Gum Springs: A Slave’s Legacy, Part II
Michael K. Bohn
This is the second in a four-part series on Gum Springs, a historically African-American community in the Mount Vernon area. It was published in the Mount Vernon Gazette during February 2010 in recognition of African-American History Month.
Reconstruction
Six months after the end of the Civil War, 2,941 African-Americans were living in Fairfax County. A few began to gather in small communities—Lewinsville (Vienna) and Cooktown (Herndon), for example, but the great majority of them lived on the edges of their former owners’ land. Some sharecropped, but most worked for wages. A small number began to rent tiny parcels, and even fewer slowly accumulated the resources to buy land.
Gum Springs didn’t become an African-American community until the heirs of West Ford began to break up two of the four original parcels among their families or sell portions to others. There weren’t that many non-Ford family residents at Gum Springs early on despite the 1863 opening ofBethlehemBaptistChurch and the first dedicated schoolhouse in 1867. That was changing in 1888 when thirteen black families owned land in Gum Springs.
In 1890, five Gum Springs men formed the Joint Stock Club. Pooling their funds in a manner used previously by African-Americans in Richmond, the men bought available parcels in Gum Springs. They subdivided the land and resold smaller plots to other African-Americans for $30 an acre, the same price they paid for the land.
Prosperity
The period 1900 to 1945 was the “golden age” of Gum Springs, according to historian John Terry Chase. In his 1990 book, Gum Springs, The Triumph of a Black Community, he ascribed the good times to a booming farm economy in southeast Fairfax County. The county ranked first in the commonwealth in dairy production and sixth in wheat, and Gum Springs farm laborers were in demand.
The surge in economic activity during World War II partially offset lingering effects of the Great Depression. But African-American servicemen stationed at FortBelvoir struggled to find local housing in segregated FairfaxCounty. Several Gum Springs residents built small houses and cabins for the GI families, but the lack of public sewer and water inhibited any real development.
This growth did not mean all was well in Jim Crow Virginia. “Negroes” or “coloreds,” as they were called, couldn’t buy houses or land just anywhere, nor could they drink from white-only water fountains, or sit in the front of the bus. Given the state of segregated FairfaxCounty, Gum Springs was a beacon of light in the darkness of discrimination.
Drainage and Housing
In the landmark 1954 case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in that separate schools for blacks were “inherently unequal.” The following year, Rosa Parks refused to surrender her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama. The wave of civil rights actions that followed—sit-ins, boycotts, marches, violence, forced school integration, and voting rights legislation—rippled across the country to Gum Springs.
Besides the fundamental denial of civil rights, the lack of storm water drainage appeared to have been the primary impediment to improving life in Gum Springs. Bankers would not extend mortgages for better housing without drainage, a prerequisite also for paved roads and public utilities. FairfaxCounty would not improve drainage in Gum Springs and other African-America enclaves because blacks lacked political clout.
The 1960 census found that seventy-two percent of the 281 houses in Gum Springs were either dilapidated or deteriorating. By contrast, only five percent of the 12,086 houses in the overall Mount Vernon district were unsound.
The low point of Gum Springs’ history dawned in 1961 when FairfaxCountyissued a “Housing Hygiene Code” aimed at “cleaning out pockets of slum dwellings.” Officials cited Gum Springs, with about 3,200 residents, asNorthern Virginia’s largest “slum,” and the main reason for the creation of the new code.
“We didn’t live in a slum!” Ron Chase and Judith Garret said in unison during a 2007 interview. Chase, president of the Gum Springs Historical Society, and Garret, then the head of the Gum Springs Civic Association, both grew up in the community. “I don’t believe those figures about dilapidated housing,” Chase said. “The county was looking for reasons for replacing the housing in Gum Springs, and it used those statistics as justification.” Chase acknowledged that there were about 100 shanties, especially in Joe King’s Bottom, an area near Route One, but said there were far fewer substandard houses than the county claimed.
After county inspectors issued condemnation notices and eviction orders, 215 dwellings had been demolished by February 1963. Many of the remaining residents huddled by wood stoves in drafty shacks. One mother of young children said her well was full of “wiggly tails” and she had no indoor plumbing.
Embolden by a temporary reprieve granted by the board of supervisors in 1966, Gum Springs residents convinced the county to let them initiate their own housing development program. The first effort was the construction of twenty-eight new homes to replace some of the shanties. Five residents pooled adjacent parcels in 1968 and created the Gabriel Plaza Housing Corporation. They sold the aggregated 5.8 acres to the Fairfax Housing Commission, which acquired construction funds through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. FairfaxCounty paid for streets and sidewalks.
When reminiscing about these successes, Ron Chase admitted that residents used government statistics about slum conditions in Gum Springs to their advantage, regardless of the validity of the numbers. “The figures formed a two-edged sword,” he said. “The county used them to advance their solutions, but we used them to push our ideas.”
In 1979, residents embarked on a second housing development--BrosarPark. Again, property owners pooled 11.6 acres of land and built thirty-seven houses. In 1982, FairfaxCounty approved another housing project, however it was one that generated controversy in the area.
At issue was a proposed 105-unit townhouse development named in honor of West Ford. The homes were to be low-income rentals, versus houses for sale. Nearby white homeowners opposed the project, citing the prospect of attracting even more poor people to Gum Springs. That prompted a negative reaction from third-generation Gum Springs resident, Marie Saunders, whose husband was the fourth great-grandson of West Ford. “They think we’d be pulling in a bunch of welfare people,” said Saunders, who also claimed that race was the real reason for opposition.
Nevertheless, the county built the federally-funded West Ford housing, which opened in 1985. Fairfax County Redevelopment and Housing Authority owns and operates the complex.
Michael K. Bohn
This is the second in a four-part series on Gum Springs, a historically African-American community in the Mount Vernon area. It was published in the Mount Vernon Gazette during February 2010 in recognition of African-American History Month.
Reconstruction
Six months after the end of the Civil War, 2,941 African-Americans were living in Fairfax County. A few began to gather in small communities—Lewinsville (Vienna) and Cooktown (Herndon), for example, but the great majority of them lived on the edges of their former owners’ land. Some sharecropped, but most worked for wages. A small number began to rent tiny parcels, and even fewer slowly accumulated the resources to buy land.
Gum Springs didn’t become an African-American community until the heirs of West Ford began to break up two of the four original parcels among their families or sell portions to others. There weren’t that many non-Ford family residents at Gum Springs early on despite the 1863 opening ofBethlehemBaptistChurch and the first dedicated schoolhouse in 1867. That was changing in 1888 when thirteen black families owned land in Gum Springs.
In 1890, five Gum Springs men formed the Joint Stock Club. Pooling their funds in a manner used previously by African-Americans in Richmond, the men bought available parcels in Gum Springs. They subdivided the land and resold smaller plots to other African-Americans for $30 an acre, the same price they paid for the land.
Prosperity
The period 1900 to 1945 was the “golden age” of Gum Springs, according to historian John Terry Chase. In his 1990 book, Gum Springs, The Triumph of a Black Community, he ascribed the good times to a booming farm economy in southeast Fairfax County. The county ranked first in the commonwealth in dairy production and sixth in wheat, and Gum Springs farm laborers were in demand.
The surge in economic activity during World War II partially offset lingering effects of the Great Depression. But African-American servicemen stationed at FortBelvoir struggled to find local housing in segregated FairfaxCounty. Several Gum Springs residents built small houses and cabins for the GI families, but the lack of public sewer and water inhibited any real development.
This growth did not mean all was well in Jim Crow Virginia. “Negroes” or “coloreds,” as they were called, couldn’t buy houses or land just anywhere, nor could they drink from white-only water fountains, or sit in the front of the bus. Given the state of segregated FairfaxCounty, Gum Springs was a beacon of light in the darkness of discrimination.
Drainage and Housing
In the landmark 1954 case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in that separate schools for blacks were “inherently unequal.” The following year, Rosa Parks refused to surrender her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama. The wave of civil rights actions that followed—sit-ins, boycotts, marches, violence, forced school integration, and voting rights legislation—rippled across the country to Gum Springs.
Besides the fundamental denial of civil rights, the lack of storm water drainage appeared to have been the primary impediment to improving life in Gum Springs. Bankers would not extend mortgages for better housing without drainage, a prerequisite also for paved roads and public utilities. FairfaxCounty would not improve drainage in Gum Springs and other African-America enclaves because blacks lacked political clout.
The 1960 census found that seventy-two percent of the 281 houses in Gum Springs were either dilapidated or deteriorating. By contrast, only five percent of the 12,086 houses in the overall Mount Vernon district were unsound.
The low point of Gum Springs’ history dawned in 1961 when FairfaxCountyissued a “Housing Hygiene Code” aimed at “cleaning out pockets of slum dwellings.” Officials cited Gum Springs, with about 3,200 residents, asNorthern Virginia’s largest “slum,” and the main reason for the creation of the new code.
“We didn’t live in a slum!” Ron Chase and Judith Garret said in unison during a 2007 interview. Chase, president of the Gum Springs Historical Society, and Garret, then the head of the Gum Springs Civic Association, both grew up in the community. “I don’t believe those figures about dilapidated housing,” Chase said. “The county was looking for reasons for replacing the housing in Gum Springs, and it used those statistics as justification.” Chase acknowledged that there were about 100 shanties, especially in Joe King’s Bottom, an area near Route One, but said there were far fewer substandard houses than the county claimed.
After county inspectors issued condemnation notices and eviction orders, 215 dwellings had been demolished by February 1963. Many of the remaining residents huddled by wood stoves in drafty shacks. One mother of young children said her well was full of “wiggly tails” and she had no indoor plumbing.
Embolden by a temporary reprieve granted by the board of supervisors in 1966, Gum Springs residents convinced the county to let them initiate their own housing development program. The first effort was the construction of twenty-eight new homes to replace some of the shanties. Five residents pooled adjacent parcels in 1968 and created the Gabriel Plaza Housing Corporation. They sold the aggregated 5.8 acres to the Fairfax Housing Commission, which acquired construction funds through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. FairfaxCounty paid for streets and sidewalks.
When reminiscing about these successes, Ron Chase admitted that residents used government statistics about slum conditions in Gum Springs to their advantage, regardless of the validity of the numbers. “The figures formed a two-edged sword,” he said. “The county used them to advance their solutions, but we used them to push our ideas.”
In 1979, residents embarked on a second housing development--BrosarPark. Again, property owners pooled 11.6 acres of land and built thirty-seven houses. In 1982, FairfaxCounty approved another housing project, however it was one that generated controversy in the area.
At issue was a proposed 105-unit townhouse development named in honor of West Ford. The homes were to be low-income rentals, versus houses for sale. Nearby white homeowners opposed the project, citing the prospect of attracting even more poor people to Gum Springs. That prompted a negative reaction from third-generation Gum Springs resident, Marie Saunders, whose husband was the fourth great-grandson of West Ford. “They think we’d be pulling in a bunch of welfare people,” said Saunders, who also claimed that race was the real reason for opposition.
Nevertheless, the county built the federally-funded West Ford housing, which opened in 1985. Fairfax County Redevelopment and Housing Authority owns and operates the complex.
