The Deconstruction of Burgess Field

By Sean Gates

In 1960, shady Washington speculators and a tangled web of land deals turned what was once a rural airport in Dahlgren into what is now called Bayberry Estates. Before interstate highways and huge bridges that span miles of river, private, single-engine aircraft were thought to be the future of personal transportation, and the countryside was dotted with small, rural air fields.

When the Dahlgren Navy base opened in 1918, it was smaller than it is today. Roland A. Burgess and his wife, Viola Shelton Burgess, were the grandparents of Peggy Mullen, the current owner and operator of James F. Mullen Hauling & Grading in Dahlgren. The Burgesses operated an airport off of route 614, or B-Gate Road, on land that belongs to the base today. In 1940, what was then known as the Naval Proving Ground expanded its holdings and the Burgesses were forced to relocate their air field.

They ended up moving to what is now Bayberry Estates. The land had once been part of the Cloverdale Estate, and had belonged to the Peed family since 1888, when one-time Confederate Cavalryman and long-serving King George Justice of the Peace, John Nathaniel Peed, bought it in a commissioner’s sale. Peed passed away in 1936 and had left the land to his heirs, who were friends with the Burgesses. In 1941 the Peed heirs sold their father’s land to Roland A. Burgess and his wife.

Burgess Field as it appeared in March of 1952.  The two-lane US 301 is visible in the lower right-hand corner. 
Nearby is the hangar, which stood until the 1990's.

The airport operated on the former Peed land for more than 15 years, but in 1956, nearly 15 years to the day after he’d purchased it, Roland A. Burgess passed away. His wife, Viola, followed five years later. Before she died, Viola and her grown children, including Roland Robert Burgess – Peggy Mullen’s father, known as “Blue,” – sold the land to developers from Washington and Maryland.

By 1960, the Dahlgren Navy base had cemented its place as King George County’s largest employer, and new, affordable housing was in demand. Eden Estates opened on 206, and Bayberry – originally to be called Cloverdale, in a nod to its history – was to follow soon after. But the process of constructing the Cloverdale Subdivision turned out to be long and laborious, and the string of deals made in connection with the development is surprisingly convoluted.

On December 14th, 1960, Vaseleos Colevas and his then-wife, Helen Fontana, purchased most of the Burgess land for $30,000. Colevas was the president of Arundel Asphalt Products from the 1960’s until the 1980’s, and served as a Marine Corps supply sergeant in World War II. In January of 1961, the Colevases conveyed part of the land to Linden Homes for $32,000.

Linden Homes and its sister company, Cloverdale Construction, were both based out of Maryland. The two companies were founded at the same time, and had the same officers. The president of both was a Baltimore architect named M. Robert Gemmill, who later served as Chief of the Howard County Bureau of Inspections and Permits. In March of 1961, Linden and Cloverdale filed the first stage of their construction plans with the county, including Danube Drive to the intersection with Baltic, and then the north end of Baltic to the cul-de-sac along the creek, where the original three model homes still stand.

A year later, in March of 1962, with lagging sales apparently halting construction, Linden Homes conveyed the rest of their holdings to a company called Oak Hill Farms, whose officers included Colevas as secretary, and a Maryland real estate man as vice president, Constas “Gus” Basiliko, brother of notorious Washington DC slumlord George Basiliko. Oak Hill also bought the debt, agreeing to finish paying off the mortgage that Linden took out to buy their part of the land in the first place. The Colevases then conveyed the part of the Burgess land they still owned to Oak Hill as well, and Oak Hill turned around and sold the whole thing to the Dahlgren Development Corporation, whose officers included an attorney from the Bronx, named Sylvester Alliegro, and a Westmoreland businessman named George William Stanford. The Dahlgren Development Corporation took out a $65,000 mortgage through the Merchant’s Mortgage Company.

By the middle of May of 1962, the $32,000 mortgage originally taken out by Linden Homes was paid off in full, presumably by Oak Hill farms, against the money received from the Dahlgren Development Corporation. In July of that year, George William Stanford, president of the Dahlgren Development Corporation, and his then-wife Audrey, sued Gus Basiliko and District Title Insurance Co. for allegedly defrauding them in a real estate transaction in Virginia.

Gus Basiliko (center) arriving for his arraignment in 1944.

In fact Gus Basiliko was no stranger to accusations of fraud. As early as 1944, he was arrested on suspicion of leading an East Coast ring that was selling used gas vouchers during the WWII fuel ration. In 1956 Gus, along with his brother George and some other businessmen, were convicted of attempting to defraud the state of Maryland in a real estate scam, buying land along a state road slated for improvement, then selling the land through various straw parties, thus falsely inflating the value of the land before selling it to the state of Maryland for the road work. Gus Basiliko appealed no less than six verdicts in which he was a defendant in the space of twenty-five years, and that doesn’t include the 1944 fuel voucher case. He occasionally impersonated his brother. He was in litigation at the time of his death in 1978. 

In 1964, the Dahlgren Development Corporation defaulted on the $65,000 mortgage it had taken out from Merchant’s. The still unfinished Cloverdale Subdivision was foreclosed and sold on March 16th, 1964, at King George Courthouse, to an engineer named C. Warren Bogan, and his wife Margaretta. Warren Bogan was the new vice-president of Oak Hill Farms, the position previously held by Gus Basiliko. Bogan immediately transferred title of his new land to Majestic Realty Corporation. At least one familiar name appears among the officers of Majestic: Sylvester Alliegro, the secretary of the Dahlgren Development Corporation. The president of Majestic was J. George Alliegro, Sylvester’s brother.

Section 2 of Cloverdale (what is presently known as Williams Place), originally planned and filed at the courthouse by Linden and Cloverdale back in 1962, was finally completed in 1965. Majestic defaulted on their obligations and the land was foreclosed and sold again on July 15th, 1966, to National Savings and Trust Company.

Original full-page ad for Cloverdale Subdivision, as it appeared in the King George News circa 1962.  Residents of Bayberry Estates will note that the map at the top is different from the final layout.

By 1967, Danube Drive was lined with homes, and the original plan for Cloverdale, now called Bayberry Estates, had been altered to reflect a less ambitious project. Bayberry remained under construction well into the 1980’s. Siebert’s Shell station at the entrance to Bayberry was formerly a Texaco service station owned by Leroy McDaniel. For three decades, the old hangar for Burgess Field still stood in the clearing behind the station, a green clapboard structure with a tin gambrel-style roof. The hangar had decayed badly by the early 1990’s, and was demolished, and with it the last vestiges of Bayberry’s origins.