In the garden court, box bushes cluster close to the doorway, perfuming the air after a summer's shower. Enormous pink poppies, phlox, and roses grow in riotous abandon, while old-fashioned periwinkle covers the roots of ancient trees.
It is a satisfactory thought that Fowle's descendants still inhabit his house, using many of his possessions, for this is one of the few old residences in Alexandria still in the family. Five generations have called it home. Two wings, or dependencies, of this house have been demolished and the garden reduced by time and the inroads of "progress." What is still a large city garden, no longer touches Washington and King Streets.
Chapter 22
[619 South Lee Street.]
Presently the residence of Mr. Justice and Mrs. Hugo L. Black, this house has been known in Alexandria for about a hundred years as the Snowden home; and so it was from 1842 to 1912 when it passed from the hands of that family.
The Snowdens have long been prominent in the old town. Samuel Snowden became sole owner and editor of the Alexandria Gazette in 1800, a paper that traces its ancestry back to 1784, and boasts of being the oldest daily newspaper printed continuously, still in circulation in the United States. Edgar Snowden succeeded his father as editor, at the age of twenty-one years. Active in civic affairs, interested in politics, he was the first representative of Alexandria to the Virginia Assembly after the retrocession of Alexandria to Virginia in 1846. He ran for Congress on the Whig ticket when Henry Clay was defeated for the Presidency and went down with his party.
He was mayor of Alexandria in 1841, and Mrs. Powell states in her History of Old Alexandria that in a collection of silhouettes in London is one of "Edgar Snowden, Mayor of Alexandria."