In The Dixon Valley: Its First 150 Years, John K. Gott and T. Triplett Russell wrote that McKendree Jones and his wife, who built a mansion (pictured above) on a Virginia estate that Johnny Harris bought in 1897, “christened all of this Glenara for a remote and ruined castle in the Scottish Highlands.” ​​Gott and Russell did not provide a source for that name origin. Nathan Vyklicky, who designed, co-edited, and copy edited The King of Sandon, investigated this claim. His findings are below.

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This is what I think can be said with confidence. There's no sign of a Glenara or Glen Ara Castle, ruined or not, but in the latter half of the 19th century Glenaras started popping up all over: a Scotsman's 1857 estate outside Melbourne, an 1873 home in Adelaide (said to be named after a Scottish Chieftain), an 1881 name for a home in Cape Town, possibly an 1870s spike in use as girl's name.

 

This happens to be after a romance poem called "Glenara" (about a "chief of Glenara") was often anthologized during the early 19th century, and a novel called The Dawsons of Glenara: A Story of Scottish Life, set in a fictional village called Glenara, came out in 1887. Glenara was in the air as a Scottishy place.

 

There does seem to be a real place behind the fictions: An 1885 Scottish history says the poem was inspired by a tradition about the Aray River valley, aka the glen of the Aray (variously spelled Glen Ara, Glenara, or today Glenaray), which had a local chieftain or laird of Glenara. But there was no Glenaray Castle, either. There's the iconic Inveraray Castle there — but hardly a ruin, then or now.

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All in all, there's no clear evidence for the ruined castle cited by the Virginia sources, but there is a globally popular name from poetry and fiction.

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For more on the Glenara of Fauquier County, click here.