Anne Moseley, a widow and one of the area's most successful farmers, built her house on what was once part of Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest tract. The house probably gained two more bays in the mid-nineteenth century. As it stands today, Ashwood is an example of an early-nineteenth-century residence reshaped by mid-twentieth-century ideas of what an old house should be. The plain brick house, now painted white, acquired a two-story, one-bay pedimented portico of incredibly elongated proportions, the era's popular cupola, Chinese Chippendale railings on the cupola's deck, and extensive interior reworking. As attenuated and odd as they are, the portico and railings and the octagonal shape of the cupola are distant descendants of Jefferson's architectural ideas.