Women’s History Walk: Splendid Showcase at Cherry Hill Park

For Mother’s Day weekend in The City of Falls Church, what could be more fitting than the 7th annual Women’s History Walk through historic Cherry Hill Park at 312 Park Ave. just after the Farmers Market and Falls Church Garden Club plant sale at the Community Center this past Saturday, May 11? 

Sponsored by the Falls Church Women’s History group, this year’s walk – on a bright, sunny Spring day – featured seven new Grand Marshals and 67 “women’s herstory stations” showcasing influential women, both past and present. Journeyers on the self-guided tour beneath the shady tree canopy saw “pioneers, abolitionists, educators, entrepreneurs, politicians, historians, artists, and activists” honored. 

“The story of Falls Church is best told through the lives of some of its most daring, accomplished, and consequential residents – the women of Falls Church,” the group’s website says. Women “across racial, ethnic, political, cultural, and religious lines” are celebrated for helping “establish Falls Church as a vibrant, responsive and well-loved community.”

Docents were provided along the way and honors were also conveyed to “Young Women of Action” from Falls Church’s middle and high schools as well as women entrepreneurs and civic groups. Members of the Victorian Society of Falls Church were on hand to role-play women suffragists as well as the man whose descendants donated the mid-19th century Cherry Hill Farmhouse to the City of Falls Church, Judge Joseph Riley. The League of Women Voters of Falls Church and Creative Cauldron theater also had tables. The Tinner Hill Heritage Foundation also had a tent displaying the evolution of the Tinner Hill neighborhood and stories about some of the many influential African American women who lived there.

Seven Grand Marshals Hailed 

On the steps of the Cherry Hill Farmhouse, built in 1845, this year’s seven Grand Marshal’s were hailed by guest speakers before an audience seated on lawn chairs.  

Cynthia Garner

Former president of the Falls Church School Board and of the Citizens for a Better City (CBC), Sally Ekfelt – emcee for the day’s main event – lauded Cynthia Garner, a fourth-generation Falls Church resident who “still lives in her ancestral home on the corner of Cherry and East Columbia,” and the “youngest woman elected to the City Council in 1988.” On the City Council, Garner helped strengthen historic preservation in the city, reduce the speed limit on Broad Street to 25 miles per-hour, change School Board positions from appointed to elected, and institute voter referenda for larger capital projects. She’s fought against partisan gerrymandering and served as a member and legal consultant to the Falls Church School Board. A longtime member of the Village Preservation and Improvement Society and a founding member of the Victorian Society of Falls Church, she's also served as a Girl Scout troop leader.

“I had the great good fortune to serve with her on the School Board and what a privilege that was,” Ekfelt said of Garner. “Cindy was thoughtful, thorough, always prepared, attentive, articulate, pragmatic and a consummate team player, and she has a droll sense of humor. Cindy is just plain damn fun to... collaborate with and she’s a wizard at School Board policy… which can be mind-numbingly boring, especially late at night…. But Cindy helped us wade deeply into policy revisions. Her training as a Virginia lawyer was certainly part of her expertise, but it was more than that. She was able to detect and alert us to nuances we might have missed, making our policy better, clearer and better grounded.”

Mary Gavin

City Manager Wyatt Shields then saluted Falls Church Chief of Police Mary Gavin, the first woman to serve as the City's Police Chief, from 2012 to 2024. 

Citing Gavin’s last 16 years of service as Deputy Chief and now Chief of Police, Shields commended her leadership abilities across many different constituencies. “Chief of Police is a very difficult job. And there are two very important constituencies – your rank-and-file police officers and the community. And if you look across the country, you can see how difficult that tension can be for police chiefs. And what Mary was able to do was to build a very deep trust for both these constituencies. And she did it with outstanding leadership,” Shields said.

Shields commended Chief Gavin for implementing police reforms in the wake of the George Floyd protests in 2020 with a strong sense of empathy and commitment to public service as well as “her deep love of her craft of public safety.” When Gavin had "difficult conversations with her officers" about needed changes or "conversations within the community about some of their crime questions," she was profoundly reflective, Shields offered.

Turning to Gavin, Shields closed: “As a woman leader, you taught us very well how to do that with empathy and connection and love for our officers who are doing very dangerous work.” 

Marian Costner Selby

Next up, City Council member Marybeth Connelly then honored Marian Selby, one of the first African American students to attend George Mason High School (now Meridian High School) in the City of Falls Church in 1961 and the first to graduate in 1964. Selby was also the first African American to work for the Fairfax Education Association and the Fairfax County Planning Department in a professional capacity. 

Concerning her courage to be among the first African American students to attend George Mason High School, Connelly quoted Selby’s self-deprecating quip: “I only went to school.” But Selby helped integrate Falls Church’s public schools in a time and place “where it was dangerous and intimidating to Black children,” Connelly said. “And [Selby] did it with grace and persistence,” paving the way “for generations of children to be able to attend integrated schools in the City of Falls Church.” 

During segregation, Black high school students from The City of Falls Church attended Luther Jackson High School in Fairfax and their tuition was paid to Fairfax by the City of Falls Church. 

“She lived right over here at 105 North Virginia Avenue, across the street from the library,” Connelly said. “Her dad was Rev. Wallace Costner, the pastor at Second Baptist Church for more than 40 years.” Selby’s influential father encouraged Marian to get into the kind of “Good Trouble” that the late congressman John Lewis of Georgia – a pioneer in the civil rights movement – advocated, where one confronts unjust laws with civil disobedience. So, in middle school, Marian and her classmates refused, like Rosa Parks, to sit in the back of the then-segregated State Theatre in Falls Church. 

Boarding the school bus on the first day of school in 1961, Marian’s bus driver thought she must be an international exchange student. As she got on the bus, every student on the bus fell abruptly silent, and remained so all the way to George Mason High School. Once at school, however, and "for the remainder of her high school years," Marian “experienced name-calling from the moment she got off that bus, [when] there were no people supervising..."

Now a grandparent, Selby had not returned to her alma mater until this past year when the Meridian High School wind ensemble invited her to speak because they were planning a performance entitled "The Nine," about the nine African American students who integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. President Eisenhower had to nationalize the Arkansas National Guard to carry out the integration following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court desegregating public schools.

Connelly described Selby’s remarkable visit to Meridian where Selby received an outpouring of curiosity and affection from students, teachers and staff, over several hours. “She was greeted like a rock star... and it was just so wonderful to see,” Connelly recalled. “And that night she came back for the concert and she gave a stirring speech…. and she challenged the next generation to do better.” 

Because the visit went so well, Selby is now working with Meridian to create a permanent display about the racial integration of George Mason High School. 

In a touching moment, Selby then took the microphone to say, “Thank you, thank you, thank you! It’s been real, but I’d like to tell my students over there [pointing into the crowd] that they can do anything, and especially the young women I’ve spoken with.” 

Merelyne Kaye

Keith Thurston, president of the City of Arts, Theater, Culture and History (CATCH) Foundation next spoke on behalf of historic preservationist Merelyne Kaye (1937-2023), a founding board member of Historic Falls Church (HFC) and a longtime member of the Village Preservation and Improvement Society. On her “herstory station” poster, Kaye is described as “a behind-the-scenes philanthropist and benefactor working to preserve Falls Church’s unique historic charm and a successful local real estate entrepreneur always willing to volunteer her expertise and experience in support of her community.” 

Thurston emphasized that Kaye quietly and humbly contributed more than just about anyone to Falls Church’s historic preservation efforts. “If you worked with [Kaye] on committee efforts,” Thurston recalled, “you know she was very sharp, she was very funny, she loved history, loved historic preservation, and she was full of folksy quips that were very useful many times. Professionally, she was cool, calm, very ethical, and she’d let you know in a minute: ‘Well, if they were to do that, it would clearly be illegal.’ [Laughs] Her keen sense of ethics allowed her to serve effectively on the ethics committee of the Northern Virginia Board of Realtors.

Kaye helped preserve and restore the Cherry Hill Farmhouse “back to its mid-1800s appearance” with painstaking research on everything from wallpaper, to paint colors, to moldings, “to ensure that it was all as authentic as possible.” 

Not only did she help boost and sustain The Falls Church News-Press newspaper with regular ad buys, help create and fund the annual Watch Night celebrations on New Year’s Eve, and found the Victorian Society of Falls Church, she was also instrumental in historically preserving the Victorian era homes along East Broad Street. For 30 years, she served as an officer and member of the Board of Directors of Historic Falls Church, Inc. (HFC), an organization dedicated to preserving historic homes and structures in The Little City.

“She was a stalwart carrying it forward,” Thurston said. “By very boldly getting in front of some development efforts, buying up land, putting preservation easements on it, and then preserving those homes. So the efforts of HFC are vastly responsible for the preservation of East Broad Street going from the 200 block down because that part of Broad Street was all bought up [and preserved] by Historic Falls Church."

So today, Thurston said, “over 50 of the 100 historic structures in Falls Church are protected.” And Kaye provided pro bono services for the cause, assigning her firm’s lawyers to carry out the complex litigation tasks.

Nancy Stock

Sally Ekfelt returned to the mic to herald Nancy Stock (1929-1994) – known as “the conscience of St. James [Catholic Church]" in Falls Church. Stock served on the City Council from 1978-1982 and was celebrated for prioritizing “constituent services, advocat[ing] for improved working conditions for city employees, and champion[ing] social support for community members in need.” She was a member of the Falls Church League of Women Voters and served on the Board of Directors of the State League of Women Voters. 

For me, she exemplifies why the Women’s History group’s work is so important,” Ekfelt said of Stock. “I talked to three people who remembered her,” and each did so “with tremendous affection and admiration.” Stock was “authentic,” they told Ekfelt. There was “nothing artificial about her,” Ekfelt said. “Her motivations were not driven by ego or a political agenda but by a genuine desire to help others less fortunate than she. She was an excellent public speaker, was undaunted by the budget process due to her analytical mind, and prowess with high finance. She had a firm grasp on matters before the City Council because she was prepared and because she was smart. Nancy always made fact-based decisions. She was never swayed by the political or personal agendas of others. Nancy Stock was a true Good Samaritan. A woman of deep religious conviction guided throughout her life by the tenets of her faith in all her public and private work.”

Betty Allan

Celebrating her 100th birthday in June, 2023, community activist Betty Allan served as a cryptanalyst or code-breaker for the U.S. government specializing in Japanese and Russian codes at the end of the Second World War. She served on the Falls Church City School Board, was actively involved in the Northern Virginia Literacy Council, served as an ESL volunteer at George Mason High School, and as a board member of the Woodburn Medical Health Center. She also served for 50 years as a member of the Falls Church League of Women Voters – receiving the League's Distinguished Service Award – and was a longtime active member of the Citizens for a Better City, the Falls Church Democratic Committee and the National Women's Democratic Club.

Maureen Budetti

Community activist Maureen Budetti chaired the Falls Church Planning Commission and served on both the Cultural Resources Task Force and the Watershed Advisory Task Force. She chaired the Falls Church Citizens Advisory Committee on Transportation. For decades she served as a board member of the Friends of Cherry Hill Foundation, serving multiple years as president. During her tenure, she helped organize the Children's Holiday Shoppe. Budetti has served as secretary and vice president of Falls Church Arts and on the Falls Church Housing Commission. She's also a member of the Arts and Humanities Council, representing the Friends of Cherry Hill Foundation. Since 2012, she's volunteered at Creative Cauldron theater and is a regular volunteer at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.

Young Women of Action

Following are highlights of the "Young Women of Action" honorees from Mary Ellen Henderson Middle School and Meridian High School in the City of Falls Church, courtesy of the Falls Church Women's History Walk:

Congratulations Young Women of Action!

By Christopher Jones