It was a pleasure to stumble across your posting. I have been researching Gunnison Homes for almost eight years now and find them fascinating. While I knew of one example in Kensington, I had only heard rumors about examples in Silver Springs. Your article is very interesting. I would like to hear more!

Randy Shipp

Despite the Pola Negri connection, I think the Gulf Branch Nature Center’s strongest claim to significance is its importance to the community for the last 40-odd years. It really is one of Arlington County’s hidden gems.

To be clear, even though I poked and prodded the Gulf Branch claim that “Pola Negri slept here,” in the end, I think the claim still stands. I really need to post the rest of this story before the budget decision. Here’s the gist of what I found: a May 1934 Evening Star article confirming that Pola Negri did stay in northern Virginia… but it was about her 4- or 5-day stay at Gray’s Hill Inn, south of Alexandria, near Mount Vernon. She apparently loved the area, and was visiting her friend, Hollywood actor Weldon Heyburn, a native Washingtonian. But I keep coming back to the C.B. Rose letter, where Negri’s secretary said she “did indeed rent the house…in the Spring of the early ’30s” — one doesn’t “rent” a room at an Inn. My working theory is that she either rented the more private Gulf Branch house soon after her stay at Gray’s Hill Inn, or perhaps she rented the house before her May 1934 trip. By 1935, she had moved to Berlin to make talkies.

I hadn’t seen any of Pola’s films before all this. But I recently watched “Barbed Wire,” one of her silent films from 1927. I was shocked by the progressive, brotherly love message in this story of a French WWI prison camp for German POWs. Pola’s performance was quite moving, and showed her to be much more than the “vamp” of her earlier years.