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OATLANDS* = is about forty miles from Washington and a little off the beaten track, perhaps, but it is well worth a visit because the house and garden are not only old, as age goes in America, but beautiful besides. That part of the country where it is situated IS sometimes called Piedmont Virginia—‘‘the foot of the mountain’’—with the Blue Ridge some twenty miles away, and the upper Potomac River not far off to the east. The place itself is known as “Oatlands House.” The house and garden at Oatlands were built almost one hundred and twenty years ago by George Carter, fourth son of Robert Carter, of Nomini Hall. Robert Carter, known to the Virginia of Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary days as Councillor Carter, was a man of great distinction, whose family life is described in terms of no unusual interest by his children’s tutor, the author of Fithians Diary. But the earliest Carter to stamp his mark on Colonial Virginia was Councillor Carter’s grandfather, another Robert, whose vast acres, derived from crown grants, gained him the patronymic of ‘King Carter’’—in all the colony, one of the foremost land-owners and influences of those days. King Carter lived at Corotoman, and his eldest son succeeded him there, but his grandson built Nomini Hall, and his great-grandson left Tidewater Virginia, to settle in what was, then, the backwoods, the frontier almost, of the Old Dominion. One of thirteen children, he was given three thousand acres by his father, north and south of Goose Creek, and some six miles south of the little town of Leesburg, in Loudoun County. There, still imbued with the Eng *In 1902 Oatlands became the property of Mr. and Mrs. William Corcoran Eustis, under whose appreciative guidance it has been restored and beauttfed. [245]
