Dominion Hills
The land where Dominion Hills would develop in the mid 20th century was covered by extensive orchards in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Dominion Hills in Arlington County is recognized as one of the first planned mid-20th-century residential suburban neighborhoods. It consists exclusively of two-story Colonial Revival-style houses constructed between 1945 and 1948.
Initially platted in 1942 by two independent builders, the subdivision took shape shortly before the end of World War II due to a shortage of necessary building materials and supplies created by the war.
In April 1945, two development companies, working separately yet in concert as merchant builders, commenced construction, with one builder developing Dominion Hills.
The builders used repetition of form, style, materials, and setting to create a cohesive suburb. As a result, unlike many neighborhoods in Arlington County that display a variety of architectural styles from different periods of construction, Dominion Hills exhibits a singular architectural style with only a few models of minimal variation.
Dominion Hills demonstrates the merchant builders’ principles of mass production, standardization, and large-scale development that is infrequent in Arlington County yet is reflective of post-war development in the U.S. At the time of its listing; the Dominion Hills Historic District was one of only three merchant-builder neighborhoods in the county.
While Dominion Hills earned a place on the National Register of Historic Places for meeting Washington, D.C.'s growing post-war housing needs, it has a much more exciting past.
By the mid-1800s, Nicholas Febrey owned the surrounding property that we know today as Dominion Hills. He had acquired it from Rebecca Upton, whose nearby family estate at Uptons Hill was a significant fortification during the Civil War.
The Febrey property, cut through by Four Mile Run, was particularly fertile for farmland. Taking advantage of the valley‘s rich soil, the land where Dominion Hills would develop in the mid-20th century was covered by extensive orchards in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
After Febrey‘s death, the land passed to his son, John, a wealthy farmer who was active in real estate and was the Superintendent of Schools in the early 1890s. John and his wife, Mary Frances Ball, built a house on the property c.1855 just north of today‘s Wilson Boulevard.
In 1898, after John E. Febrey‘s death, the estate was bought by Alvin Lothrop, a founder of the Woodward and Lothrop department store, who, after renovating the existing house, used the property as both a farm and summer home. The property remained with the Lothrop family until about 1950 when it was sold to developer Randolph D. Rouse, who used about 50 acres to develop what would become more of the Dominion Hills neighborhood.
The large two-story Febrey-Lothrop-Rouse House, which incorporated the original rectangular farmhouse that John E. Febrey constructed as its rear wing, was a relic of the area‘s 19th and early 20th-century heritage until it was destroyed for development.
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