Picture Georgian brick rising at the corner of North Washington and Queen Street: the Wise‑Hooe‑Lloyd House, once host to George Washington. This handsome late eighteenth‑century Georgian building was raised in 1796–1797 by John Wise, a prominent entrepreneur, and today serves as a historic house and library. It was important in its day: a high‑status home that once hosted George Washington on one occasion, and it earned a place on the National Register of Historic Places on July 12, 1976.
The story of this building reads like a town chronicle: in 1810 Wise sold it to Jacob Hoffman, later Mayor of Alexandria; in 1824 Hoffman sold to James Hooe for $13,000; after Hooe’s 1826 death his widow rented it to educator Benjamin Hallowell, who ran a school here. When Hooe’s widow died in 1831 the house passed to John Lloyd — whose wife was a cousin of Robert E. Lee, who had been a student at the school. The Lloyds kept the property for over a century until the 1930s; by the 1940s and 1950s it had fallen into ruin and in 1956 proposals were made to gut the building.
Queen Street and North Washington Street still meet at John Wise's Georgian corner.