Thomas Harbin

[L Verge]

I was just past Harbin House this past week, and the porch has been repaired. Actually, the house looks better now than it has ever looked in my lifetime (even when it was a store). My daughter taught the children of the family that now lives in the house and is doing work on it.

The old place stands firm, but I suspect the thought of moving it even one inch would cause a chain reaction that would end up with a pile of kindling! The Surratt House archives has a photo of it around 1920 (?), and it was in very bad shape at that point, but still being used.

Our family home was moved back about 150 yards, turned around 180 degrees to face south, and plopped down in what had been our sheep pasture. This was in the 1950s to make way for a dual-lane road in T.B. It was a 13-room Victorian with numerous additions and had been beautifully maintained since 1830. We lived in the house the whole time it was being moved, and the process went slowly, but surely. It was an amazing process, however, and the thought of Harbin House undergoing the same situation seems unreal to me - plus, there is very little space around the Harbin property for the heavy equipment to work.

Piscataway has always been a peaceful little village - until a decade ago when the developers woke up to the fact that there was open space just a few miles from D.C. that had not yet been developed. Many of the English field stones that were under old barns and outbuildings in the area (including those on one of our farms as well as our old house) came from what had been a port at Piscataway in the 1700s. English tobacco ships carried them over as ballast and then dumped them on the side as they took on the hogsheads of tobacco for the return trip to England. The people of the area made good use of them. Some of them now line several of my flower beds...

A short distance from the port was/is one of the oldest Catholic parishes in the area. St. Mary's Piscataway was Mrs. Surratt's home church after her family moved to Surrattsville (and when she could get her husband to take her to church). The church itself is believed to be on the site of where the Piscataway Indians' chief (Tayac) was baptized as a Christian. Right past the church is the main street of what is left of the town (and the street). About a decade ago, several large developments have gone up around the village, and in their infinite wisdom of how to control traffic, the planners turned what was left of the main street (about a quarter mile, if that) into a deadend street. The historic village that remains has been minimized to the point where you could pick it up and stick it under a Christmas tree!

I have a new assignment for anyone who may wish to take it on. I was recently told that one of the residents of Piscataway at the time of the Civil War was William Clarvoe, who went on to be one of the officers involved in investigating the Lincoln assassination. Do we have another secret Confederate operating under the guise of a Federal agent?