Claymont Court, or simply Claymont, is a Georgian-style brick mansion, the grandest of several built near Charles Town, West Virginia for members of the Washington family. The current "Big House" was built in 1840 for Bushrod Corbin Washington, nephew of Supreme Court justice Bushrod Washington and grand-nephew of George Washington, to replace the 1820 main house on his plantation that burned in 1838.
In 1899 author Frank Stockton purchased the house and lived there until he died in 1902. In 1943, Claymont was bought by West Virginia industrialist Robert Joseph Funkhouser, who at the same time bought the adjacent Blakeley and Cedar Lawn, other Washington descendant houses and large properties. He combined the properties into a estate.
In 1974 John G. Bennett purchased Claymont to create an intentional community. It is currently used as a retreat center by the Claymont Society for Continuous Education.
Washington Family era
In the 1700s, the plot of land on which Claymont stands was owned by John Augustine Washington, the brother of George Washington. With the labor of enslaved people under his control, George Washington developed the Bullskin Plantation, the first property he ever owned, a few miles southwest of the Claymont property.
In 1811, George Washington's grand-nephew Bushrod Corbin Washington inherited the land, having reached the legal age of 21, and about a decade later had 90 enslaved people build a thirty-four room mansion there. At about the same time, his slightly older brother, John Augustine Washington III, built the Blakeley mansion about 600 yards away and facing Claymont. The two brothers married daughters from the Blackburn family and raised their own families directly across from each other in the Blakeley and Claymont mansions.
Bushrod finished building Claymont in 1820 for $30,000 (~$ in ), a massive sum at the time. The house became known as "Bushrod's folly." At completion, it was the largest house in the area, and with later additions would become the largest house in West Virginia at with 59 rooms and 25 fireplaces. Claymont may also be the northernmost example of the Virginia Plantation Style mansion; it had wings, courtyards, and dependencies. Claymont burned down in 1838. Bushrod had recently departed for Richmond, where he was serving his first week as an assemblyman in the Virginia House of Delegates. The fire is believed to have started in the fireplace of the mansion's basement kitchen.
The central part of the mansion was completely rebuilt in 1840, and the remainder restored. Bushrod died in 1851, leaving Claymont to his son Thomas Blackburn Washington. Thomas died in 1854, leaving the estate to his eldest son Bushrod Corbin Washington II.
The Civil War was devastating to the Washington family, many of whom fought for the Confederacy, and others took refuge at Claymont. During the war, Bushrod C. Washington enlisted in the 2nd Virginia Infantry and then the 12th Virginia Cavalry, both Confederate States Army units, and ended the war hospitalized in Charlottesville (though upon release he signed the required oath in Winchester and received a federal pardon in 1866). His younger brothers Sgt. George Washington died in battle in 1863, and his youngest brother James Cunningham Washington fought less formally under John Singleton Mosby, and was captured after conducting raids north into Kentucky and Ohio, and died in a Baltimore prison in 1865.
Both of the young men were captured in Claymont Court during Christmas furlough (holiday leave) by Union Army troops led by George Custer. As an example of the close history among some officers, he had been a roommate of one of the Washington men when they were both cadets at West Point military academy. The camps were rife with disease due to overcrowding and poor sanitation; people did not know how to handle these conditions. As punishment to Claymont estate for "harboring guerrillas", General Sheridan ordered all of the cattle driven off the land (except for one milch cow) and every fence surrounding the estate's Clay Mound farm burned down.
After the Civil War, the reconstructionist government demanded payment of back taxes for all of the years that the Washington family had paid taxes to the Confederacy rather than the Union. Like many other families, the Washington family were short on cash, struggling with agricultural decline, and could not pay the taxes. By 1871 the family was forced to sell Claymont estate for the modest sum of $10,000 (~$ in ) (a third of what it cost to build). Most of the family moved to the Pacific Northwest and the territory of Washington, which was not admitted as a state until 1889.
