Vienna Connection

The Exhibit

Saving Pope-Leighey House: How Marjorie Leighey Rescued Her Frank Lloyd Wright Home

The exhibit will continue until Dec. 29, 2025, Thursday through Monday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Woodlawn & Pope-Leighey House
9000 Richmond Highway, Alexandria, VA 22304 Visit www.woodlawnpopeleighey.org.

Woodlawn will host a commemoration event, including tours, on June 7, 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. Tickets are $60. Visit https://fareharbor.com/embeds/book/woodlawnpopeleighey/items/624459/?full-items=yes&flow=34465.

For more visit: www.woodlawnpopeleighey.org; Facebook:www.facebook.com/woodlawnandpopeleigheyhouse; Instagram: www.instagram.com/woodlawnandpopeleighey and Twitter: www.twitter.com/WoodlawnPopeL.

To learn that state highway officials will route an interstate highway through your house two months after your husband’s death had to be an overwhelming double-whammy. In 1964, when the Virginia Department of Highways wanted to condemn her Falls Church house and pay her $25,605 to make room for Interstate 66, Marjorie Leighey did not whimper or cower. She swung into action.

She asked Governor Albertis Harrison to reroute the road. He refused. Her house was not only special to her, but special to the country and to history, she believed. It was a distinctive, 1,200-square-foot house designed by the famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Leighey contacted Secretary of Interior Stewart Udall, mobilized others and donated the house to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The Trust dismantled and rebuilt it at Woodlawn.

Woodlawn is celebrating the 60th anniversary of the house’s move with an exhibit titled, “Saving Pope-Leighey House: How Marjorie Leighey Rescued her Frank Lloyd Wright Home.”

While attention is often focused on Wright and his talents, this exhibit spotlights the woman who saved the house.

    A photograph of Marjorie Leighey seated in the living room of the Pope-Leighey House.
  

Who Was Marjorie Leighey?

Marjorie Folsom grew up in Washington, D. C., and graduated in 1931 from George Washington University where she met and married Robert Leighey before graduating. Both were on GWU’s rifle team. They had no children and Robert died in 1963.

When Leighey got the state’s notice and reached out to Udall and others, according to a 2017 National Trust article: “Transportation officials were adamant that the highway could not be routed around her home. Mrs. Leighey was adamant it could not be demolished. It must have been a rather tense meeting, made all the more so by where the meeting occurred -- inside the very house that teetered on the chopping block.”

When she transferred the title, she gave the Trust a check for $31,500, the amount Virginia paid her and used that to pay part of the $46,087 cost to move and reconstruct the house.

Leighey chose the Woodlawn setting because it resembled the house’s original treed lot in Falls Church for which Wright designed it to integrate with the natural setting.

Leighey did not want to witness her house torn apart so she went to Japan for three years as a missionary and taught English. From 1965 to her death in 1983, she lived in the house at Woodlawn. She is buried at Pohick Church.

Many preservationists credit her activism with the 1966 enactment of the National Historic Preservation Act which created a national program and some protections for historic properties. The bill became law at a time when some infrastructure and urban renewal projects were destroying many historically significant places.

The House

In 1939, a 28-year-old Washington Evening Star journalist, Loren Pope, wanted to build a modest house on his Falls Church lot. He contacted Wright who agreed to design a house. Pope envisioned spending $5,500, equal to about $86,000 today. The Popes spent $7,000 and in 1941, moved in.

Today called the Pope-Leighey House, it is an example of Wright’s 100 or so Usonian houses built between 1936 and 1959. He designed these houses to be efficient, functional and affordable for middle-income people. In 1936 Wright wrote, “The house of moderate cost is not only America’s major architectural problem but the problem most difficult for her major architects.”

“The Usonian house was intended to provide a radically rethought, partially shop-built, inexpensive yet sublime dwelling for the middle-income American family. Wright wanted to make these houses affordable to all who owned land by maximizing the use of readily available, local building materials,” wrote Steven M. Reiss in his 2014 book, “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Pope-Leighey House.”

It is the only Wright house in the Washington area open to the public today.

The Exhibit

At the exhibit, visitors can read original letters of support from neighbors and others, can peruse GWU yearbooks featuring Marjorie and Robert and see some of their personal items.

Visitors can also listen to recordings in which Marjorie talks about her beloved house’s connection to nature. She loved “its real union of the outdoors with the inside,” she said.