For decades, the brick manor on six acres in McLean, Virginia, was known as the most photographed family home in America. With 13 bedrooms, 12 fireplaces, two swimming pools, and 11 children, Hickory Hill became the backdrop for some of the most enduring images of the Kennedy family—touch football on the lawn, children on ponies, and a woman laughing at the center of it all. That woman was Ethel Kennedy. Over the course of her life, she buried her parents, her brother, her husband, and two of her sons.
Yet she remained in that house for 35 years after her husband’s death. When she finally listed it for sale in 2003, she asked $25 million. It took seven years to sell, and it ultimately went for $8. 25 million.
The property was originally built in 1870 by a master carpenter named George Walters, who named it after the hickory trees lining the driveway. During the Civil War, the land served as the Union Army headquarters for General George McClellan. By the 1950s, it was a stately brick home just 20 minutes from Washington, D. C.
In 1955, the house was purchased by a young senator from Massachusetts and his wife. John and Jacqueline Kennedy lived there for about a year, and John wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Profiles in Courage in the house. But they left, and the reason marks the first tragedy connected to the home. Jacqueline had furnished a nursery in the house.
In August 1956, she suffered a stillbirth. By every account, she could not return to a home that held a room prepared for a child who never arrived. The Kennedys sold the house to John’s younger brother. Robert and Ethel Kennedy moved in with the first five of what would eventually be 11 children.
The home that became the loudest family house in America began as a place one woman could not bear to stay in. Over the next decade, the Kennedys transformed Hickory Hill. They added a north wing with a drawing room, a living room, four more bedrooms, and a movie theater. They built two swimming pools, one for adults and one for children, plus a tennis court where Bobby played every morning before work.
The property filled with dogs, horses, ponies, and at various times a sea lion, a coati, and assorted birds. For several years, the family hosted an annual children’s pet show on the lawn for charity. The event was not small—photographs show elephants on the grass, a bear, and ponies for the children to ride. Thousands of people came through the gates, unaware of the losses the woman hosting them had already endured.
There were also the Hickory Hill seminars, where Bobby and Ethel invited intellectuals to debate education policy, psychology, and the existence of God. Rachel Carson, John Glenn, Laurence Olivier, and Gene Kelly were among the visitors. On rare occasions, the President of the United States came from the White House to sit in his brother’s living room and listen. For about ten years, Hickory Hill was the true center of the Kennedy family’s private life.
It was also a household that ran on the labor of nannies, cooks, housekeepers, groundskeepers, stable hands, and drivers. None of them were photographed, and none were named in the famous images. They appear only as blur at the edge of a frame, or not at all. Before the most famous photographs were taken, Ethel had already buried people.
In October 1955, months after the birth of her fourth child, her parents were killed when their private plane crashed in Union City, Oklahoma. She was 27. In 1966, her brother George was killed in another plane crash. By the time the most iconic images of Hickory Hill were captured, the woman laughing on the lawn had lost her mother, her father, and her brother.
Then the family lost the president. John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Bobby, then attorney general, took the call at Hickory Hill, beside the pool.
The house that had been the center of the family’s private life became the place where its public life ended. Accounts from that period describe Bobby walking the grounds alone for hours. Five years later, Robert Kennedy ran for president. He was shot in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, and died the following day.
Ethel was in the room when it happened. She was pregnant with their 11th child. Rory Kennedy was born in December, six months after her father was killed, and is the only one of the 11 children who never met him. Ethel was 40 years old, with 11 children, the youngest not yet born, and a 13-bedroom house in Virginia.
In the months that followed, she received over 350,000 letters. She kept some of them, including a book of condolence letters from Christmas 1968, her first Christmas without her husband. She did not sell the house. She did not move to Hyannis Port with the rest of the family, or to New York.
She retained sole ownership of Hickory Hill and raised 11 children there alone. The parties continued for a while, as did the pet show. Photographs from the 1970s show the same lawn, the same dogs, the same house—with an empty seat at the table. Her fourth child, David Kennedy, was 12 years old when his father was killed.
He had been watching the California primary on television in a hotel room that night and saw the shooting happen live. In April 1984, David Kennedy died in a hotel room in Palm Beach at age 28. The cause was an overdose. He had been struggling for years, and the family had repeatedly tried to get him help.
Ethel was 56 when she buried her fourth-born son, 16 years after burying his father. Thirteen years later, it happened again. Michael Kennedy, her sixth child, died on the last day of 1997 during a family ski holiday in Aspen. He hit a tree while playing a game of football on the slopes and died that evening at age 39.
Ethel was 69, burying a second son. By the end of the 1990s, the woman photographed laughing on that lawn had buried both parents, her brother, her husband, and two of her sons. She was still living in the same house. By the turn of the century, Hickory Hill was in trouble.
The children had grown and gone, and the house was empty most of the time. The 130-year-old manor had no garage, no central air conditioning, outdated electrical systems, outdated plumbing, and grounds that had fallen into disrepair. The house carried a maintenance bill that arrived every year whether anyone was there to pay it or not. One part of the household has rarely been written about: after 1968, the staff stayed.
Cooks, housekeepers, groundskeepers, and those who looked after 11 children carried on working in a house where the father had just been killed. Somebody made breakfast the morning after, somebody answered the door to the 350,000 letters, and somebody took the youngest children to school while their mother was pregnant and grieving. Not one of those workers is named in published accounts of the house. In 2003, Ethel Kennedy put Hickory Hill on the market.
She was 75 and had lived there for 47 years. The asking price was $25 million, roughly five times the assessed value. Nobody bought it that year, or the next, or for seven years. The reasons were ordinary.
The house needed rewiring, replumbing, and air conditioning. It was on the Virginia Register of Historic Places and the county list of historic sites, so a developer could not demolish it and build multiple homes on the six acres. And the name itself was a deterrent: buying Hickory Hill meant owning an address half of America recognized. In November 2008, she withdrew the house from the market.
A year later, in December 2009, it sold to Alan Dabierre, a technology executive who lived a block away, for $8. 25 million—a third of the asking price. He and his wife spent three years gutting and modernizing the interior while preserving the facade. They still live there with their four children.
Ethel Kennedy moved to the family compound at Hyannis Port and lived there for the rest of her life. She died in October 2024 at age 96, having outlived her husband by 56 years. Hickory Hill is a private residence and is not open to the public. There are no tours and no plaque for visitors.
The facade is the same, and the apple-red front door remains. At the bottom of the driveway sits a mailbox shaped like a farmhouse with plain white lettering. Inside, the house has been completely rebuilt with new wiring, plumbing, air conditioning, and a garage. The rooms where the family’s history unfolded are gone in every way except their walls.
The famous photographs remain. Every one of them shows children, animals, a lawn, and a woman laughing. None of them show what she had already lost or what was still coming. Ethel Kennedy sold the house in 2009—by then she had buried two of the children in those photographs.
What cannot be explained is not the house, but the staying. A 40-year-old woman, pregnant with her 11th child, came home to a 13-bedroom house where the phone had rung about her brother-in-law five years earlier. She did not leave for another 41 years.