All told, I've now lived in Falls Church for 25 years. You'd think after all that time I'd know every nook and cranny within 50 miles, but just a few days ago I made an amazing new discovery . . . hidden, but sitting practically across the street. It got me thinking.
I remember once talking to a Palestinian man about the West Bank town I was staying in, suggesting that it had seen a lot of history. “Oh, no,” he replied, “Ramallah is a new town, only about 400 years old.” I’m sure he had no idea just how absurd that sounded to an American whose own country really didn’t get going until the 18th century and where we call a famous structure built in Boston as recently as 1723, the “Old North Church.”
It turns out that Ramallah, a town just north of Jerusalem, was settled about the same time Sir Walter Raleigh financed the ill-fated “Lost Colony” of Roanoke. The short-lived colony of Roanoke lay in what was then called the Dominion of Virginia, named after Queen Elizabeth I, the “Virgin Queen” (thus called because she never married — no one knows why but it might have something to do with the fact that her father, King Henry VIII, beheaded her mother, Anne Boleyn). The site of Roanoke is now part of North Carolina’s Dare County, named after Virginia Dare, the first child born in America to English parents.
Ramallah was already several generations old when another group of English colonists waded onto a marshy island in an estuary of the Chesapeake Bay and named it Jamestown after their new king (the same who gave us the King James version of the Bible). That was in 1607 and the colony became the oldest permanent English settlement in America.
Thirteen years later English Pilgrims sailed into Plymouth Bay aboard the Mayflower. During those intervening years, the Black Plague was still sweeping through Europe, William Shakespeare wrote, The Tempest, Galileo began looking through telescopes and Shah Jahan married the woman for whom he would later build the Taj Mahal.
By world standards all that is recent history. By the time Jamestown colonist John Rolfe married an Algonquian Indian girl named Pocahontas, the Leaning Tower of Pisa was already 400 years old and the Parthenon in Athens had been standing for over 20 centuries. Even in England where there are foundations of buildings dating to the Norman Invasion, some like to call America’s brief architectural heritage, “temporary housing.”
Still, I remember how awed I was when I moved to Virginia and first saw the sign just up the street from where I live:
Settled in 1699! Given my Colorado upbringing where my grade school history book essentially began with the 1858 gold rush and where “old” meant a one hundred-year-old miner’s cabin, Virginia is indeed old and Virginia does have history.
What has become more evident each year I live here is that, while Lynn and I used to stumble onto a Civil War battlefield or a boyhood home of a Founding Father on one of our weekend road trips, this area is so immersed in reminders of the nation's past that I can actually see a number of not-so-little pieces of America's history while just standing on my balcony. In fact, the parcel of land my building sits on was once owned by George Washington.
From my 17th story balcony I have a view that stretches all the way from the Blue Ridge Mountains that border the Shenandoah Valley in the west to the roof of the White House in downtown Washington. I even once saw thick, black smoke from a
major fire in Baltimore (40 miles away) where 200 years ago, by the dawn’s early light, Francis Scott Key could see the star-spangled banner still waving over the ramparts of Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor after a night of British bombardment during the War of 1812.My address on Seminary Road takes its name from the nearby Virginia Theological Seminary that Francis Scott Key, a Georgetown lawyer, helped found in 1823. Georgetown, now an upscale neighborhood of Washington, D.C., is connected to Virginia via the (Francis Scott) Key Bridge that spans the Potomac River. At one end of the bridge is Georgetown University and the long set of steps the priest falls down in “The Exorcist” and at the other end, the parking garage where Bob Woodward clandestinely met with “Deep Throat” during the Watergate scandal.
What is most remarkable is that I continue to discover surprising American treasures not forty miles away or even ten miles away but sometimes within just yards of where I live.
Although I have a Falls Church address, the zip code is sometimes listed as Baileys Crossroads. If you’ve talked to me on the phone and heard sirens it’s because the fire trucks are turning from their
Columbia Pike fire station onto Leesburg Pike. The intersection is called Baileys Crossroads after the Bailey family of circus fame.Hachaliah Bailey had operated a "menagerie" of elephants before moving here in 1837 and building "Bailey's Mansion" or "Moray." His son, Lewis Bailey, operated a traveling circus that pioneered the use of circus tents before he also settled to farm at Bailey's Crossroads. A nephew, Fred Bailey, recognized a potential circus talent in James Anthony McGuiness who changed his name to James Bailey and united the Cooper and Bailey circus with P. T. Barnum to form the Barnum and Bailey Circus, then billed as "The Greatest Show on Earth."
During the Civil War, Union officers and their families boarded at Bailey's "Moray." Now nothing is left of the 100-room mansion except a sign that is incongruously placed between the Old Navy store and the Safeway where I buy my groceries.
Leesburg Pike
Leesburg Pike (Route 7) runs past my complex and is by itself a window to the past. Originally called the Alexandria-Leesburg Turnpike, it stretches from the Alexandria docks on the Potomac River to Leesburg, situated at the foot of the Blue Ridge. It was built in the early 1800s by Alexandria merchants as a private toll road. Large wooden barrels or hogsheads filled with some 300 pounds of tobacco would be rolled down the road to the tobacco warehouses on the river for export.
Leesburg Pike was one of the earliest toll roads in America and derived its name from a long pike or pole that stretched across the road. Once the toll was paid the pike was turned on a turnstile to allow the traveler to pass, hence the term “turnpike.”
On Thursday, May 23, 1861, the turnpike’s small log tollbooth was used as a polling station for local citizens to vote in the matter of Virginia's proposal to secede from the Union; Thirty-three votes were cast; twenty-nine for secession.
At the Potomac River end of the Leesburg Pike is “Old Town” Alexandria. From 1828 to 1836 Alexandria was home to the Franklin & Armfield Slave Market, one of the largest slave trading
firms in the country. By the 1830s the company was sending more than 1,000 slaves annually from Alexandria to their Natchez, Mississippi, and New Orleans markets to help meet the demand for slaves in Mississippi and surrounding states.The Franklin & Armfield building is still there as is Market Square, the oldest continuously operating marketplace in the United States and once the site of the second-largest slave market in the young nation. Today it’s a fountain in a large square where I used to go to hear small concerts on Saturday mornings.
Up the street a couple of miles from my balcony, on a small rise, the pike intersects another old crossroads called Seven Corners. It was originally an Indian trading post where several trails converged. During the Civil War, Seven Corners was the site where Federal troops built Fort Buffalo, one of a ring of forts protecting the District of Columbia in 1861.
A hundred years later, stores were built at Seven Corners and in 1953 President Eisenhower took Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to visit the site as an example of the new prototype of American retailing emporiums. Seven Corners Shopping Center is still there, including the Home Depot hardware store where Linda Franklin was shot and killed by DC snipers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo as she returned to her car in the crowded parking garage. Lynn called me that night scared and in tears — she had been shopping at the same Home Depot just a half hour before the shooting.
The Falls Church
The area now called Falls Church was settled in 1699 and later took its name from a wooden church that was built in 1734 on an intersection of two Algonquian Indian trails leading down to the lower Potomac River Falls. By 1763 one of the parishioners and a member of the vestry (lay governing council) of the church was none other than George Washington who was appointed to contract for a new building. That brick building still stands today.
George Mason, author of the Virginia Bill of Rights, a Virginia delegate to the Constitutional Convention, and considered a Founding Father was also a member of The Falls Church. Not surprisingly, all that history is reflected in local street names. I live at the intersection of Seminary Road and George Mason Drive.
It’s not hard to believe the claim that the Declaration of Independence was read to local Virginians from the steps of the south doors of the church.
Falls Church during the Civil War by Matthew Brady
The Falls Church today
During the Civil War, Union cavalry used the Falls Church as both a hospital and later as a stable (remember this was generally Confederate territory). The damage from this is still visible on the west door and on some windows. Northern troops also vandalized the interior. Compensation was made to the congregation by the federal government after the war.
The Boundary Stones
This is the new discovery I made just days ago:
While Congress was meeting at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, a group of soldiers from the Continental Army demanding payment for their service during the Revolutionary War threatened to attack the delegates. The fact that Pennsylvania failed to act to protect the national government ultimately led to the creation of the District of Columbia
as a place the government could assure its own security, independent of the states.As a result, Article I of the Constitution provides for a national capital, not to exceed ten miles square. The site for the District of Columbia was selected by George Washington and was carved out of Maryland and Virginia, a square on the diagonal with the Potomac running through it.
In 1791 surveyors placed boundary stones at each mile interval. On each stone, the side facing the District of Columbia displayed the inscription "Jurisdiction of the United States" and a mile number. The opposite side read either "Virginia" or "Maryland," as appropriate. The third and fourth sides displayed the year in which the stone was placed (1791 for the 14 Virginia stones and 1792 for the 26 Maryland stones) and the magnetic compass variance at that place.
It turns out that one of those original Boundary Stones is located just across the street (Leesburg Pike), behind the Giant Food store. I had no idea.
One of the better preserved Boundary Stones in Maryland
A twist to the story is that in 1846 all District land south of the Potomac was retroceded back to Virginia, so all the Boundary Stones in Virginia no longer delineate the District. The reason for the retrocession is an interesting story in itself involving, once again, Alexandria’s slave trade.
I always believed I lived close to, but just outside the original Federal City. The Boundary Stones finally prove it.
The Battle Hymn of the Republic
Just 8 miles from Washington, Bailey's Crossroads saw action during the Civil War. The houses along Leesburg Pike became rotating quarters for Confederate or Yankee soldiers.
In late September of 1861 Federal forces moved to secure Munson's Hill at Baileys Crossroads after the Rebels' departure. Instead of the powerful artillery they assumed the Confederates
had left behind, they found "Quaker cannons" — logs painted black to intimidate General George B. McClellan's Army of the Potomac. The cannons were placed near what is now a most unlikely post-Civil War eatery: the Peking Gourmet Inn, which sits in an entirely nondescript strip mall but was made famous by the very frequent visits by both Presidents Bush and their families, once even with National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice in tow.To buoy Union troops after their summer defeat at Bull Run, President Lincoln and General McClellan staged the largest troop review of the Civil War. In November of 1861 The New York Times reported that the formal review was, "the largest body of troops ever before reviewed on this Continent" — 70,000 strong — strode down Leesburg Pike in Bailey's Cross Roads.
More than 20 generals led seven divisions, including seven regiments of cavalry, 90 regiments of infantry and 20 batteries of artillery numbering 120 pieces. The Times described "a semi-circle of about four miles" when all divisions were finally in place. “As far as the eye could reach there was nothing but lines of bayonets and uniformed men,” one of the Vermont soldiers later wrote in his journal.
Abraham Lincoln reviewed the troops on horseback for many hours, beginning at about 1:30 p.m. on that cold, windy afternoon. McClellan and members of the Cabinet accompanied him. By all accounts, 20,000 to 30,000 civilians cheered from the sidelines. A marker now stands just across Leesburg Pike from the Crossroads BP Station where I get my Virginia emissions inspection.
(click to enlarge)
Among those present at the Bailey’s Crossroads “Grand Review” was Julia Ward Howe who wrote new words to a tune popular with Union troops. Accounts vary as to the day she first wrote the lyrics but her song was published a few months later as "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps.
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps;
His day is marching on!
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps.
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps;
His day is marching on!
Virginia is indeed old and Virginia does have history. Over the past 25 years I’ve rediscovered some of the America I was taught in school but couldn't then begin to appreciate — dozens of not-so-little pieces of history right in my own backyard, many right off my balcony . . . all of them defining a large part of who I am.
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