Historic Roadside Marker Installed in Chesterbrook Community

McLean’s Chesterbrook community received a Fairfax County Historic Roadside Marker at the intersection of Park and Kirby Roads earlier this week, serving as a link to the community’s founding in the mid-1800s.

Chesterbrook was originally known as Lincolnville following the Civil War, and in 1897 it changed its name to Chesterbrook when the neighborhood received a post office. As the community grew, adding the Chesterbrook School and two churches, so, too, did its identity.

To honor the installation of the new historic roadside marker, the Fairfax County History Commission and McLean & Great Falls Celebrate Virginia hosted a special dedication ceremony on Saturday, Sept. 19.

Longtime Chesterbrook residents Elaine Strawser Cherry, Virese Hall Thornton, Peggy Stalcup Byers and Janet Beall each spoke before the roadside marker was revealed to the entire community.

The marker reads:

Lincolnville, a farming community that developed along Kirby Road after the Civil war, was renamed Chesterbrook ca. 1897. The “first Colored Baptist Church of Fairfax County” was founded ca.1866 by reverend Cyrus Carter. The one-room Chesterbrook School opened in 1906 on present-day Linway Terrace. The school moved to Kirby Road in 1926. Chesterbrook Methodist Episcopal Church South, formed in 1906, worshiped in the schoolhouse, then relocated to Kirby Road in 1921. Classes for the Chesterbrook Colored School were held in the Odd Fellows Lodge adjacent to the general store which the Stalcup family operated for many years.

Image (from left): Cherry, Janie Strauss, Carole Herrick, Thornton, Byers, John Foust and Beall.

Image credit: Lloyd J. Flood