In the period between 1935 and 1940 Mrs. Evelyn Lemley owned the stone side of the property. Mrs. Lemley had purchased the property from Mrs. Katie Rudolph on the 5th of February 1935 for $800. Mrs. Lemley herself was a divorcée who had remarried by the time she purchased the stone side of the property. She was born Evelyn Lillie Dinges on the 8th of February 1890, the daughter of David C. Dinges and his wife Anna A. Dinges. David C. Dinges was the younger brother of Henry A. Dinges who married Philoma (“Lomie”) Jane Steele in 1867. Henry and Lomie had owned the log side of the Stone House from the time of their marriage and lived there until they sold it in 1879 to Branson T. Argenbright. According to T. K. Cartmell, in his 1908 work Shenandoah Valley Pioneers and Their Descendants, David C. Dinges was a farmer at that time who lived east of Stephens City.
Evelyn grew up on her father’s farm outside of Stephens City. By the time of the 1910 census she was still living with her parents and her older brother Mark. She was first married in Winchester, Virginia, on the 20th of February 1913 to Harrison Morrison Miller, a twenty-four-year old farmer who had been born in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. She was listed in her marriage record as being twenty-one at that time. To this union were born two sons named Melvin D. and Paul R. By the time of the 1920 census Evelyn was divorced and living at home again with her parents and her two sons. She had returned to using her maiden name of Dinges. On the 14th of January 1929 she married a widower named Herbert Milton Lemley in Woodstock, Virginia. The marriage record indicates he was a fifty-year-old who worked as a brick mason. Mr. Lemley, who was usually referred to in official records as “H. Milton,” was born on the 2nd of November 1878. He was the son of Luther F. Lemley, a brick mason from Newtown/Stephensburg, and the grandson of John C. Lemley, of the Lemley family of Newtown/Stephensburg. Luther F. Lemley had moved his family to Shenandoah County sometime before 1900, and by the time of the 1910 census H. Milton is living in Shenandoah County near his father and his younger married brother. H. Milton’s first wife Elizabeth “Lizzie” Cayton Lemley was born on the 19th of April 1875 and bore him seven children, with at least one of them (a son named Harold) dying in infancy. Eliza passed away on 2 December 1926 and her body was buried in Riverview Cemetery, Strasburg, Virginia.
After Evelyn married H. Milton Lemley, she began to acquire and sell properties. The deed books in the Frederick County Clerk’s office in Winchester attest to her efforts during the Depression Era of the 1930s. Evelyn’s purchase of the stone side of the Stone House from Katie Rudolph in 1935 was just one of several purchases she made during this time when property values were relatively low. These transactions included divesting herself of properties she had inherited from her uncle Henry A. Dinges through her father David C. Dinges. Evelyn leased the stone side of the property during these years to tenants while she lived on the Dinges farm east of town. It is unlikely that she undertook any improvements to the stone side of the Stone House during this period. All indications are that she and her husband used it as a source of income until she sold it in 1940. One of the other properties that Evelyn and her husband H. Milton are associated with is the old “Lemley Filling Station” to the east of Stephens City on VA-277 west of its intersection with Double Church Road. This building was later moved north, back off the road near the Virginia Department of Transportation yard where it stands today at 2 Vdot Lane. Those who remembered this building when it was owned by Evelyn and H. Milton Lemley recounted that it was more than a filling station and included a grocery shop, restaurant and soda fountain.
H. Milton Lemley died 6 March 1956 and was buried next to his first wife Eliza and one of their children in Strasburg, Virginia. After being widowed Evelyn lived another eighteen years. She died 6 August 1974 in Berryville, Virginia, where one of her sons was living. Her obituary in the Winchester Star stated that she had five grandchildren at the time of her passing and that she had earlier been an employee of the Farmers Livestock Exchange in Winchester, Virginia. Evelyn was also a member of the Trinity Lutheran Church in Stephens City and is buried at the town’s Green Hill Cemetery as were other members of the Dinges family. Evelyn Lemley has the distinction of being the one who sold the stone side of the Stone House to Mildred Lee Grove, the founder of the Stone House Foundation. Miss Grove purchased the stone half of the house from Evelyn and her husband on 11 May 1940 for an undisclosed amount.
