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McLean: How it's changed!
July 28, 2003
Tom Corner, now 83, was born in McLean. Literally.
He and his three siblings all were born in a frame house at the corner of Elm
Street and Poplar; now Beverly Road.
Corner’s mother, Charlotte Troughton Corner, was the first principal at
Franklin Sherman Elementary School, holding that job from 1914-1918. Then she
resigned to stay home with Corner and her other children.
Their childhoods were quite different from what today forms the normative
period for children who accompany their mothers to the library, to soccer
camp, to the grocery store and maybe the post office in a SUV.
When he was a child, Corner remembers, you picked up your mail at the post
office, unless you lived more than a mile away. Then, “Pop” Taylor would
deliver it in his horse-drawn buggy.
“He lived a half-block away, in a building next to [what is now] McDonald’s,”
said Corner.
He also remembers that Elm Street was not paved but was covered with cinders
that remained from baked coal, fine and brittle. “I’ve still got some in my
knees,” said Corner, who remembered how the cinders would sting when he fell
off his bicycle on Elm Street.
HE ALSO REMEMBERS that the Washington and Old Dominion Railroad defined
McLean in the early 20th century.
“John McLean and Steven Elkins brought the rights to start the railroad in
1903,” said Corner, a member of the McLean Historical Society.
“The first car went into Great Falls Park in 1906."
Then, the post office was [established in] 1909. I think H.E. Storm became
postmaster in 1910,” Corner remembered.
McLean was named after founder the trolley line’s founder, John McLean. He
and Elkins formed a company to build an electric trolley to Great Falls
National Park.
People would go there to escape the oppressive summer heat in Washington,
Corner said. “We had no air conditioning, We’d go out to Tysons or Great
Falls, where it was cooler.”
“WHEN I WAS five, six, and seven years old, my mother would take me down and
put me on the trolley car, and I would ride to Rosslyn by myself, meet my
grandfather from Annapolis, and ride back with him.,” Corner remembers.
“And I was safe, at five or six, on public transportation. Would you do that
with your child now?”
A man named Eppa Robertson, who was superintendent of the Washington and Old
Dominion Railroad’s track repair crew, “knew every kid,” Corner said. “He’d
just pick them up and take them home. [The track] was a magnet for every
little kid to go to the railroad.”
“The carousel; it was fun,” he remembers.
“In 1936, to my memory, the big flood came. The water came up about four or
five feet high inside the house -- the caretaker’s house. We had to go up
there with fire equipment and scoop out the mud and wash out what was left
after it was over with.”
CORNER CITES Salona and Bienvenue, two historic McLean residences that have
been preserved, as examples of the early period in what was then just the
country outside Washington.
“You’ve got the old Langley Meeting House [on Georgetown Pike] and a
hodgepodge of everything,” he said.
An historic marker now places Odrick’s Corner, where McLean’s black community
was centered, along with the Chesterbrook area.
“Up until World War II, we hardly changed any.” But then, things changed,
Corner said.
“[Public] sewer and water really opened things up after the war.”
With development in east McLean came more people, buying bungalows where they
could raise their families.
“Washington is the melting pot of the nation. People come here from all over
the world,” Corner said.
Now, “The only place I can find anyone I know is if I go to the post office
and sit there for 25 or 30 minutes.”
“Everybody’s a stranger,” said Corner. “My McLean has passed, as far as the
people go. I don’t worry or think that much about it. It’s a normal thing
that happens.”
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