The lifelong home of Helen Chapman Calvert, a descendant of some of Alexandrias earliest landowners, Mount Auburn was positioned on a hillside southwest of where Mount Vernon Avenue and Sanborn Place meet today. 
    
Mount Auburn, seen at the end of a winding driveway on the left of the above 1937 aerial image, was relatively modest. It contained six rooms in the main house and a few outbuildings further west, including a barn that caught fire in 1920. Mount Auburn held antique furnishings and portraits of Calverts ancestors, and she often held special events there, such as a League of Women Voters picnic and dinner for the Womens Auxiliary of Christ Episcopal Church. 

Thomas Swann, Calverts grandfather, had moved to Mount Auburn in the 19th century when it was located north of the city limits. Over the next century, the property was divided and developed. In 1927, the Alexandria Water Company built a reservoir north of the home and south of the rail-road tracks along West Glebe 

Road. Then in the late 1930s, the eastern part, still undeveloped in this photo, was sold and developed into Auburn Gardens known today as Auburn Village. The Warwick swimming pool was built in 1958 on Landover Street to the west of the reservoir. 
    
In the early 1960s, the remaining property was developed, with high-rise apartment buildings erected on separate parcels. Construction began on The Calvert, located at 3110 Mount Vernon Ave., in the summer of 1962, just months after Helen Calverts death. Two years later, following the demolition of Mount Auburn, Landover House opened at 3201 Landover St.. Landover House was later renamed Aspen House and the parking lot to the south of it occupies the site where Mount Auburn once stood. 

Out of the Attic is provided by the Office of Historic Alexandria.