Easter Egg Hunt set for April 9 at Sully Historic Farm

Local kids can join an Easter Egg Hunt on April 9 at the while experiencing some post-colonial holiday events common for youngsters to enjoy 200 years ago when the farm was occupied by its original owners. 

The eighth-annual hunt will also include an Easter Egg roll, which was a pretty common event during the Easter holiday at the time the house was completed in 1794 by Richard Bland Lee, a gentleman farmer and northern Virginia’s first elected congressman, said Barbara Ziman, the site’s events and marketing coordinator. 

During an Easter Egg roll, kids were given wooden spoons and rolled eggs along a pre-determined outdoor course for prizes, Ziman said. Site organizers will be making some modern-day substitutions by handing out plastic spoons to roll plastic eggs. Real eggs and wooden spoons create a bit of a mess, she said. Prizes will still be given.

“You know what you get when you combine youngsters with wooden spoons and real eggs.” she said with a laugh. “They play golf.”

The 130-acre site, nestled along Route 28 just north of Route 50, represents just a fraction of the 3,000-acre estate that Lee worked for wheat and animal feed. Smart farmers like Lee in the early 1800s moved away from tobacco, Virginia’s signature cash crop, because of commercial problems and the fact that the crop too-quickly depleted the soil, Ziman said.

Although Lee (who was the uncle of Gen. Robert E. Lee) owned 40 slaves, the farm was not a plantation, Ziman said. Plantations are self-sufficient and it was clear that Lee had to buy a great deal of things to keep the farm running.

The site includes the original two-story Lee home as well as a number of original outbuildings—the kitchen-laundry, smokehouse and stone dairy. A newly constructed representative slave cabin stands near the house where historians think some original slave quarters stood. 

The hunt will be on the South Lawn with two starting times: 1:30 p.m. and 2:30 p.m. for children ages 3 to 7.  The event costs $5 per child and each youngster can collect up to six eggs. Kids who find the one special egg will be awarded with an Easter basket full of toys. Organizers also will bring some farm animals—lambs, goats, ducks, chickens—to the site from their home at Frying Pan Park for the day, Ziman said.