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Deep roots reach to 1796

Restoration of centuries-old home part of doing business for organ restoration specialist

Date published: 10/2/2009

BY RICHARD AMRHINE

When Dennis Stephens decided in 1998 to make his organ restoration business a full-time enterprise, restoring a centuries-old house wasn't on his agenda.

As a spare-time gig, rebuilding organs in his garage in Fredericksburg had been doable. But within a few years, with the organs and equipment he was collecting, he realized he needed more space.

"I looked around Fredericksburg, but it was going to be too expensive" to get the land and work space he needed, he said.

Soon he learned about a Northern Neck property, out in Northumberland County, with an old house sitting on a few acres.

In 2002, long story short, he decided to take on the challenge.

First off, the house, just off U.S. 360 in the village of Village, had not been used as a residence for years and would need work to become habitable. Lots of work.

ORIGINAL STRUCTURE

The foundation dates to 1796, when it was built by a U.S. naval captain, William Henderson, who had plied the waters of the Chesapeake Bay and the nearby Rappahannock River. He would use that experience in the young nation's defense when the British sailed up the Chesapeake during the War of 1812.

As Stephens has heard the story told, British seamen trailed Henderson back to his home and burned it down, leaving nothing but the brick foundation and the burned brick chimneys.

The property retains the name "Burnt Chimneys" today.

The house was rebuilt in 1815, using the existing foundation and chimneys. It would be a very simple two-story affair with several rooms and a shallow basement, and that's how Stephens found it.

To become what he wanted and needed it to be, the whole interior would have to be restored and a significant addition to hold a large pipe organ would have to be built. And he'd have to live somewhere else in the meantime.

So he first built a steel warehouse and workshop for his organ restoration business, the Rappahannock Pipe Organ Co. It was equipped with a kitchen and bathroom so he could live there as the house was restored.

He then turned his attention to the old house.

"We first had to make the first two floors livable," he said, and that meant an immediate need to shore up the floors--which bounced like a trampoline--from the basement below.

Dennis Stephens has been a church organist for 33 years and has been working on organs and restoring them for the past 20. Stephens and his three-member Rappahannock Pipe Organ Co. staff of organ building technicians, Denise Symonds, Mac Covington and David Brannan, build, restore, tune and maintain pipe and reed organs for churches and other venues in the mid-Atlantic area. The company operates out of a 2,100-square-foot warehouse that's located at the corner of Gibeon and Lively Hope roads. (Stephens points out that Gibeon Road at that point is the boundary between Northumberland and Richmond counties.) The warehouse, which holds a showroom, workshop and offices, is just a stone's throw from Stephens' restored home, Burnt Chimneys. --Richard Amrhine

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Date published: 10/2/2009