Drive west out of Middleburg on Route 50 and the horse country opens up quickly. Board fences. Rolling pasture. The Blue Ridge faint on the horizon. About four miles northwest, at the base of Rattlesnake Mountain in unincorporated Marshall, Virginia, sits a single-story ranch house on 167 acres. Locals still call it what Jackie called it in 1963. Wexford.
It is the only home John and Jacqueline Kennedy ever built together. And it is, per the Reagan Presidential Library, the only private residence in the United States that has hosted more than one president.
That is a remarkable line to attach to a low-slung ranch house in Fauquier County that JFK spent maybe five weekends inside.
The Kennedys go looking for a country place
The story starts not at Wexford but at Glen Ora, a 400-acre ranch about five miles southwest in Atoka. The Kennedys leased Glen Ora from Gladys Byfield Tartiere in February 1961, one month after inauguration, hunting for what Jackie described as a way to “get their children out of the governmental atmosphere.” Atoka was familiar territory. She had ridden here as a girl and stayed nearby at Merrywood, her stepfather Hugh Auchincloss’s estate above the Potomac in McLean.
Glen Ora worked. It was 25 minutes to the South Lawn by helicopter, one hour by car. Jackie, Caroline, and John Jr. rode out the Cuban Missile Crisis there in October 1962. But when the Kennedys asked Tartiere to sell in the spring of 1962, she declined.
JFK had done his own Northern Virginia stint before this. In 1955 he and Jackie had bought Hickory Hill on Chain Bridge Road, a six-acre estate about 40 miles east of Atoka, and lived there briefly as a young Senate couple before selling the house to Bobby and Ethel Kennedy after the 1956 convention. Twelve years later, back in Virginia horse country, they were building fresh.
So they went shopping for land.
Buying from Hubert Phipps
Roughly five miles to the northeast, in the horse country between Middleburg and The Plains, the Kennedys found what they wanted. A parcel at the base of Rattlesnake Mountain owned by Hubert Phipps, a member of one of the old Long Island and Virginia horse-country families. Thirty-nine acres for $26,000, closed in the spring of 1962. In current dollars, that is roughly $222,000 for the land.
They hired a local Middleburg architect named Keith Williams, and through 1962 Jackie worked closely with him on the design. She wanted single-story, low profile, no grand statement. What Williams and Jackie came up with was a 5,050-square-foot ranch house with four bedrooms, two staff rooms, and one non-negotiable Cold War feature: a bomb shelter and communications room, so the President of the United States could work from a country weekend without going dark.
Construction ran through the winter of 1962 and into the spring of 1963. Total cost, including the land, came to about $110,000, or roughly $930,000 today. That is a strikingly modest number for a presidential residence.
Naming Wexford
The house did not get its name until after JFK’s late-June 1963 trip to Ireland. The president spent four days visiting his ancestral county, and by the time he returned, the family had souvenirs. Éamon de Valera, the Irish president, had gifted a pony to three-year-old John Jr. Prime Minister Sean Lemass had thrown in an Irish wolfhound named Wolf. Caroline, who was six, named the pony Leprechaun.
Jackie decided to name the country house after the Irish county the Kennedys came from. In a Washington Post story that ran three weeks after Dallas, on December 14, 1963, she explained the choice through a friend:
Mrs. John F. Kennedy has named her country home at Atoka, Va., Wexford in honor of the President’s sentimental attachment for his Irish forebears who came from County Wexford. Mrs. Kennedy also decided to give her ranch-style retreat an Irish name because it has a growing menagerie of Irish animals.
The house was completed that spring. It sits, per the same Post article, “on Rattlesnake Ridge overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains.”
JFK’s first visit
The president’s first documented weekend at Wexford was Saturday, May 25, 1963. His photographer Robert Knudsen shot a set of views of the finished house that day, now filed in the JFK Presidential Library as “Views of the House.” Jackie had been out throughout construction. This was JFK’s introduction to what she and Keith Williams had built.
According to the same Washington Post account, he was not initially sold.
At first Mr. Kennedy did not like the country house, which was attuned to the Virginia horse country. However, he grew to like it more and more, although he had only spent about four or five weekends there before his death.
Four or five weekends. That is all he ever had.
The October weekend
On October 26, 1963, Jackie flew out to Wexford with Caroline, John Jr., and their governess Maud Shaw for a family weekend. White House photographer Cecil Stoughton captured Mrs. Kennedy arriving on the property that Saturday, a picture now in the White House Historical Association archive. The president joined the family for at least part of the weekend. Wikipedia’s account of Wexford, drawing on the JFK Library’s own “Summary of Trips,” lists an October 25 visit. That is the same weekend the Post’s account almost certainly refers to when it counts JFK’s Wexford weekends.
The last weekend at Wexford
November 10, 1963. Cecil Stoughton drove out again, this time with color negative film. What he shot that Sunday is now filed at the Kennedy Library as JFKWHP-1963-11-10-A and cataloged with the roll code ST-C387. A subset lives on Wikimedia Commons, out from behind the JFK Library’s Cloudflare wall, in federal public domain.
The Kennedys had invited Ben Bradlee, then the Newsweek Washington bureau chief, and Bradlee’s wife Antoinette out for the weekend. Ben was one of the closest friends the president had in the press corps, and Wexford was where the friendship played out in shirt sleeves.
There is a picture of the two couples standing together outside the house, JFK in a windbreaker, Jackie with her arms crossed against the November chill. There is one of the president at a paddock rail with Toni Bradlee and Leprechaun, the Irish pony. And there is one of John Jr., three years old, running the lawn in a plastic helmet with a toy gun, playing soldier on the same grass where in less than two weeks he would be photographed saluting his father’s caisson at St. Matthew’s.
Twelve days later, the president was killed in Dallas.
After Dallas
At Kennedy’s funeral, Jackie asked that the Boys From Wexford and Come Back to Erin be played outside the White House as the caisson pulled away for St. Matthew’s Cathedral. The house in Virginia, still less than a year old, was suddenly a monument to a marriage and a presidency that were over.
Jackie went back to Wexford for the first time on the weekend of December 14, 1963. She sold it eleven months later.
The buyer, per the Washington Post’s November 25, 1964 account, was Quing Non Wong, a Harvard-educated investment banker born in Canton, China, in December 1933, and running an investment company out of New York. His French-born wife, in the paper’s telling, was also named Jacqueline. The price was in the neighborhood of $225,000, or about $1.9 million today. Settlement was scheduled for mid-December 1964 in New York City. Jackie’s tie to the last house she and JFK had built together was severed.
The chain of ownership after Jackie
Wong owned Wexford for about seven years. In 1971 he sold it to Dr. George K. Tanham, a Rand Corporation defense analyst best known for his work on counterinsurgency, for $314,000.
Tanham held it until 1975, when he sold to William P. Clements Jr., a Texas oilman who was then serving as Deputy Secretary of Defense under Presidents Nixon and Ford. Clements added the swimming pool and the tennis court that show up on every subsequent real estate listing. He would go on, after Wexford, to be twice elected governor of Texas.
Clements is where the second-president story kicks in. During the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan leased Wexford from Clements as his Washington-area residence and headquarters. The Reagan Presidential Library counts Wexford in his official list of residences. That is what makes it, per the standard reference, the only private retreat used by more than one president of the United States. Camp David is federal, and the Bush family compound at Kennebunkport has never hosted a second president.
For a stretch of 1980, then, Wexford was doing exactly what it had been doing in 1962. Housing a presidential-scale operation on the same 39 acres, with the same view of the Blue Ridge, in a landscape that had barely changed. Reagan won that election, moved into the White House, and Wexford went back to being what it usually was, which was a quiet horse property in Fauquier County.
Wexford on the market
The property came onto the market for the first time in a serious way in 2013, listed for a headline number of $10,999,000. It sat. In 2016 the ask came down to $5,959,000. It sat again. There is a specific kind of premium a seller can put on a house because a president once slept there, and there is a specific kind of ceiling the market can put on that premium, and Wexford spent four years discovering both.
On September 22, 2017, per the Washington Post’s Reliable Source column, Wexford finally sold for $2,850,000, less than a third of the original ask. The buyer was Thomas S. Price, a retired Virginia businessman who had made his money in natural gas, and, notably, already owned neighboring land.
Price told the Fauquier Times he had bought the estate specifically because he did not want to see the land developed. His stated hope for the property was to open it up to wounded warriors to hunt on and to rest. That is close to the intent Jackie described in 1961, which was a country place where a working family could turn off the machine for a couple of days.
What’s still there
The 39 acres Jackie bought from Hubert Phipps have grown into a 167-acre parcel across successive owners’ add-ons. The Keith Williams ranch house is still there, single-story, still oriented to the Blue Ridge. So is the pool and tennis court Clements added in the late 1970s, the stable, the pond, and, per the 2017 Post write-up, the underground bunker and Secret Service facilities that JFK’s staff insisted on in 1962. The name Wexford has stuck through five owners and sixty-plus years.
Middleburg, four miles down the road, has changed some. The tack shops are still tack shops, but there’s a coffee bar now, and a real-estate signboard in the window with numbers on it that would have startled Hubert Phipps.
Horse country itself has changed less. Route 50 west still runs past the same fences, the same barns, the same stone walls JFK and Jackie drove past every time they came out from the South Lawn by helicopter. Turn north off 50 near Atoka, follow the ridge, and the land Jackie chose in 1962 looks a lot like it did the weekend Cecil Stoughton drove out to photograph the Kennedys with a pony named Leprechaun.
That is roughly the point. It is why she picked it.