Grandma's Cottage

Grandma's Cottage. Historic Blenheim. , Margaret Conn Willcoxon Farr, known as "Grandma Farr" lived in "Grandma's Cottage" from about 1867 until her death in 1904. At that time, the house stood at its original location at the northeast corner of Main and North Streets. A sister of Albert Willcoxon, and she and her husband, Richard Ratcliffe Farr, are buried in the Willcoxon Family Cemetery here at Blenheim., The house (currently under restoration) is architecturally important for its rare construction technologies: hewri-timber framing with brick infill between the studs found inside the c. 1840 section (left side) and its shed-roofed addition (right side) with clapboard-covered log-wall construction providing the area's only known surviving example of this early building technique., In the early morning hours of June 9, 2001, Grandma's Cottage rolled along Old Lee Highway to its new home. Overhead power wires were moved, traffic was diverted, and onlookers cheered. Moving the Cottage to Blenheim reunites "Grandma Farr" with the Blenheim landscape and reflects the tightly-connected Willcoxon, Farr, and Ratcliffe families, integral to the history of the early Town of Fairfax., [Captions:] , Mural: A crowd gathered to watch and photograph "Grandma's Cottage," atop a flatbed trailer, move to its new home on June 9,2001. , City of Fairfax Historic Collections, Far Left: Margaret Conn Willcoxon (photographed c. 1870 in the fashionable dress of the period) and husband Richard Ratcliffe Farr (1804-1845) had two sons, Richard an Rezin. , Courtesy of Ann Far Lewis, Near Left: Son Richard Ratcliffe Farr (1845-1892), a "Mosby Ranger" during the Civil war, was a state Superintendent of Schools and served in the Virginia General Assembly. , City of Fairfax Historic Collections