A revolution that would reform the world’s care for children with intellectual disabilities began with fun and games on a rolling estate just south of downtown Rockville in June of 1962. Eunice Kennedy Shriver welcomed 34 young summer campers to Timberlawn, her home, for a week of swimming, horseback riding, and track-and-field events.
It was the first test of what would evolve into the Special Olympics – just one part of the long history of Timberlawn that is driving efforts to designate the property as historic and protect it from any future attempt to tear it down.
The Montgomery County Planning Board voted unanimously Thursday afternoon to add Timberlawn, the 1901 Georgian-revival house at 5700 Sugarbush Lane, to the county’s Master Plan for Historic Preservation. The vote followed a unanimous endorsement last fall by the county Historic Preservation Commission. The designation still must be approved by the County Council in a vote expected to take place as soon as this fall.
“For me, it’s all about the people who lived there and what they did,” board Chair Artie Harris said just before the vote.
The move reverses a 1992 decision, when the planning board and the council opted not to protect Timberlawn. Back then, the house was viewed as simply an intact piece of Georgian-revival architecture where famous people once lived. What’s changed is that the full story of the house has been recovered and is being told for the first time – especially its role as the cradle of the international Special Olympics movement.
“Our master plan [for historic preservation] is our master collection of stories of places that matter in Montgomery County,” Rebeccah Ballo, supervisor of the county Historic Preservation Office, told Bethesda Today in an interview Monday. “And this place matters to our county, our state, to the country, and to the world because of the work that Eunice Kennedy Shriver did here … so that people saw these children as no longer less than [but] as equal to others, as athletes.”
It took a couple from Colombia to prompt the county to revisit the history of Timberlawn. Luz Maria Sampedro and her husband, Gonzalo Durán, were renting another house nearby in 2012 when they saw and fell in love with the outside of Timberlawn, with its endless gables, dormers, double-sash windows, enclosed pergola, and an extension with oxidized copper roofing. Only after they bought the house that year and were stripping paint, peeling wallpaper, and cleaning mold to restore the interior, and planting roses outside, did they dig into the history. They were amazed: As a 17-year-old in Bogota, Colombia, Sampedro and her classmates had volunteered to help at a Colombian “Olimpiadas Especiales” in 1978, no doubt inspired by what started at Timberlawn.
“The amazing thing is … she started here in this house with this idea, and in 10 years it was all over the world,” Durán, chief executive of a company that has restored some of the top historic theaters in Latin America, said in a recent interview with Bethesda Today in the house.
Sampedro showed a picture of the Olimpiadas Especiales from her high school yearbook and said, “We feel like custodians of a legacy and a memory that is so worth preserving.”
As they spoke, they sat in a wood-paneled family room with tall arched windows where Sargent Shriver, Eunice Shriver’s husband who served in her brother President John F. Kennedy’s administration, received visitors. “You have to feel that there was an important past here,” Sampedro added.
The couple contacted the county about designating the house as historic, and Ballo decided it was time to take a deeper dive into the history of Timberlawn, especially – but not only – the story of Eunice Kennedy Shriver and the summer camp she called Camp Shriver.
As county preservation historian Serena Bolliger described her discoveries to the planning board Thursday, she apologized for speaking so quickly, noting that Timberlawn’s history has so many fascinating aspects, including much that wasn’t known the first time the planning board considered a historic designation.
The architect was Arthur Heaton, who designed numerous historic buildings in the District of Columbia, including George Washington University’s Corcoran and Stockton Halls and the National Geographic Administration Building. The first owners included John Joy Edson, a banker and philanthropist who advocated for prison reform, supported the first YMCA for Black men in D.C., and helped sponsor a women’s suffrage march in New York City in 1913. The next owners were members of the Corby family, pioneers of modern commercial bread-baking.
Eunice and Sargent Shriver rented Timberlawn in 1961 after President Kennedy appointed Sargent Shriver as the first head of the Peace Corps. Eunice Shriver was already speaking out for people with intellectual disabilities, including her elder sister Rosemary. She invited Black and white children to Camp Shriver, and she enlisted counselors from the county school system. She hosted politicians, foreign diplomats, and VIPs to see Camp Shriver in action from 1962-1967. In 1968 Shriver transformed the idea into the first International Special Olympics Summer Games, held in Chicago — a movement that continues today. The Shrivers left Timberlawn in 1979, and the estate was subdivided, leaving the house on less than 2 acres.
Through all that history, Bolliger said, the house has remained “remarkably unchanged.” It would join 455 other properties listed in the county’s preservation master plan. Besides protection against demolition and major exterior alterations, the designation provides owners with tax breaks for exterior renovations.
“It chills me to think that when this was here the last time in the early ’90s it was not voted to be designated,” Karen Burditt, who chairs the preservation commission, testified at the Thursday hearing. “At any time from then to now, it could have been torn down and lost to history..”
Sampedro also testified: “If you love something, you preserve it.”
