House and History

The main house began as a simple farmhouse in 1775. When our family purchased the property in 1833, we added the Colonial front and wings. The house is furnished with family pieces that have been collected over the years, and an abundance of family portraits adorns the walls.

There are numerous outbuildings – a greenhouse, billiard house, carriage house, and farm office are now residences. The Old Dwelling, a circa-1750 log cabin, pre-dates the main house. A smokehouse, springhouse, and icehouse also dot the grounds. The old schoolhouse still stands in the garden.

Welbourne was the home of Col. Richard Henry Dulany, the great-great-great-grandfather of the current innkeepers. Col. Dulany founded the nation’s oldest foxhunting club, The Piedmont Fox Hounds, in 1840, and the oldest horse show, the Upperville Colt & Horse Show, in 1853.

Soldiers camped on the lawn during the Civil War, bullets ticked off the roof during the Battle of Unison, and J.E.B. Stuart, John S. Mosby and John Pelham visited the house.

In the 1930s, writers F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe stayed at Welbourne at the behest of their legendary editor, Maxwell Perkins. One of Perkins’ closest friends was Elizabeth Lemmon of Welbourne (their letters were published in As Ever Yours) and he wrote after one visit, “It’s as if I had drunk the milk of Paradise once and seen an enchanted place.” Fitzgerald wrote “Her Last Case,” a short story published in The Saturday Evening Post that used Welbourne as its setting: “The house floated up suddenly through the twilight…the stocky central box fronted by tall pillars, the graceful one-story wings, the intimate gardens only half seen from the front, the hint of other more secret verandas…” Wolfe also used the house as a setting in "The Hound of Darkness," calling it "Malbourne": "The house in its general design is not unlike the one at Mount Vernon...yet surpasses it in its warmth and naturalness. An air of ease and homely comfort has pervaded every line.” He goes on, "The place is warm with life, instantly familiar the moment that a stranger enters it." Wolfe wrote in a letter to his mother, “I did make the trip to Virginia and had a fine visit in one of the most beautiful plantation houses you ever saw.”

In 2001, Crazy Like a Fox, a feature film based loosely on the family and the father of the current innkeepers, was filmed at Welbourne. It is a comedy-drama about a man who is evicted from his eighth-generation family home and fights to win it back. The film stars Tony Award-winner Roger Rees and two-time Academy Award-nominee Mary McDonnell and was written and directed by Richard Squires, a long-time Welbourne tenant.

Welbourne was home to approximately 30 enslaved people who worked the farm and inside the house before the Civil War.  This an important part of Welbourne’s history, much of which can be found in the recently published A Path Through Willisville by Carol Lee and Lori Kimball.

Welbourne has been run continuously as a bed-and-breakfast since the 1930s. The farm has been a retired horse boarding operation since the 1970s - to learn more visit us at welbournefarm.com. We are open 365 days a year. To learn more about a visit to Welbourne, see our FAQs.