A. Smith Bowman Distillery was originally built as the Wiehle Town Hall in western Fairfax County in 1892, and has since served as the focal point for the surrounding community. The two-story, Classical Revival brick building was designed and constructed under the direction of C. A. Max Wiehle, who in 1886 purchased 3,228 acres of farmland in western Fairfax County on which he planned to create a self-sufficient community named in his honor. Although a well-planned community, the town began to flounder after Wiehle’s death in 1901. By 1909, the former town hall had become a single-family residence. In 1927, A. Smith Bowman purchased the town, engaging its small population in fox hunts and the only legal whiskey distillery in the Commonwealth of Virginia. In 1934, with the repeal of Prohibition, the building was again renovated, this time to serve as a distillery, where large oak barrels of bourbon and whiskey were aged. Renovations included removal from the roof of an 80-pound bell and steeple, as local residents believed it improper for a building associated with the production of alcohol to look like a religious edifice. The A. Smith Bowman Distillery, the only legal whiskey distillery in Virginia in its day, operated here until the 1950s.
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Abbreviations:
VLR: Virginia Landmarks Register
NPS: National Park Service
NRHP: National Register of Historic Places
NHL: National Historic Landmark
Programs
DHR has secured permanent legal protection for over 700 historic places - including 15,000 acres of battlefield lands
DHR has erected 2,532 highway markers in every county and city across Virginia
DHR has registered more than 3,317 individual resources and 613 historic districts
DHR has engaged over 450 students in 3 highway marker contests
DHR has stimulated more than $4.2 billion dollars in private investments related to historic tax credit incentives, revitalizing communities of all sizes throughout Virginia