Federal style townhouse in Old Town Alexandria for $3.995M

As a home ages, successive owners put their imprints on it. And after time, the house evolves into a structure that only hints at the original.

This circa 1790 brick townhouse in Old Town Alexandria was built by a shipping merchant, sold to the owner of one of the citys oldest continuously run businesses, transformed into barracks during the Civil War, nearly destroyed by a devastating fire, turned into a multifamily dwelling and restored to a single-family home. Along the way, the Federal-style house acquired an archeological designation from the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.

Denys Peter Myers perhaps put it best when writing an architectural history of the home in 1996: The house is now, after all, a palimpsest so to speak a fascinating record of successive tastes. (Myers, an architectural historian who died in 2003, was one of the Monuments Men who rescued art stolen by the Nazis during World War II.)

The homes original owner was Benjamin Shreve, a shipping merchant who sold exotic goods out of his warehouse on Prince Street. He eventually moved to Salem, Mass., and his son sold the house to Edward Stabler.

Besides being a prominent member of the Quaker community and an avid abolitionist, Stabler founded the Stabler-Leadbeater Apothecary in 1792.

The shop has been preserved as a museum on Fairfax Street.

Stablers son-in-law, Richard Huck, expanded the home in 1854. Eight years later, the home served as barracks for Union forces during the Civil War and quarters for escaped slaves.

During this time, a fire on the second floor nearly destroyed the home. The burnt building was auctioned off and eventually divided into five apartments.

In 1959, Charles and Lucy Woods bought the home and spent a year returning it to its former glory. For their efforts, they were awarded the Alexandria Associations award of merit for architectural restoration.

Wilfred Smith, the founding president of the Alexandria Historical Society, and his wife, Elizabeth, moved into the home after the Woods and continued the restoration, adding the Georgian moldings and cornices

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Federal style townhouse in Old Town Alexandria for $3.995M