From 1904 to 1928 members of the William H. Adams family owned the stone side of the property. On 1 October 1904 Evelyn Virginia (“Ginny”) Lemley Campbell sold the stone side to William H. and Francis R. (“Fannie”) Adams for $500. William H. Adams was born in 1850 near Lynchburg, Virginia. He was the son of Lynch A. Adams and his wife Juriah. Lynch Adams was born around 1820 and had served as a Confederate soldier in Virginia’s Lynchburg “Lee” Light Artillery Battery. After the war Lynch moved his family to Newtown, where he is listed in the 1870 Federal Census as a railroad hand. His sons William H. (21 years old that year) and John R. (17 years old that year) are also listed as railroad hands. It is likely that their jobs had brought the Adams family to Newtown. The railroad connecting Winchester and Strasburg had been completed the previous year, and Newtown’s post-war economic engine was just starting to take off, fueled with money from this new transportation link.
While it is unclear where Lynch and his family lived after they moved to Newtown, we do know that on 2 November 1878, shortly before his death, Lynch Adams and his son John R. bought the log house at 5416 Mulberry Street. Just over a month later on 20 December 1878, Lynch passed away and was buried at Green Hill Cemetery. In the meantime his eldest son William H. Adams had moved out and married Fannie in 1875. It is unclear where William and Fannie lived after their marriage, but an oral tradition maintained by their descendants says that they lived in Lynchburg, Virginia where William worked as a dynamite man for a railroad company. It was during these years in Lynchburg that their sons William C. and Roy M. were born. This family tradition also maintains that William H. Adams moved back to Stephens City for a job at the M. J. Grove Lime Plant, where he was one of the first men hired to blast rock out of the plant’s limestone quarry. When the Federal Census was taken on 18 June 1900, William H. Adams was listed as a “Quarryman,” and his eldest son William C. was listed as a 15-year-old “Blacksmith.” The younger son, Roy, was only 10 years old at that time. This census record also indicates that William H. and Fannie were leasing a room to a boarder in their rented home.
The 1900 federal census return does not clearly indicate where William and Fannie Adams lived at that time. The names of their neighbors listed in that census return do not match those who are known to have lived then near the Stone House. The possibility remains that they may have later rented the stone side of the property before they purchased it. In any case, after William H. Adams purchased the stone side of the property in 1904, he became the first owner to actually live there since the Shryock family’s occupancy before the Civil War. As is typically the case with leased properties, the stone side of the Stone House saw little in the way of capital improvements during the latter half of the nineteenth century when it was rented out to tenants. Structural and documentary evidence indicates that after William H. Adams became the owner of the stone side of the house, he made considerable renovations and improvements to the property. In fact, when his heirs sold it in 1928, the price was $1,200 more than William H. had paid for it nearly a quarter century before.
Chief among the improvements made by William H. Adams was the current two-story ell addition on the rear of the house. Structural evidence, as well as an 1885 town map, indicates that prior to this time there was apparently a small lean-to addition on the rear of this stone side of the property. It is possible that this earlier timber frame lean-to shed addition was reused by Adams on the east end of the two-story ell addition that stands today. Other improvement made during this period may include the introduction of electrical wiring after the power grid came to town in 1915 for the M. J. Grove Lime Plant.
In 1908 William and Fannie’s oldest son William C. married Jessie R. Pifer (the daughter of Stanley M. and Angie Pifer) and moved into the old home on Mulberry Street that his grandfather Lynch Adams had purchased thirty years before. Juriah Adams had just passed away the previous year and left that house to a new generation of the family. The 1910 census shows William H. and Fannie living in the Stone House with their son Roy and his bride Dollsell (“Dolly”) Walters whom he had married on 8 Sept 1908. The record also shows that Roy had a job at the M. J. Grove Lime Plant. By 1914 Fannie had passed away and was buried at Green Hill Cemetery. Roy and Dolly had three children―Franklin, Francis, and Anna―during the time they lived in the Stone House with William H. They helped care for William H. after he had retired from the quarry. William H. Adams passed away in the old front parlor on the first floor of the Stone House in 1922. Roy and Dolly continued to live in the stone side of the house until they sold it to Mrs. Katie Rudolph in November of 1928. They then moved to Winchester where they lived for the rest of their lives.
