Even though Hollin Farms is in Fauquier County, about a one-hour drive west of Alexandria in Delaplane in the Crooked Run Valley, there's a very local connection.
The “Hollin” name is a familiar one in the Alexandria area. The Hollin Hills neighborhood — the award-winning commu-nity famous for Mid-Century Modern architecture — and the 18th-century Hollin Hall Plantation are both located in Fairfax County south of the City of Alexandria. The Hollin Hall Plantation land was originally owned by George Mason, a founding father, who gave it to his third son, Thomas.
Robert Carroll Davenport, a Nebraska native, developed Hollin Hills in the 1950s. He also owned the Fauquier County farm. His son and grandson and their families live there today.
“My mother and father moved East from the Midwest just before World War II,” said Tom Davenport. (His father passed away in 2002 at age 96, and his mother, Elizabeth Barbara, died in 1999.)
“There was no housing being built during World War II, so he and other idealistic young parents formed a cooperative and built a community below Alexandria called Tauxemont,” Davenport said. “He was the president of the cooperative and he got experience in housing development. The community was devoted to Roosevelt and his New Deal. They were left wing and mostly not from Virginia or the South.”
“Fairfax County and Northern Virginia were very rural,” he said. “My father must have realized the potential of suburban growth. He was an idealist and had a vision for a community that would incorporate ‘Modern’ architecture and landscape planning. He teamed up with architect Charles Goodman and landscape architect Barney Voigt and came up with the concept of Hollin Hills.”
“It was on a hill and wooded,” Davenport said. “It was not farmed. Most of the other post-war housing developments like Levittown were built on flat, open farm fields.”
The Davenport family lived in some of the Hollin Hills homes, “but not permanently. My parents commuted from the farm near Delaplane and stayed in different Hollin Hills houses during the week.”
“The feeling of a community was very strong. It was almost utopian,” said Davenport, who is a documentary filmmaker with his wife Mimi.
Hollin Farms has been in the family since 1955.
In 1971, the family left Hollin Hills for good to farm in Fauquier County on the 1,000 acre-farm, where they continue to breed Black Angus and now Angus-Hereford cattle in addition to growing apples and other produce throughout the year.
“It was a rough mountain farm, very run down,” Davenport said. “The steep slopes were not good for row crops. They were so steep that we used horses to pull our mowers because tractors might turn over.”
“My father always loved growing things,” he said. “He was a gardener and he also enjoyed breeding purebred Angus cattle. He supplied good bulls to many commercial herds in Virginia and West Virginia.”
In the 1980s, Robert Davenport was selected as Fauquier’s Man of the Year and was honored with the Virginia Cattleman of the Year award in 1992.
Tom Davenport said he liked the rural community and as a boy enjoyed the outdoors. “I loved to hunt and fish and had friends who did that too,” he said.
The farm has passed from generation to generation. Today, his son Matthew and his wife Shannon do most of the farming, Davenport said. “Matt studied Mechanical Engineering and has a master’s degree in Agricultural Engineering from Cornell. He is the one who maintains the orchards.”
“The hillsides are very good for orchards because there is less chance of losing a crop because of a late frost (the cold air sinks down off the slopes and collects around bottom land near streams). I think our customers appreciate the views as much as they do the fruit.”
“Weather is always a challenge,” he noted. “It can wipe out a crop in one day with frost, wind or hail.”
Hollin Farms grows lots of varieties of apples that ripen at different times, from Honey Crisp to Gold Rush. “We have our roots here,” said Davenport. “We feel connected to the local community and to our customers.”
Hollin Farms is located at 1584 Snowden Road in Delaplane, Va. For more information, visit hollinfarms.com.
