Mansion Was Floated Up the Potomac
Landon House, August 2016 (Google). A longstanding legend holds that historic Landon House, in Urbana in Frederick County, was moved to its present location in 1846, but originally was built a century earlier, across the Potomac near Fredericksburg, Virginia. Supposedly, the new owner, the Rev. R.H. Phillips, loved the house but not the location, and had it dismantled and moved 85 miles north, to be reassembled on the Maryland side of the river. Writing of this legend in 1973, the house’s then-owner, Marion Stancioff, was careful in her assessment: While there is no known archival documentation to substantiate this claim, the account exists of the dismantling of the house and its subsequent transportation by barge down the Rappahannock and up the Potomac to Point of Rocks and its re-erection on its present site, as given by two nieces of Reverend Phillips who were still living in Frederick in 1949. Note that those two women, in retelling the events of 103 years pre...