Tinner Hill and the first rural NAACP branch

At the corner of South Washington Street and Tinner Hill Road, in the south end of the City of Falls Church, a pink stone arch stands beside a busy commercial strip. The Tinner Hill Heritage Foundation calls the place the birthplace of rural civil rights resistance. In 1915, Black families on and around Tinner Hill pushed back against a town ordinance meant to segregate where they could live, and the group they formed became the first rural branch of the NAACP.

This guide covers what happened, who led it, and what you can see today.

The Tinner family and their hill

After the Civil War, Charles Tinner, a stonemason, and his wife, Mary Elizabeth, bought the top of the hill and its western and southern slopes. They split the land into lots for their ten children, and those lots grew into the African American neighborhood of Tinner Hill. The Tinner Hill Heritage Foundation, which preserves the site, describes it as an early example of Black land and home ownership in Falls Church.

The family also quarried the hill. From the late 1800s into the 1920s the Tinners cut a pink granite, a rock called trondhjemite, from its base and built foundations, chimneys and buildings from it. The foundation says the 1922 Falls Church Bank at Broad and Washington streets was one of them. That building was torn down in the 1970s, and what survives of the Tinners' stonework is in the foundations, porches, fireplaces and chimneys of older Falls Church houses.

Edwin Bancroft Henderson

Dr. Edwin Bancroft Henderson was born in Washington in 1883. His grandmother had bought a house in Falls Church in 1882, and in 1910 he and his wife, Mary Ellen, moved to the town. He rode the streetcar across the Potomac to his job with the District's schools, where he taught and then directed physical education for five decades.

He is also called the father of Black basketball. He learned the new game during summer study at Harvard and, starting in 1904, taught it to young Black men at the 12th Street YMCA in Washington. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2013.

1915: the ordinance and the league

In 1915 the Falls Church town council moved to create segregated districts that would bar Black residents from buying or renting homes in parts of town. In January of that year, Henderson called a meeting of the families on and around Tinner Hill. Out of it came the Colored Citizens Protective League, led by Joseph Tinner, a son of Charles Tinner and a stonemason like his father, and by Henderson.

The league wrote letters to the council, organized public protest and, working with NAACP lawyers, fought to keep the ordinance from taking effect. They did this under real threat, including Ku Klux Klan activity, according to the foundation.

The Supreme Court soon moved the same way. In 1917, in Buchanan v. Warley, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a Louisville, Kentucky, ordinance barring the sale of homes by race violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The Falls Church ordinance was not enforced after that ruling.

The first rural branch

Henderson wrote to W.E.B. Du Bois asking to start an NAACP chapter in Falls Church. The answer was that the organization had no rural branches. The group was allowed to work as a standing committee instead, and in 1918 the NAACP granted it a charter. Joseph Tinner was its first president and Henderson its secretary, with Mary Ellen Henderson as a key organizer and recruiter. The branch's first meeting was held in the Tinner home on Tinner Hill.

The victory had a cost. Henderson later said that the council then gave the Seven Corners area back to Fairfax County, because in those days Black voters were Republicans. The foundation points to an older line as well: in 1887, it says, the town's boundary was drawn to dilute the voting power of Black residents, placing many of them in the much larger county, where their votes carried little weight.

What changed the hill in 1922

In 1922, Lee Highway, now US 29 and South Washington Street in the city, was cut and paved across the top of Tinner Hill. It split Henderson's property in two, and his house, a 1913 Sears kit home, had to be moved north on its lot. The road brought traffic and commerce, which is why the arch today stands among shops rather than houses.

What you can see today

The Tinner Hill arch. The monument at South Washington Street and Tinner Hill Road was dedicated in 1999. It was designed by John Ballou, a Falls Church teacher, and built by hand over three months, July through September 1999, by three men. It is made of the same pink granite the Tinners quarried. About 30 Falls Church property owners gave back stones their families had saved from demolished buildings, and uncut stones from the Tinner quarry, each with a plaque, ring the base. The land was donated by the city and Saab International.

Tinner Hill Historic Park. A short walk down Tinner Hill Road, the park stands on the site of Joseph Tinner's home, where the branch first met. A zigzag sculpture there by artist Martha Jackson Jarvis follows the line of the old segregation boundary. The foundation notes that the zigzag is also a West African symbol meaning to do the unusual or impossible. A block of trondhjemite blasted from the original quarry rests on the site.

The Henderson house at 307 South Maple Avenue still stands and is still a family home, so view it from the sidewalk.

When to go

The foundation holds a gathering at the arch on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, with a march from the monument to The Falls Church; in 2026 that was January 19. The Tinner Hill Music Festival began in 1994 as a block party and now takes place in Cherry Hill Park, usually in June; the 30th festival was June 8, 2024. Check the foundation's events page for this year's dates.

Using our listings

Tinner Hill Historic Park is in our Museums and Galleries category with Cherry Hill Farmhouse and the park that marks the District of Columbia's west cornerstone. Cherry Hill Park is under Parks and Outdoors. Our listings for these public sites carry an address and little else; the foundation's own pages are the place for history, events and tours.