By Kate Masters
You can head to the Carlyle House for its history, but you should stay in hopes of meeting Susan Hellman or Helen Wirka, the two delightful administrators of the Alexandria museum. Both women have been tasked with keeping the legacy of an old merchant alive, and they’re doing a pretty bang-up job.
Don’t get me wrong, the Carlyle House is interesting. Completed in 1753, the house is named for owner John Carlyle, a British merchant and town founder who commissioned it for his bride, Sarah Fairfax. (Yes, of that Fairfax family—the guy was skilled at hooking up with the right people.) It might be better known, though, as the headquarters of General Edward Braddock, the commander-in-chief for the 13 colonies at the start of the French and Indian War.
A year into the war, so the story goes, Braddock landed in Alexandria to take control of the colonies’ military forces and decided to stay at the Carlyle house.
“He said he wanted to stay at the finest house in town,” Helen says, “so he paid Carlyle 50 pounds sterling and promoted him to Keeper of the King’s Stores.” It was in the formal room of that house that the seeds of the American Revolution were first sprinkled, a story that Helen excitedly relays to me as we stand in the ornate parlor.
“Braddock gathered some of the colonial governors here,” she says, “and they met in this room to discuss how to fund the war. Ultimately, they decided, ‘Well, it’s going to take an act of Parliament. Parliament will need to tax them, because we can’t get the colonists to give.’ Then, over the next 20 years, taxes start to rise, and the American Revolution happens. Generating from the meeting in this very room.”
She laughs. “Sorry, I don’t mean to sound so dramatic.”
“But is kind of is dramatic!” Susan says. “It triggered the whole process, and then everything just built up from there.”
An adorably enthusiastic pair, Susan and Helen are in charge of keeping the Carlyle House running, no small feat for a two-woman team. Not only that, but they have to keep the house relevant in a town already laden with historic properties, straddled by D.C. on one side and Mount Vernon on the other.
“We’re mostly trying to keep things fresh,” Susan says. “We’ve been open for so many years that a lot of the locals are like, ‘Ehh, we’ve been there. It’s nothing new.’”
To breathe new life into the site, the two women are changing the Carlyle House programming over the next year, adding new events or giving pre-existing ones an original twist. One example is the re-enactment of John Carlyle’s funeral, an annual ceremony that the house puts on in October.
This year, though, the death is being stretched over two weekends—on October 17 and 18, you can visit the body of an ailing John Carlyle in his bedchamber as an attending physician explains the treatments he used. The following week, on October 25, you can head to the house for Carlyle’s funeral, all remedies apparently having failed. Susan and Helen also plan to open the tunnels beneath the house that day, a new feature that lends a layer of eeriness to an already morbid event.
If a funeral celebration seems a little…dark, don’t worry. Susan and Helen have other ideas up their sleeves. One involves whiskey, which is always a sign that things are looking up. This year, Susan wants to incorporate some of the hard stuff into A Soldier’s Christmas, an annual event that always follows Old Town’s Scottish Walk.
“Well, after the walk,” Susan says, “people will come to the Carlyle House and we reenact what it’s like for your typical soldier at Christmas time. We’ve done that for years, but this year we’re going to try to have a whiskey tasting because a soldier always got some as part of their rations.”
Those types of changes may seem subtle, but they help to differentiate the Carlyle House from the liberal scattering of other historical sites within a 15-mile radius. By doing simple things like moving Carlyle’s black history celebration to June instead of February (commemorating the date when slaves were finally freed in Texas, ending slavery in all corners of the nation), Susan and Helen hope to draw new visitors to events where attendance was dwindling.
And when you meet the pair, you can only hope they’ll succeed. Carlyle House is obviously more than a building to them—it’s a proud individual, with its own history and temperament and remarkable features.
“These chairs are my favorite thing in the collection,” Helen says, getting on her knees to show me an 18th century chair in the formal parlor. “They’ve got these really cute feet—the ball and claw—and they have these curving ears. You can see the intricate details, like this little sun medallion. I just think that feature is so great.”
I lean down to see. There on the seat of the chair is a little carved sun, dark and deeply engraved into the front. It’s more than just a craftsman’s flourish, a whimsical garnish to a workaday piece of furniture. It’s like the chair has its own tattoo, a living print that will last as long as the Carlyle House continues to stand.
Carlyle House Historic Site
121 N. Fairfax St., Alexandria
