armies.
So we are lucky that this house has survived being all wood into the present day.
It's special places like this where the past comes to life, especially with an expert like Nate.
Thanks for traveling back in time with us in Prince William County on the special revolutionary road trip podcast of Travels with Darley.
And thanks for listening.
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