| Sunset Hills Began
as Company Town for Bowman Family |
by
Peggy D. Vetter
Observer Staff Writer
|
| Peg Spickard of Herndon grew up in Sunset Hills, the Bowman family’s
company town which was later to become Reston. |
| Most of the employees of the huge dairy farm, and later of the distillery
that produced Country Gentleman fine bourbon whiskey, lived in company houses
in the area of Sunset Hills Road near the W&OD Railroad tracks, or in nearby
Herndon. A row of neat white bungalows faced Old Reston Avenue, in the area now
occupied by apartments. |
| All that remains of the thriving Sunset Hills community is the post office
and rail station on what is now the W&OD bike trail, two of the distillery
warehouses and the Bowman home, headquarters of the Prison Fellowship. |
| Gone are the many single-family houses and the large red brick bottling plant.
There were also several private homes at Sunset Hills, one of them owned by a
member of the Wiehle family, to whom the property had once belonged. Of these,
only one remains. |
| A big clubhouse built for the Fairfax Hunt was turned into apartments when
members built a new Hunt Club on Lake Fairfax Road. The Fairfax Hunt once roamed
freely over the area between Sunset Hills, Lake Fairfax Park and Route 7. |
| Spickard, her seven sisters, two brothers, her mother, Maude, and her father,
Nick Doores, lived in a house at the farm, where her father, Nick Doores, was
barn foreman. |
| All the children at Sunset Hills, usually 20 to 30 of them, went to school
in Herndon, traveling both ways by train. All the grades from kindergarten through
high school were housed on Locust Street, now the site of Herndon Middle School. |
| “School got out at 3:15 in the afternoon and the train left the station
at 3:30,” Spickard said. “We always had to run to get there in time.” |
| The train made one stop between Herndon and Sunset Hills, a stop at Coral
Road (near the current Herndon Post Office) for two children. At the west side
of town, the train stopped for children at Herndon Heights, now Bond Street by
the Golf Course. |
| As with many of the train stations of the time, the building also housed the
Sunset Hills post office, where A.H. Kirk, a former Herndon mayor, was postmaster.
“He loved all the kids and they loved him,” Spickard said. |
| All through high school, she would go to the post office at 6:30 in the morning,
gather up the mail that had accumulated since the previous day, load it in a bag
and put it on the train to Herndon. |
| Twenty minutes later, Kirk would arrive on the next train from his home in
Herndon and open the post office for the day. After returning from school, she,
and sometimes her sister, Kitty, would work at the post office until closing time,
serving customers and putting mail in the 40 postal boxes. |
| For many years, milk from the dairy farm was put on the train to Washington
each morning, but at some point, she thinks early in World War II, after the distillery
was opened, the Bowmans stopped dairy farming. |
| But soon they realized that the same mash used at the distillery was good
for cattle, and they turned to raising beef. |
| The farm fields and barns gradually disappeared in the 1960s as the new town
of Reston grew and spread out. |
| Nevertheless,the distillery remained in business for a few more years, finally
moving in the early 1980s to Fredericksburg, where they still make Virginia Gentleman. |
| Peg met her husband, the late Bill Spickard, when he came from Tennessee to
work as a builder for the Bowmans. |
| For a short while, they lived in Sunset Hills in the clubhouse apartments
before moving to Dranesville and then to a farm of their own near Arcola, where
they raised their three daughters. |
| Twenty-seven years ago, after her husband died, Peg Spickard bought a home
in Herndon and has remained here ever since. |
| She remembers with pleasure the years of growing up in Sunset Hills and riding
the train to school. |
| The last year she was in high school, buses were introduced into the school
system and picked up the kids in Sunset Hills. |
| “We just hated the school buses,” she said. They were so crowded,
not like the train where we had all the room we wanted. It was never the same
after that.” |
