A historic Reston building that was created as the center of a utopian community, and later used as a distillery, has been added to a statewide preservation group’s “Most Endangered Places” list, lending momentum to local efforts to try to save it.
Preservation Virginia added the Wiehle Town Hall, also known as the A. Smith Bowman Distillery, to its list of endangered historic places earlier this month, citing “significant development pressures in this region of Virginia” as well as the fact that last year, the land was listed for sale.
The building was built by Dr. Carl Adolph Max Wiehle, a German immigrant and businessman, in the 1880s, said Preservation Virginia CEO Will Glasco.
“The Wiehle Town Hall really represents an interesting movement in the late 19th century to create essentially communes, or prefabricated communities,” said Glasco. “… It was kind of almost like a religious movement of the time that you’d see pop up around the United States, but not as much in Virginia. You would see this more in New England, and even in the Midwest. So, the fact that this was proposed near Washington, D.C., is kind of rare.”
According to Glasco, Wiehle’s vision for the community “dissolved” after his death in 1901, but the town hall building took on a new life as part of a distillery business owned by Fairfax Hunt Club founder A. Smith Bowman.
“Mr. Wiehle passed away, and at that point his vision for this kind of community dissolved, but…the building continued to be historically important as a main production center for one of the first legal whiskey distilleries in the United States, that happened to be in Virginia, through the Bowman Distillery. That’s a very historic business in its own right.”
Developers plan to retain a nearby home owned by Bowman, which dates to 1899, as the centerpiece of a planned townhouse neighborhood at 1850 Old Reston Avenue. The Fairfax County Planning Commission will hold a public hearing on that project in July.
The town hall was added to the Fairfax County Historic Commission’s “Most Endangered Properties” list last fall. Despite its inclusion on the Virginia Landmarks Register, National Register of Historic Places, and Fairfax County Inventory of Historic Sites, it is not protected from redevelopment.
Most historic preservation programs are “honorific and mostly incentive-based,” Glasco noted.
“What they don’t do is guarantee a building’s preservation in perpetuity,” he said. “Essentially, a building like this could be pulled as of tomorrow, and there’s not really a lot of government oversight to stop that.”
Preservation Virginia says its most endangered list “has raised awareness for over 200 sites in Virginia,” and encourages “individuals, organizations and local governments to advocate for their preservation and find solutions that will save these unique locations” — only 10% of which “have been lost to demolition or neglect” since the program began in 2000.
Wiehle Town Hall was one of nine sites added this year, along with the Old Bennett School complex in Prince William County, the historic Cave Spring community in Roanoke, Richmond’s historically Black neighborhood of Westwood and more.
