Cedar Lawn is built on a parcel of land owned by Thornton Washington and his wife Mildred Berry which they acquired from Thornton's father Samuel Washington. Samuel had inherited one of three tracts of land in then Frederick County, Virginia, owned by his older half-brother Lawrence. In 1770 Samuel built his home Harewood there.
Thornton and his wife Mildred built "a large house of logs and plank" on the property which they named Berry Hill in honor of Mildred's childhood home Berry Plain. In 1825 their son John Thornton Augustine Washington and his wife Elizabeth Conrad Bedinger replaced the wooden structure with a brick mansion which they named Cedar Lawn.
The home passed from the Washington family in 1855. It was one of the Jefferson County Washington homes acquired by industrialist R. J. Funkhouser in the 1940s. This photograph was published in the pamphlet The Washington Homes of Jefferson County, West Virginia by the Jefferson County Historical Society in 1975.