History - Alexandria Virginia

Leven Powell and George and James Mercer. 200 Duke Street. Leven Powell, Jr. (c1773-c1808) purchased this lot in May 1787. His father, Leven Powell, Sr. (1737-1810), and George Johnston, Jr. (1750-1777) drafted the Resolves adopted by the freeholders of Loudoun County in 1774. The elder Powell served with the Virginia forces during the Revolution as a major and a lieutenant colonel; as a member of the Virginia House of Delegates in 1779, 1787-1788, and 1791-1792; as a presidential elector in 1796; and as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1799 to 1801. Also, he established the town of Centreville, Virginia. In 1786, the senior Powell gave Washington 50 bushels of buckwheat to try planting and several more bushels in 1787. He dined at Mount Vernon in 1788. When George Washington died, Congressman Levin Powell, Sr. wrote, “God knows what is to become of us.”
The younger Powell purchased this lot from James Mercer (1735-1793), brother and heir of George Mercer (d. 1784), who fought with Washington in the French and Indian War. When Washington was first made a colonel, George Mercer became his aide-de-camp. In 1761, he served in the House of Burgesses with Washington. Later, he went to London as an agent of the Ohio Company. When the Stamp Act was passed, Mercer was appointed “chief distributor of stamps” for Virginia. He returned to the Colony, but the storm that the Act raised forced his resignation, and although he had not been more than ten days in America, he found himself “under a necessity of immediately returning to England,” where he remained the rest of his life.
George’s brother James was a member of the House of Burgesses and the Committee of Safety, a delegate to the Continental Congress, and a judge of the first Court of Appeals of Virginia. Washington’s diaries mention dining with him several times.
Michael Clark, a tenant here of Leven Powell in 1788, worked for George Washington as a mason, repairing Washington’s mill walls in 1771.

(Adapted from Robert Madison’s Walking with Washington, available in Alexandria museum gift shops.)