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Hear From the Residents

August 4, 2025

Summer Writer-In-Residence Emily Haynes on the Story of Landscape

Emily Haynes is the third writer of the Summer 2025 cohort to spend a week onsite participating in our local residency program at Northern Virginia’s Woodlawn & Pope-Leighey House and Arcadia Center for Sustainable Food and Agriculture. Our summer writers-in-residence focus their weeks on-site exploring ways to rediscover and re-purpose place and place histories, and use writing as a means to build community, to bring awareness to critical social and environmental issues, and as a creative force of empowerment.

Emily Haynes is a writer and editor living in Washington, D.C. She has covered philanthropy and nonprofits for the last six years, reporting news and feature articles and producing live journalism and a flagship podcast for the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Emily also writes freelance about ecology, horticulture, and nature. Her work focuses on themes of place and attention; she loves spotlighting the overlooked wildness of the everyday and exploring the reciprocal ways people and landscapes shape each other. A passionate gardener, Emily has cultivated a community garden plot for the last five years and recounts her growing season in a monthly newsletter, Right Plant, Right Place. 

Emily earned a B.A. in Environmental Analysis and a minor in History from Pitzer College, where she received honors for her senior thesis on the history and political ecology of American urban rivers. She is a regular garden volunteer at Tudor Place Historic House & Garden in Georgetown and a reader of nonfiction submissions to Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine. Her journalism has been published by the Associated Press, Chronicle of Higher Education, U.S. News & World Report, Northern Woodlands, and others.

I came to Woodlawn to learn the story of its landscape. The story is a long one — much too epic for me to describe in detail here. It’s a story that at times can feel contradictory. Woodlawn is a site of enslavement, and also the place where a maverick group of Quakers successfully established a multiracial free labor community. The structures built here reflect the conservative tastes and values of the early nineteenth century and also the iconoclastic beliefs of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose popularization of organic architecture reshaped the American built environment in the mid-twentieth century. For this reason it’s often easier to tell the story of this place in pieces. But what if we didn’t?  

I began to see Woodlawn and Pope-Leighey House as a nexus of lines — architectural lines and ancestral lines. Lines of sight. Lines of corn, wheat, and tobacco. Lines of a surveyor’s map. Lines of a blueprint. Lines of a highway system. The story of the landscape unfurls in a continuum along this line. Put your finger to it and trace it. Follow its path as it takes you to this moment, where I sit facing a forest of green, observing a blue-tailed skink. The lizard has crawled in from the terrace, under the wall of windows, to sun itself on the red concrete floor of this Usonian house — blurring the line between outside and in. I wonder whether Marjorie Leighey was ever visited by a skink when she lived here. The line between past and present smudges. 

This is a place where horizons matter, where a person’s relationship to them speaks of how they see themselves in the world. Will you tower over the landscape with stacked stories and stately columns — or will you melt into it, emulating the forest in shadow and light, shelter and air?

Lines were how the planting class showed their dominance over both man and nature. The Lewises knew this when they built Woodlawn in the early 1800s. The house was the axis upon which the world of the plantation turned. It was the most imposing structure on the landscape, a two-story brick mansion on a hill. The rest of the plantation — which included agricultural fields, pastures, food processing sites, and the homes of the more than 90 enslaved people whose forced labor made luxury possible for the Lewises — was arrayed around the house. 

At Woodlawn, the visible and invisible were carefully controlled. While the politicians and gentry who visited would have been able to glimpse some of the agricultural fields from the front of the house, the primary vista was channeled over the Potomac River, out to Mount Vernon — the home where Nelly Custis Lewis, the step-granddaughter of George Washington, was raised. The vast majority of the plantation would not have been visible from the house, where lush groves and pleasure gardens screened it from view. You were supposed to marvel at the Lewises link to presidential power. You were supposed enjoy the ease that came with wealth. You were not supposed to see the brutality with which it was plundered. 

Over centuries, Woodlawn’s landscape has transformed many times. Into a radical free, multiracial community. Into a war zone. Into a monument to a so-called lost cause. Into a military base. Into a memory palace. Into an archive of the atrocities of our nation’s founders and the people whose liberty they stole. Into a new experiment in preservation.

It was this experimental spirit that made Woodlawn the most suitable place, in 1965, to relocate an endangered home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The Pope-Leighey House, like Woodlawn, was predicated on a bold horizontal line. The details of the house underscore this form — from the lateral bands of tidewater red cypress cladding to the mortar raked out from each row of bricks in the structure’s load-bearing walls. You see it in the grid traced into the poured concrete floor and in the heads of the nails screwed into the wood panels, whose grooves are each level with the floor. But whereas Woodlawn was erected as a landmark on the horizon, Wright designed this house to blend into it. To that end, the Pope-Leighey House sits lightly on the land, the single-story structure flowing into the garden and woods around it, the roof and walls dissolving into glass.

The view from the house was controlled: the garden and dappled groves meant to imbue an earthy calm in the home’s residents. There was no towering vista. People and landscape existed on the same plane. “Organic architecture declares that we are by nature ground-loving animals,” Wright lectured in 1939. The structure is more akin to a fox’s den than a suburban house. This is how Wright believed middle-class people should live in America: on at least an acre of land, with development screened from view by nature, and the ephemera of modernity held at bay. 

As was also the case at Woodlawn, the house Wright created for the Pope family was meant to convey effortless ease. “What I was aiming for was the sense of a happy, cloudless day,” Wright said of his design. The chaos of the city where Loren Pope worked was miles away. Parking his car in the carport after a long day editing news stories, Loren would be greeted by birdsong and dappled light as he entered his family’s simple, cozy home. That, at least, was the dream. Wright wanted the families who lived in his Usonian homes to embrace a more elemental way of living.

Wright also took a much more harmonious approach to the natural world when he designed this house for the Popes than William Thornton did when he designed Woodlawn for the Lewises. The Pope-Leighey House is not meant to be marveled, but rather experienced at a natural pace. The house was not built for a wealthy family; Loren earned just $50 a week as a copy editor. Yet his profession, gender, race, and social status afforded him privileged access to land ownership and financial support. Despite its egalitarian intent, the home would not have been affordable for the average family. 

What’s more, the whole dream of this house depended on a car, which would transport Loren some 10 miles to his job in Washington every weekday. But the car — the fossil fuels that fed it, the carbon it emitted — posed a slow-motion threat to the health and viability of the landscape the house celebrated. (A threat I’m acutely aware of as I ramble over the property during this week of extreme heat and poor air quality.) And, in 1963, that threat became immediate when the new Interstate 66 was routed right through Falls Church, Virginia, slating the Pope-Leighey House for demolition under eminent domain. It was only through determine advocacy by Marjorie Leighey, then owner of the house, that it was saved and moved to a quiet knoll at Woodlawn.

Taken together, Woodlawn and the Pope-Leighey House have much to tell us about how we value and relate to the environment around us. They are two hashes on the same line. Touring them together, as I did, underscores the ongoing conversation between people and the landscape. The houses each offer a different answer to the same question: How should we live now? Two-hundred and twenty years after Woodlawn’s construction and eighty-five years after Pope-Leighey’s, we are still fumbling for an answer to that question. 

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