Re: anyone know anything about Green Forest Nudist Colony
Posted by:
Jim Farwell
()
Date: February 09, 2015 04:16PM
I grew up a few miles from the old Green Forest nudist camp in the 1950's. Some folks called it the Green Forester camp. All of the roads around it were dirt and gravel. Lawyers Road was paved from Vienna out to Hunter Mill Road, and then it devolved into not much more than a track, and I don't remember many homes on it. As I recall, the entrance to the nudist camp was maybe 250 yards from the west end of Lawyers road, on the north side. The camp was on a rise (not a high hill, just a rise) only a short distance north of Lawyers Road (maybe 50 yards?). There was a high wooden fence around it.
I never heard of Snake Den Lake. There's a hollow, a low area, known locally as "the snake den", full of hickory and pine scrub, and plenty of copperhead snakes, and the creek that runs through it is called Snakeden Branch, and during the mid-60's, during the development of Reston, it was dammed up to form Lake Audubon, and Lake Thoreau, too, I believe. But that hollow runs east-west, maybe half a mile north of the location of that nudist camp, and I doubt you can see much of the hollow from the camp-site.
The nudist camp had been there since...what?...maybe 1930. Fairfax County had tried to ban nudist camps, but the ban didn't pass, or didn't stick, because there were folks visiting the camp throughout the 40's, and into the 50's. We stopped a few times and tried to peak over the fence, but that was in the mid- to late-50's, and we never saw anybody nude. A couple of times we saw a car there and some people, but they had clothes on. It was pretty ramshackle.
All the local kids had heard of the murders...a family and a baby had been killed, or that's what we'd heard. We didn't have any details, so our campfire stories were likely more lurid than the facts.
Last time I drove along Lawyers Road it was paved, and the Reston development had added streets and homes everywhere, and I don't know if I could find the exact site, not today. It's very different.