Germantown Then and Now: The Waring-Crawford House

Next on the list of official Germantown historic sites is the Waring-Crawford House, 19212 Forest Brook Rd. No one is quite sure of the age of this house because the Warings had lived on the property for generations before it was purchased by George Leslie Crawford in 1881, but the equity case of 1881 describes the property as having a frame two story dwelling with log outbuildings, since the center and oldest part of the house is of log. The question remains, however, if this might have been a slave quarter  that was later embellished and added onto by the Crawfords. John Waring, the last of the Waring family to own the property, claimed to have owned 22 slaves in the Montgomery County 1867-68 ex-slave census.

The older part of the house is a commodious two-story, four room log building with a brick chimney and fireplace at each end. The two–story addition, probably added in the early 20th century, is as large as the older section and creates an “L-shaped” building. In the front there is a two-story tower with a pyramidal roof, and a porch with a square cupola over the entranceway. This sound like a jumble, but it is actually quite lovely, all of the parts made uniform by pebbledash stucco finish over the whole house. The Maryland Historic Trust describes it as “a unique vernacular farmhouse.”

Henry Waring had purchased the land grant by the name of “Norway” in the early 1800s. He was a tobacco merchant in Georgetown descended from Sampson Waring who had immigrated to Maryland from England in the mid-1600s. When Henry died in 1835, the property was divided between his two sons John Phillip Waring and Henry Basil Waring (he also had nine daughters). Henry married Rachel Clopper, the daughter of his neighbors Andrew and Anne Clopper. They had four daughters and one son, Henry, who joined the Confederate army in 1861 (spelling his name Warring) and served with the First Regiment Virginia Cavalry. Henry, the father, may have been a Confederate spy as known Confederate Captain Walter Bowie wrote in his diary of having “dined at Henry Waring’s” on Jan. 4, 1863.

John Phillip Waring, who inherited the portion of the property where the house now stands, married Evelyn Manning in 1843 and they had only one child, Sarah Ann Waring, who married George Wilfred Marshall and moved away. So when John died in 1874 the farm was sold out of the family.

The road going through the brother’s property was named Waring Road, and was changed to Waring Station Road after the train came through in 1873 and a train stop was created to both pick up milk and to load water for the steam locomotive. There was a large water tank next to the road that held water pumped up from Seneca Creek.

When George Crawford purchased the farm it had 214 acres of land, a bank barn, slave quarters and other outbuildings. He ran a wheat and dairy farm here until he died in 1925 and the farm passed to his sons, George, Jr. and Luther H. Crawford. George, Jr. lived on the farm and when he died in 1950 the farming operation was continued by his wife, Zula, and later passed to George Thomas Crawford who kept the farm in operation until the late 1980s when it was purchased by a developer. It was bought by the St. Angelos in 1989, who renovated the house and lived there for about 5 years.