The Howser House - 400 East Del Ray Avenue

A true classic American center-hall design, beautifully preserved as a joy to the neighborhood.

Del Ray lots numbers 887-889 were among the large block of empty lots purchased by Edwin Cockrell following the demise of Charles Wood. They sat empty for a few years, then Clarence and Georgiana Howser showed up in August 1913. Clarence had been born in November 1879 and moved to a rental house on a farm in Loudon County where he performed general farm duties, including carpentry. In November 1902 he married Georgiana Hay, both 22 years old at the time. They moved to Alexandria about 1911 with children William (7), Robert (3) and Sarah (1). Once here they rented on Howell for two years, while Clarence worked as a carpenter, quickly getting a job at the rail yard repairing box cars.

They purchased lots 887-889 on 29 August 1913 and two days before Christmas got two construction mortgages. One was for $2,000 to be repaid in three years, along with six interest notes of $60 each, to be repaid one every six months, this working out to the standard 6% interest rate of the time. The second was for $1,100 to be repaid at $25/month. These date the construction of the house to December 1913 or January 1914.

The house would have been a noisy one in 1918 as the Army leased the racetrack property directly behind the house to station and train 12th Field Artillery, 1,300 men and a thousand horses.  This portion of a wartime panoramic photo of  "B" Battery shows the Howser house in the background, laundry hanging out to dry. (note the crack in the original photo in the upper right).    The rest of the story of the 12th FA at Camp St Asaph can be found here.

They were apparently doing fairly well, for Clarence had been promoted to engine dispatcher by mid-1918 and they declared $70 worth of household furnishings, about the average for the area, along with a cow in the back yard. But they seem to have missed country living. Determined to get money out of the house for a move they took out new mortgages for $2,800 in February 1917, their earlier ones having been paid off. In April 1919 they sold the house to Stephen S Roszel, with him assuming the mortgages. He paid them off in 1921. With that the Howsers moved back to Loudon county, living on the dairy farm of Curtis Arundle.

The Roszel part of the story is not an altogether happy one. Stephen Roszel had been born in Florida to parents from Maryland. He moved to Fauquier County around 1895, and married Nannie Roszelle of Cambridge, Maryland in April 1897. It is not clear if the two were distantly related, as portions of Nannie’s family also spelled their surnames as Roszell and Roszel.

Together they had three sons (Samuel in 1899, Douglas Dulaney in 1901, and Charles in 1907) and two daughters (Mary in 1902 and Julia in 1912). They moved to Alexandria around 1915, with Stephen working as a car repairer for the railroad. During that time they had been afflicted with two tragedies. At some point between 1912 and 1920 Nannie had developed severe mental problems and she was eventually placed in the Western State Hospital For The Insane in Staunton. She lived there until released to a nursing home shortly before her death in 1979 at age 102.

The second was the death in August 1917 of son Douglas, drowned while swimming in the Potomac at age 17. He had apparently knocked his head against an obstruction of some sort and either lost consciousness or become disoriented.

In 1919 father and the remaining kids moved into 400 E Del Ray (then named and numbered as 302 E Peyton). By that point Samuel was a clerk for the railroad, and they took on lodgers, in the form of Robert Robinson, a plumber, and his wife Lee. Stephen’s health had not been good, suffering from chronic cardiac disease and diabetes. He seems to have felt the end was near and in April 1927 he divorced Nannie on grounds of abandonment. This was presumably a formality, as she would never come home, but it kept the state from seizing the house on his death to defray the costs associated with the hospital.

He died in Alexandria Hospital in March 1928 at 53 when his heart finally gave out. He was buried in Marshall, Va and was finally joined there by Nannie fifty years later. The house passed, as he planned, to the children. The kids continued living there for a while, and then gave Julia power to sell it. In August 1933 she sold the house to her sister Mary and husband John Bumpass. Charles and Julia never married, and they continued to live in the house with Mary and John until they sold it in April 1944 to Taylor and Lima King, starting a string of short-term owners until Francis and Josephine Feagans bought it in 1949 and held onto it until they sold it 1964.