The oldest part of Woodpecker appears to have been built around 1750 by Samuel Hawes I. Hawes was a justice on the Caroline Court and later a member of the County Committee of Public Safety and an Important local leader during the Revolution. His son Samuel Hawes II was Secretary of the County Committee of Public Safety until he was placed in command of a company of Caroline troops raised to reinforce General Woodford at Great Bridges. Samuel Hawes II’s daughter, Anne, married Col. John Washington and the plantation passed to the Washington family.
Col. John Washington was a son of George Washington of “Pine Forest,” and a grandson of John Washington, (a nephew of George Washington, the first president), who had come to Caroline in 1770 upon his marriage to Elizabeth Buckner, the sister of Captain George Buckner of “Braynefield”. The Washington family lived at Woodpecker until about 1940 when the estate passed to the Gravatts.
Various generations of Hawes and Washingtons remodeled and added to the house and this accounts for its unusual architecture.