22 East Windsor Avenue
Two Generations of Zacharys
1883 saw the marriage in DC of George Washington Zachary, born 1863, and Mary Cumberland, born a year earlier. They quickly filled out a family, with Edith (1885), Robert A (1888), George T (1890), Milcey (1895), all born in DC, and twins Catherine and Charles in 1900, born in Alexandria, although Charles apparently did not survive infancy.
George was a 35-year-old house painter when he and Mary bought the house at 22 East Windsor from the Columbian Building and Loan Association in 1898. Both George and Mary were active with civic organizations, George with the Masons and Mary with the Shriners and Maccabees. In fact, in 1912 George was voted as
the “tiler”, or full-time custodian, of the local Masons temple. He had also served briefly as the interim town clerk for Potomac in 1908 and continued to help out, including interviewing for the position of janitor at Mt Vernon School in 1919.
Daughter Edith was the first out the house, marrying Samuel Lloyd in 1903 and moving to Baltimore, where she had three children. The rest of the family remained intact in the gingerbread house for another ten years.
Son Robert had begun working as a clerk in the DC bureau of the Brooklyn Eagle right out of high school and soon began covering stories for the paper as well. By 1916 the Congressional press list showed Robert as a full-fledged correspondent for the Eagle. But that was not all that was happening. In November 1912 the Alexandria Gazette noted that he had left for Bridgeton, NJ, “where he will spend Thanksgiving”. Surely a strange place for family holidays? But the mystery was solved in April 1914 when he married Mary Edwards of, you guessed it, Bridgeton NJ. The new couple made their home in Alexandria, in a rented house in the Cottage Park development on Alexandria Avenue and by 1915 they had a son Robert W, followed in 1918 by son Roy.
By 1921 they had decided to move to Mary's home state and Robert found a job as secretary to Walter Evens Edge, a wealthy, moderately reformist Republican. At that time Edge was US senator from NJ, but governor before and after and later ambassador to France. After several years in that role, he moved to a managerial role in publications in West Orange, and in 1930 started work with the public relations office of of Public Service Corp, making vice president in 1939. He and Mary were still living in South Orange in 1959.
Son George T worked as a railroad clerk and apparently studied in their technical department, for by 1918 he had moved to Ohio where he worked as a civil engineer for the state highway department until he was drafted in September 1918. He put in a year in the Corps of Engineers and set up in DC before briefly returning to live on Windsor for a couple of years. He then moved to NJ, where he took a life-long job with the state highway department as a civil engineer and married in 1924.
Robert A Zachary
Daughter Milcey stayed in the house at 20 E Windsor until she married John MacGregor, a radio engineer, in 1925. They moved to DC where she had son John Jr and daughter Milcey. Catherine got married to Robert Eddington, a railroad clerk, in 1920 and, unlike the others, they moved into her parents' house on Windsor.
The house on Windsor was one of the most beautiful in the area, but its three levels could be trying for some owners as they aged. In 1930 George and Mary purchased 806 Junior Street, a single-story house behind the then brand-new Maury School. Catherine and Robert moved with them. The house on Windsor was rented out, although finding stability in the rental market in the heart of the great depression proved elusive.
As A Rental
The first tenants were Thurston and Edna Drake, paying $40 per month. They moved in with their children: 13-year old Emma, 9-year-old Thurston Jr, 8-year-old Ora, and 4-year-old Douglas, plus nephew Weldon. They were recent arrivals from South Carolina, moving so that Thurston could take a job as master mechanic for the Mutual Ice Company. They stayed for about five years, being replaced by Burruss and Edna Mundy, he a brakeman in 1934, then James Sommers, a machinist, and his wife Anna in 1936. Then it was the turn of Charles Wilkerson, a pump tender in 1938. After that it was John and Gladys Hansborough in 1940, John being a janitor at George Washington High School.
A measure of stability returned in 1942 when William and Nellie Bailey moved in. He was a salesman for the Quarrie Corp, a publishing firm most noted for its World Book Encyclopedia. They stayed until 1946.
During that time the house hand actually changed hands several times. The Zacharys had finally sold it in June 1933 to local merchant Jervis Stark. Jervis and Molly Stark were quite familiar with the house in that they lived three houses west and across the street on the same block, at what is now 11 E Windsor. Mary passed away in 1936 and Jervis in 1942 at age 84. The kids held onto it for a short while and then sold it in May 1946 to Harry and Evelyn Veltoven.
Harry had been born in Brooklyn in 1918 trained as an auto mechanic. He moved down to Alexandria and and in April 1940 he married 19-year-old Evelyn Clark, a member of the local Smoot family.