Alonzo and Susannah Storm were very recent arrivals from New York when he entered into an agreement with Mary Walker Carter Jones to lease the farmland at Sharon from January 1860 to January 1863 on a profit-sharing basis. Susannah’s brother, John S Crocker, records that they moved in 1858 (and that his sister was an active member of the Methodist church, so Alonzo and Susannah may not have been Lewinsville members, though some of their descendants were).
The Storm family’s initial years in Virginia were difficult; according to his later testimony before the Southern Claims Commission, Alonzo was forced at some point during the term of the lease to flee the area due to hostility to Union sympathizers. In addition, livestock and crops in which he had an interest were seized by Union troops for military use. Alonzo filed a claim for compensation from the federal government, and, after his death in 1870, Susannah brought it to a successful resolution.
Despite their unpromising introduction to the area, several members of the Storm family became integral parts of the Lewinsville and McLean communities. Alonzo and Susannah’s son, John Adelbert, married a member of the Magarity family. He bought land at the center of McLean on which his son, Henry Alonzo, ran a general store and post office beginning in 1910. Henry Alonzo’s brother, Johnathan Clemons Storm, whose name appears along with that of his wife Susie on a 1952 friendship quilt created by Susie and other ladies of the church (on display in the stairwell adjacent to St Andrews Hall), is shown in a picture included in Frank Gapp’s 1976 history of Lewinsville relaying the 1846 cornerstone as part of the building of the new sanctuary in 1956.
