“They tagged my sign,” Lee Levin says as we walk around Winderbourne, the 137-year-old house he and his wife, Jennifer, hope to purchase, renovate and live in — if they can overcome some pretty big obstacles.
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It’s an amazing Queen Anne-style mansion that sits on nine acres and overlooks Little Seneca Lake in Boyds, Md. But the house has sat empty for years, and its wooden boards and beams and cedar-shake shingles have become a canvas for vandals.
Lee has just noticed that one of the “No Trespassing” signs he put up has been covered in the squiggly mess that denotes a graffiti tagger’s signature. “Here’s what I think of your ‘No Trespassing’ sign,” it seems to say.
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I take in the house, which has deteriorated since I last visited five years ago. Then, only some of the windows were broken. Today, most of the windows don’t even have frames. Shutters rest in a pile under the porch. A side wall is open like a split melon from when a tree fell against it.
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“You’re brave,” I say to Lee.
“Most people say crazy,” he says. “It got its meat hooks into us.”
We take the steps up to the curving wraparound porch and enter Winderbourne, which is as grim inside as outside: broken floorboards, missing plaster, sagging ceilings, the remains of a small fire, and graffiti that ranges from the profane to the mundane.
Lee points out a nest of bees that thrum inside the wall near the broad main staircase, the hive built amid the exposed lath.
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“We’ll take a different staircase upstairs,” he says.
Winderbourne was built by Enoch and Mary Totten. He was a Washington lawyer and Civil War veteran who survived the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House. She was an heiress who came into money after the death of her father’s cousin, Elias Howe, who perfected the sewing machine.
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The Tottens discovered the property when riding the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, whose tracks still run alongside it. They lived in Washington and wanted a summer home to escape the heat and disease of the city.
In 1929, Edward and Beulah Pickrell bought the house. Edward was a policeman with the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad. After their deaths, their son Edward Jr. lived at Winderbourne. He died in 2004, and the house has sat empty since. Edward’s brother, Paxton, has tried to sell it over the years.
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“We’re trying to be the third owners,” says Lee, 53.
That’s not as easy as it might seem. In 1980, the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission bought 100 acres of the Pickrells’ land, along with adjoining properties, so it could dam Little Seneca Creek and create a reservoir. The WSSC insisted on a right of first refusal should anyone ever put an offer on Winderbourne.
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The Levins’ recent $490,000 offer triggered that clause.
“Our interest in purchasing this property is part of our ongoing efforts to create buffers around our drinking water supplies to protect them from development,” spokesman Chuck Brown wrote in an email. “Purchasing properties around drinking water supplies helps enhance water quality by preventing sediment erosion and pollutants from entering these reservoirs.”
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He could not say what the WSSC planned to do with the house, which is a locally designated historic site and may not be altered or torn down without the approval of the Montgomery County Historic Preservation Commission.
Miriam Schoenbaum of the Boyds Historical Society told me: “What we want to see is Winderbourne restored and used.”
She has doubts whether the WSSC is best suited to save and maintain a house that has a special place in Boyds, a community that grew because of the railroad.
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Lee agrees: “They’re not in the business of rehabbing houses.”
Said Paxton: “I’d love to see him restore it. I’m hoping there’s some way to work out an agreement.”
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What no one who loves Winderbourne wants to see is “demolition by neglect,” when a structure is ignored for so long that there’s no other choice than to take it down.
Lee, who works for a company that develops pharmaceuticals, says he knows what he’s getting into. He and Jennifer, a former high school English teacher, live in a historic house in downtown Rockville, built in 1924 from a kit purchased from Woodward & Lothrop department store.
“This is a bigger project,” Lee admits.
Even though the Levins don’t own the house — they’re still figuring out the best way to counter the WSSC — they’ve already spent money removing some of the detritus inside and clearing the overgrown site.
Lee and I leave the house and walk through the woods to gaze at Little Seneca Lake, where boaters and anglers frolic.
“We want a place where we feel like we’re on vacation,” he says. “We’re not giving up yet.”
Twitter: @johnkelly
For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly.