A Home Where You Can Watch the River Flow

WASHINGTON — The stone house stands alone on a small island, shaded by tall, leafy sycamores and surrounded by the sound of water running past in the C&O; Canal. When it was built 170 years ago, this small house just north of here was home to a lock-keeper who day and night let freight boats pass through Lock 6.

The barges long ago stopped plying the 180-mile canal between Georgetown and Cumberland, Md. Yet once again, the sounds of family life can be heard here, mixed in with the sound of rushing water.

Lock house 6 is now home to David and Jill Drupa, who signed a 10-year lease with the National Park Service under a program meant to ensure the preservation of historic buildings within the C&O; Canal National Historical Park. Another house is being leased farther up the channel, at Lock 10.

The National Park Service announced recently that four more houses, all far upriver, also will be leased this summer. Over the next few years, park officials hope to rent 40 structures, including spartan lock houses, rural cabins and more plushly accommodated engineer’s houses, up and down the historic waterway.

“It’s a different world here,” David Drupa said on a quiet afternoon outside the whitewashed house, as a couple of bicyclists whizzed past on the dirt path just across the canal and a raven cawed in the distance. “Everyone you see is in a great mind-set. They’re either out fishing or walking or running or playing.”

“Everybody’s happy,” added Jill. “We love it.”

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Jill, 29, is an interior designer. David, 30, runs a coffee service company that sells and maintains equipment for places like Border’s bookstores. They saw a news story last year about the Park Service’s leasing program and submitted a proposal for how they would renovate the house. In May, they left their Arlington, Va., townhouse behind to move into this semi-wilderness.

Their families “definitely thought it was crazy,” Jill said with a laugh.

The only bathroom is in the basement. The second-story ceilings are low by modern standards, just 6 feet 4 inches high. And the house is just 30 feet long by 18 feet wide, with two rooms on each level. The Drupas must pick up their mail at the post office.

There are snakes, of course, and sometimes passersby mistake the little house for a tourist attraction and make impromptu visits, despite the private-residence sign at the gate. The possibility of floods--which have washed out the house at least a few times in the past--looms large.

Those inconveniences, though, pale in comparison with the glory of their surroundings, said the Drupas, avid kayakers who are now just a minute’s walk from the Potomac River. The Olympic kayaking team trains in the river waters beside their house.

They’re surrounded by postcard scenes and wildlife. Wild dogwoods flower in springtime. Frogs plop in the water. Geese float by silently. Heck, even the snakes are all right.

At canal’s edge, they’ve found a stone with “graffiti from the 1800s” etched into it. “To walk over there and see that, it just makes you think, ‘Look what we’ve got here,’ ” David said.

The Drupas have spent about $13,000 in renovations, doing most of the work on weekends. They added central air and heating. They ripped out shag carpet installed during the 1970s, they believe, when the house was used as a home for Park Service employees, and uncovered original wood floors. They looked at old floor plans and knocked down some walls and closets that had been added in the second floor, restoring it to the way it was built in 1830. More work remains, such as a new roof and porch repairs.

Rent is about $1,300 a month, but they’ll pay only part of that until they offset the cost of the renovations, all of which must have advance Park Service approval. “I think the key has been not to tinker with the original plan,” David said.

The place looks much better now than it did when they began working on it in January. Even the family doesn’t think it was such a crazy idea now.

And--who knows?--there might be an addition or two sometime down the road. “What a great place for kids,” Jill said. “Imagine growing up here. All this nature.”

Added David: “Some of our friends are now looking at buying bigger houses. We wanted quality of life. We might not have the equity at the end of 10 years, but we’ll have the stories.”

Information about the National Park Service Historic Property Leasing Program is available online, at https://www.nps.gov/choh.