OATLANDS* 



is about forty miles from Washington and a little 

 off the beaten track, perhaps, but it is well worth a 

 visit because the house and garden are not only 

 old, as age goes in America, but beautiful besides. 

 That part of the country where it is situated is 

 sometimes called Piedmont Virginia — "the foot of 

 the mountain" — with the Blue Ridge some twenty miles away, and 

 the upper Potomac River not far off to the east. The place itself 

 is known as "Oatlands House." 



The house and garden at Oatlands were built almost one hun- 

 dred and twenty years ago by George Carter, fourth son of Robert 

 Carter, of Nomini Hall. Robert Carter, known to the Virginia 

 of Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary days as Councillor Carter, 

 was a man of great distinction, whose family life is described in 

 terms of no unusual interest by his children's tutor, the author of 

 Fithians Diary. 



But the earliest Carter to stamp his mark on Colonial Virginia 

 was Councillor Carter's grandfather, another Robert, whose vast 

 acres, derived from crown grants, gained him the patronymic of 

 "King Carter" — in all the colony, one of the foremost land-owners 

 and influences of those days. 



King Carter lived at Corotoman, and his eldest son succeeded 

 him there, but his grandson built Nomini Hall, and his great-grand- 

 son left Tidewater Virginia, to settle in what was, then, the back- 

 woods, the frontier almost, of the Old Dominion. One of thirteen 

 children, he was given three thousand acres by his father, north and 

 south of Goose Creek, and some six miles south of the little town of 

 Leesburg, in Loudoun County. There, still imbued with the Eng- 



*In 1902 Oatlands became the property of Mr. and Mrs. William Corcoran 

 Eustis, under whose appreciative guidance it has been restored and beautified. 



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