The Queen Annes of East Windsor

Franklin Lamson, the author of two Queen Anne style houses, had been born in January 1836 in Indiana and served with the 11th Vermont Infantry during the Civil War until he was captured in June 1864. He survived five months at the Andersonville prison camp before being paroled and was mustered out in August 1865.

By 1882 he was living in Anacostia and working at the Pension Office and between his pay and what was apparently a war pension for wounds was doing fairly well. Given that it is perhaps not surprising that when Wood Harmon began aggressively advertising suburban lots for sale in Alexandria County across the river Franklin decided to take a flier in real estate. On 6 August 1894 he purchased what would become 22 East Windsor, and nineteen days later took out a $1,800 mortgage to finance construction of the house. He was apparently taken with the result because he purchased the 20 East Windsor lot that November. It seems likely that his finances were slightly stressed because he did not apply for the construction mortgage for the second house until June 1895. He could only get $1,000 for that second house, so he also took out a $300 mortgage on the two lots combined.

The housing market had softened considerably over the next year and Lamson quickly found himself well underwater on both. In mid-1896 his mortgages were foreclosed on and the two houses put up for auction. As was common at the time the holders of the mortgage participated in the auctions and actually won both houses, Columbian Building & Loan in Richmond getting 22 and the National Building Association in Baltimore getting 20. An indication of just how far the market had fallen can be gauged by Columbian's winning bid of only $875 for their house.

In October of 1897 Mary Zachary bought number 20 from National Building but quickly decided that for whatever reason she preferred number 22 and bought that from Columbian January 1898. In June of that year she resold number 20, but to Columbian, ending the five months of the second period of combined ownership of the two. Columbian rented out number 20 to short term-tenants until April of 1900, when they sold it to George Pryor. Pryor continued to rent it out, including to John R Smith, a train dispatcher, in 1904-05, until he sold it to William Emerson in June 1905.

For the interesting subsequent histories of the houses see 20 East Windsor and 22 East Windsor.