School buses may lumber by a quiet shaded section of Layman Street in McLean’s Potomac Hills. Cars may whiz by, too, but most people in the rush through their daily life don't even realize they are passing a historic site.
Katia Luedtke knows it well. She lives in a house on the street that’s attached to a historic plot – a cemetery where the first grave is dated 1805.
Luedtke and her husband, Michael Raymond, a tax lawyer, almost didn’t buy the one-story home in 2010 because they were afraid a cemetery on the property would be too hard to handle.
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“Before we bought the house, I sat in the cemetery to make sure I was OK with it,” she said.
She was. And so they bought the house, which is on a double lot that includes one-third of an acre with 15 graves. The tombstones lie flat to the ground because of vandalism nearly 100 years ago.
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The property is called the Adams-Nelson-Sewell-Hirst Cemetery after the families who are buried there. They were some of the McLean area’s earliest landowners. Its history was researched 22 years ago in a paper written by Anna Brahms at McLean High School.
In a newspaper story reprinted in Brahms' paper, an article in the Washington Star on Feb. 17, 1914, said, “The cemetery lot has been subject to considerable vandalism and controversy over the years. The remaining gravestones have all been laid down and set flush with the ground.”
Located on the corner of Layman Street and Hardy Drive, the cemetery has been designated a historical landmark, like 100 small cemeteries that dot the landscape in Fairfax County.
The last burial in the cemetery was in 1946 when Maude Estelle died at the age of 68, according to the high school paper. She was the daughter of John and Asburina Hirst, one of the families that had owned the cemetery.
In November 2010, the Thursday Morning Garden Club of Potomac Hills, after closing its accounts, used the balance to install a bench at the cemetery and hold a dedication ceremony.
“We’re trying really hard to maintain the property so it looks nice,” said Luedtke. “I’m not sure many people in the area realize what it is.”
The moral of this story: You may find a little bit of history somewhere in McLean. Just look for it.
