Huntley, 6918 Harrison Lane, near Woodlawn Plantation, Fairfax County, Virginia, is currently owned by Colonel and Mrs. Ransom G. Amlong. It is located off the Jefferson Davis Highway (U.S. Route 1), in the Groveton community, on Harrison Lane, between Lockheed Boulevard and Kings Highway (Route 633).
The house is on a plateau, overlooking Hybla Valley, at 150 feet above sea level. To the south, or in front of the house, the ground level drops in three terraces to 130 feet above sea level. To the north or rear there is a sharp rise to 200 feet.
A church and several houses are located directly in front of Huntley, but the vista from the house toward the Potomac River, especially in summer, is relatively undisturbed. The general area is one of intense commercial and residential development. Hybla Valley, through which Barnyard Creek flows from Huntley, constitutes the major part of the view from the house, and much of this land is owned by the U.S. Government.
The Huntley complex consists of:
1. The mansion house.
2. Necessary with flanking storage rooms.
3. Root cellar.
4. Ice house.
5. Spring house.
6. Tenant house.
All the buildings are brick. The house itself is a significant Federal period structure, built during the ownership of Thomson F. Mason, c. 1820, and believed to have been influenced by George Hadfield, architect of Washington's first City Hall and first superintendent of the Capitol's construction.
Origin of the Name
The first known use of "Huntley" as a place name for the Harrison Lane house appears in an 1859 deed of the property by Betsey C. Mason, widow of T.F. Mason, to her sons John Francis and A. Pendleton Mason. The property is described as:
... all that certain tract of land in the County of Fairfax and state of Virginia called "Huntley" and containing about one thousand acres....[16]
It is probable that the plantation was named Huntley before Thomson F. Mason died in 1838, although his will of that year mentions no real estate, or personal property specifically.
If he followed the Mason tradition, the house may have been named after an ancestral home in England, and probably after the home of a maternal ancestor. In writing of Gunston Hall, Helen Hill Miller says: