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House Tour - Bowling Green
The Prestons: 'We love our old place dearly'
Since the early 19th century, Bowling Green on Resettlement Road has looked down its driveway to the road in an austere and stately fashion. But its history is much older than that.
Like most homes in the Flint Hill area, Bowling Green was originally part of the vast land holdings of the Thornton family. Sometime in the late 1700s a modest log building appeared, and by 1808 a stone addition sheltered the household of Moses and Betsy Gibson and their growing family.
The name “Bowling Green” dates from these early days, and its meaning is not clear, although the green lawns that now stretch on all four sides of the house certainly might have brought to mind England’s cricket fields, peopled with bowlers and batsmen.
In 1839, the farm saw great change when a young Eastham Jordan purchased the property and proceeded to enlarge the house for Louisa, his bride to be. The 1840 “addition” would dwarf the earlier structures; it was constructed of brick fired on the property, and was done in the period’s fashionable Greek Revival style - its front facade constructed in three bays, with deceptively large (8' x 5') windows. A low hipped roof with large cornices crowned the new “three over three” structure.
Today the house is much as Jordan built it, although the log section disappeared during a brief period of government ownership in the 1930s (when the house served as the engineering office for the new Shenandoah National Park), and Moses Gibson’s stone wing hasn’t been inhabited for more than 45 years.
Bowling Green is now owned by Charles (“Chuck”) and Mary Preston who have decided to make their current and future life’s work the return of this wonderful house to its former glory. They are allowing house tour guests to share in that transformation with the renovation still in its early stages.
“We first saw the house on a dark, rainy, spring day,” Chuck remembers. “What still sticks in our minds was the incredible natural beauty of the setting - what would have been an ugly day in most places was breathtaking in Rappahannock. Mist in the mountains, green rolling fields - we still can't believe we are lucky enough to live here.”
“I had pretty much decided to buy the house based on the ride up the driveway,” he said. “For Mary it took a little longer - long enough to see and climb the curved staircase and then discover a lovely set of back stairs as well.”
Mary and Chuck have been working on the house since 2003, and they joke that they are on a 20-year plan, and are already behind. They spent seven years before that looking for the right combination of architecture, condition, land, and community.
“Sometimes,” says Chuck, “we get tired of living in 'splendid squalor,' but the reality is we have never regretted our decision to come here and we love our old place dearly.”
What will be apparent for all to see in this wonderful home are the high ceilings, large rooms, original heart pine floors, mantled fireplaces in all the rooms, curved staircases, and intricate wood trim, and original doors of that era.
A guest’s first sight of the graceful stairway curving up to the second floor in the gracious center hall sets the tone for the entire house, and makes everyone appreciate Mary Preston’s first feelings about the house.
In the formal living room, the trompe-l’oeil ceiling and wall painting has been attributed to either a Frenchman or an Italian (two equally good stories) and dates from the turn of the century. Although a very few original pieces of furniture remain, the Prestons are furnishing the house with period antiques as well as reproductions, and the carved and inlaid woods of the butler’s desk, bookcases, sideboards, and sofas speak to the seriousness of the era. Upstairs, exposed brick walls in a new bathroom join the past and the present. The spacious bedrooms, canopied beds, and generous hallways hark back to a more gracious era.
Outside are a cemetery, outbuildings, a new large garage built by the Prestons, old trees, and the generous lawn that enhances the formality of the house. The Prestons treasure this home and intend to honor those who came before by spending an unthinkable number of years in its restoration.
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