(Helen Lane research paper, June 1998)
The Donaldson Run watershed is in the northern part of Arlington County, VA. The stream itself is a little over a mile long and flows into the Potomac.
The watershed is contained in the area bordered as follows: (1) by Glebe Road on the west; (2) the southern border runs from the corner of Lee Highway and Glebe Road east along Lee Highway to Lorcom Lane, then along Lorcom Lane to Military Road and along Military Road to 26th St. North where it angles to the right to the Potomac; (3) the eastern border is the Potomac River and its Palisades; and (4) the northern border runs from the Potomac along Roberts Lane and Rock Spring Road to Glebe Road. The George Washington Parkway crosses the Potomac Palisades but does not have direct access to the watershed neighborhood. (See Map 1)
The watershed area includes numerous ‘natural,’ educational and recreational areas:
While the watershed is a discrete geological and geographic entity, the contemporary human population, does not differ significantly from neighborhoods to the north and west. It is thus somewhat arbitrary to define it as a distinct human neighborhood. Nor does the watershed lend itself to easy definition as a historic entity, given that, since the 1950’s, the poles of human activity in the area have shifted as streets were connected and the location of public schools and polling places changed. The watershed area does not center on a main or high street with shops, although Lee Highway, which runs along the southern border, is a modern commercial strip, which serves that purpose. Contemporary inhabitants depend on private automobiles for the vast majority of their transportation needs and for easy access to shopping and the many educational, sports and cultural activities of the Greater Washington Area. The area of the watershed is approximately 1.5 square miles.
Today the inhabitants are largely upper-middle class and homes sell in the $250,000 to $500,000 and higher range. Very few residents work within the neighborhood. About half of the working population works in the District of Columbia and the other half work at a variety of locations elsewhere in the metropolitan area. Automobiles are the principal mean of access to the workplace. A number of residents are retired civil servants who bought their homes 30 or more years ago.
I have also included Marcy Creek, a small stream flowing into the Potomac one-half mile south of the mouth of Donaldson Run, in this neighborhood, because it has an interesting Indian site, and shares much of Donaldson Run’s history.
The watershed and its underlying substructure were formed by geologic processes going back at least 400 million years. At that time the continent Laurentia, the piece of the earth’s crust where our neighborhood is located, lay well below the equator, but with the Appalachian Mountains already formed. An ancient ocean lay between Laurentia, our continent’s precursor, and another continent, Gondwana, part of which would later become South America.
About 250 million years ago, as the earth’s tectonic plates moved, Laurentia and Gondwana collided, forming the super-continent of Pangea, and the floor of the ancient ocean was smashed and deformed between the colliding land masses. Our piece of the crust had by then had moved north of the equator.
About 100 million years ago, during the age of dinosaurs, Pangea began rifting into three parts. Our part became North America.
About five million years ago, the Potomac River made one of its many shifting meanders as it flowed down from the Appalachians to the Ocean. It deposited layers of river sand, silt and rock on top of the ancient ocean floor which had been thrust up as the tectonic plates came together 250 million years earlier. One of these silt and rock deposits or terraces, designated as Terrace 4 on the USGS map and Bryn Mar gravel on an earlier map, is the highest part of our neighborhood watershed.
Donaldson Run emerges as a spring-fed stream from River Terrace 4 and runs Northeast for a little over a mile, dropping over 300 feet and cutting deeply into bedrock mica schist as it nears the Potomac. On the right and left banks of the Run are several lower terrace deposits from which flow tributary streams.
A bit of the ancient history of the watershed is contained in a skolithos fossil, embedded in a river cobble, which was found near the top of the watershed near the North Arlington water tower. Many millions of years ago Skolithos linearis was a worm who made a burrow on a sandy beach. Over time that beach became sandstone. Heat from the mountain building process converted the sandstone into quartzite in the Blue Ridge. In time the rock broke apart and the Potomac carried it downstream rounding its contours until it came to rest in our neighborhood.
When humankind first entered our neighborhood, its underlying geology was very like what it is today, but the ecology and climate would have been quite different. Our neighborhood was on the west bank of the Potomac River on the Piedmont Plateau, at the top of the estuary of the river, just below Little Falls.
The underlying rocks, which could be seen along the river’s edge, would have been similar to what they are today, the complexly deformed and uplifted sedimentary and igneous rocks that 500 million years earlier had been the floor of an ancient ocean. That geologic formation, which is our neighborhood bedrock is part of one of the most complex and least understood terranes on the continent. Known today as the Sykesville Formation, it was first described in an outcropping near Sykesville, MD. It is made up of sedimentary gneiss, a metamorphic rock, and feldspar. The upper part of this formation is decaying into saprolite, a clay formation. On top of the clay layer is a thinner layer of topsoil.
When the first humans arrived, the vegetation was tundra-like and the climate cold. These first humans in our neighborhood were Paleo-Indians, descendants of the Siberian hunters who crossed the Bering land bridge from Asia roughly ten thousand years ago. According to Scott Silsby, a local archaeologist, a “clovis” point, the typical arrowhead of the period, was found during the excavation of the Donaldson Run Recreation Association pool. Tools characteristic of the Paleo-Indians also have been found in Fairfax County.
As the climate grew warmer, the land became forested and the wooly mammoths disappeared. Humans continued to reside in the watershed. Pottery from the next cultural period, the Archaic (8000 to 1000 BC) has been found near Donaldson Run. At a site excavated in the 1940’s near the mouth of Marcy Creek, the next stream below Donaldson Run, pottery from the late Archaic period was found. It is classified as “Marcy Creek Ware” and is characterized by textured decoration made by pressing cords into the clay and crushed soapstone before it was baked. It is the same color as the yellow-brown saprolite clay we find if we dig down a foot or so in our backyards. The Marcy Creek site in now covered by the GW Parkway.
The Archaic Culture was succeeded by the Woodland Indian Culture (1000 BC to 1608 AD), which was notable for the development of rudimentary slash and burn agriculture. Crops included corn, beans and melons. These Indians lived in small groups and probably moved seasonally. Their abodes were small huts made of sapling poles fasted together in a rounded form, which could be taken down and moved when needed. Several rudimentary sites used by the Woodland Indians have been found in Potomac Overlook Regional Park. In the 1850’s a soapstone Indian bowl was found by a local farmer named Donaldson and used to hold feed for chickens. That bowl is now in the University of Pennsylvania Museum.
These sites may have been used when shad was running up the Potomac and into Donaldson Run. The name “run” is used in Northern Virginia to designate small watercourses where migratory fish ran upstream to spawn. The Woodland Indians traveled the river in dugout canoes made from large tulip poplar trunks. An Indian burial site was reportedly found in the 19th century on the Donaldson farm near the Run.
The arrival of the English in Virginia led to the quick demise of the native peoples. Their numbers, never very large, were greatly reduced by white man’s diseases to which they had no immunity and by warfare both with the whites and with neighboring tribes. By 1680, the last remnants probably had moved up river to Conoy Island in the Potomac just below Point of Rocks, Maryland, and no native people remained in Arlington.
Captain John Smith may have reached the mouth of Donaldson Run when he sailed up the Potomac in June of 1608, in his quest for a short cut to the Orient. He mentioned the “innumerable sweet and pleasant springs” below the falls. Following Smith’s exploration, our area was visited by traders, who came for beaver pelts; however, there was no permanent settlement in what is now Arlington County until the 1700s. The undeveloped land belonged to a few large landowners such as the Lords Fairfax, and later the Lees, the Alexanders, the Jennings and the Masons. It was a remote part of the Northern Neck, the area of Virginia between the Rappahanock and the Potomac.
The first plantation house built in Arlington was Abingdon built by Gerard Alexander on a site near today’s Reagan National Airport in 1740. When the settlement at Belle Haven on the Potomac was recognized by the House of Burgesses in 1749, it was formally named Alexandria, in honor of John Alexander, Gerard’s great-grandfather, who had originally surveyed some of the area.
The development of the neighboring towns of Alexandria and Georgetown (1750) brought a few early settlers into the proximity of our watershed. In 1770, 516 acres of land, immediately to our south was purchased from Daniel Jennings for a “glebe” farm and rectory to support both Christ Church in Alexandria, which had been established in 1767, and the Falls Church, which was established to accommodate the up-river settlers. The trail or road from Alexandria to the Little Falls passed by the glebe and came to be known as Glebe Road.
In 1778, the Alexanders sold 1,000 acres to John Parke Custis, Martha Washington’s son, which later was developed into an estate and named Arlington, from which the current county would take its name in 1920.
The first bridge linking the two sides of the Potomac was built in 1797 across Little Falls. Its purpose was to bring cattle from Fairfax County to market in Georgetown. It was destroyed by floods in 1804 and rebuilt using chains, hence its name Chain Bridge.
A trace called the Sugarland Trail led from a ferry landing between Georgetown and what is now Rosslyn past the Falls Church to Sugarland Run in the Dranesville area, where there was a large grove of Sugar Maples. This trace was the forerunner of today’s Lee Highway.
The watershed political event that would most influence our small geological watershed’s development was the establishment of the Federal District in 1800. When first established the Federal District included all of today’s Arlington County, as well as the Federal City just across the river (See Map 2). What is now Arlington became a separate political entity in 1801, when it was separated from Fairfax County and organized as Alexandria County. The watershed was in the northernmost district of Alexandria County, the Washington District. In the early decades of the 19th century, the inhabitants were few and lived on scattered farms.
The first house that we know of to be built in the watershed was that of Caleb Birch, whose family had been in the Northern Neck for close to a century. Birch was the son of a Col. John Birch and the eighth of 13 children. Birch built his log cabin in about 1800 on property inherited from his grandfather, who had received the land in 1724 as part of a grant from Lord Fairfax. The original cabin burned and was rebuilt in 1836. A second cabin was built a decade later and the two were joined under a common roof with a “dog trot” in between. The property was still in the family in 1850, and was being farmed by two of Caleb’s sons, named John and Caleb. According to the Agricultural Census for 1850, on 110 acres the Birches grew wheat, rye, corn and Irish potatoes and had a market garden. They owned four horses, eight cows and 31 swine.
The site of Caleb Birch’s house is less than 100 yards up the street from my house. It was restored as a residence and greatly remodeled in 1939 (See photograph after Map 2). A number of the original chestnut logs were incorporated in the restored structure. Two of Caleb’s brothers, William and Samuel, also had farms in North Arlington. A Birch family graveyard is nearby, on the grounds of Marymount College and Birch descendants still reside in North Arlington.
Other farm families in the watershed were the Marceys, who were in our neighborhood before 1830, and the Donaldsons, whose name first appeared on a 1782 Virginia census for Fairfax County. Andrew Donaldson was named superintendent of the Glebe in 1808, when the Glebe House was partially destroyed by fire. He was to prevent the theft of timber by trespassers and to deliver every fourth load of wood to the rector of Christ Church in Alexandria. These two families were to give their names to Donaldson Run and Marcey Creek. Before the publication of a County Map in 1900, Donaldson Run was known as Swimming Landing Run, and on Ellicot’s 1793 map of the Federal District it is shown as Rock Run.
The Glebe was sold by Christ Church in Alexandria in 1815. The funds received were used to purchase a rectory close to the Alexandria church and to pay for the erection of a steeple and a churchyard fence. All glebe lands in Virginia were confiscated by the Commonwealth in 1802; however, the Christ Church Glebe escaped confiscation as it was part of the District of Columbia. This case went to the Supreme Court for final decision.
By 1850 our neighborhood’s links with the outside world had improved. The Aqueduct Bridge across the Potomac at Georgetown, which carried waters of the C&O canal and canal boats to the Port of Alexandria, had been completed in 1843. In 1852 a Georgetown group built a plank toll road along the old Sugarland Trail through Falls Church to Fairfax, then called Providence.
Formation of Larger Farms (1846-1860)
Around the middle of the Century several larger landholdings were established in the vicinity of our neighborhood by newcomers to the area. One holding belonged to Gilbert Vanderwerken and another to Bazil Hall. Vanderwerken was admired by his neighbors for his enterprise and good nature, whereas Hall was remembered for his violent temper.
Gilbert Vanderwerken (1810 – 1894) was born in Albany, NY and was apprenticed to a coach maker. As a young man he operated a stage coach line from Mexico City to Vera Cruz. His next venture was a coach line from Aqueduct Bridge to the Navy Yards. His business grew and became the first public transportation company in the capital. In order to have a place to raise and pasture his many horses, he bought a large tract of land which included part of the Donaldson Run watershed. Some of this land was purchased from the Mason Estate. Vanderwerken also kept thoroughbreds, one of which served as the model for the Andrew Jackson equestrian statue in Lafayette Park. Shad oil was used to grease the wheels of the Vanderwerken coaches.
Another Vanderwerken enterprise was the stone quarry on the Potomac Palisades, which provided the stone for Georgetown University and the Haines’ Point seawalls and other structures. The quarry was located along the Potomac Palisades from north of Donaldson Run to below Marcey Creek. Although quarrying had existed earlier, Vanderwerken’s Potomac Blue Stone Company was the first to exploit the exposed Palisades gneiss on a large scale. Quarrying and gravel works persisted there until 1938. Beginning in Colonial times, and until into the 20th century, quarry operators leased exclusive fishing rights and small plots along the river to local fishermen.
Bazil Hall (1806 – 1888) was born in the District of Columbia. He had been a whaler and had spent time in South America and California. In 1850, when he bought a 327 acre farm in Arlington, he gave his occupation as trimmer of wood. Prior to 1860, “Old” Hall, as he was commonly known, had a number of slaves, whom he reportedly treated as badly as he treated everyone else. He is reported to have shot one slave in a fit of temper. In 1857, his wife Elizabeth was murdered by one of the Hall slaves, who pushed her into a fire following an argument. Hall soon married the daughter of a neighboring farmer. In 1860 he had 125 acres under cultivation and the rest in timber consisting of oak, pine, chestnut and hickory. He had corn, oats, rye, potatoes, and clover pasture under cultivation, and an orchard of apple, pear and other fruit trees. His house was worth $3,000 and was located on a 400 foot high hill which he called “Hall’s Hill.” This is the terrace at the top of our neighborhood.
Bazil Hall had a sister Mary, who in 1853 purchased a 72-acre farm from the Birch family on Glebe Road for use as a summer residence. Mary Hall’s farm is the site today of Marymount University. The similarity in nomenclature between Mary Hall’s farm and Marymount University is entirely coincidental.
Alexandria County was returned to Virginia in 1846. The ‘retrocession’ came about because of the delay in completing the Aqueduct Bridge, which was to carry the C&O Canal to Alexandria. The project had begun in 1830 with promises of strong federal support. Because of delays at the Cumberland end of the canal and changes in the plans for the Aqueduct Bridge, funding for the project was exhausted before the Bridge was completed. Once the canal reached Georgetown, Congress refused to appropriate more money. Alexandria County turned to Virginia for aid. Virginia promised to help, if Congress would restore Alexandria County to Virginia jurisdiction.
The public referendum to give final approval to the recession to Virginia did not actually take place until several years after the Bridge was completed. It appears to have been strongly supported by the native Virginians but opposed by many of the newcomers from north of the river. The opportunity to have a vote and a political voice must have been a strong selling point in favor of retrocession.
Apart from the chapel at the Arlington plantation, the first church built in Arlington County was the Mount Olivet Methodist Church at the corner of Glebe Road and Brown’s Bend Road (now North 16th St.). The original church was completed in 1860 and included a school. The Methodist, rather than the Episcopal Church, was the church of choice for most of the farm families in the watershed. Judging from their surnames, almost all were of English ancestry.
The Civil War and Following Decades (1860 – 1890)
The Civil War brought severe hardship to inhabitants of the Donaldson Run area and great destruction of the natural environment. The inhabitants were divided in their allegiances, with the native Virginians tending to favor the Confederacy, and the newcomers favoring the Union. As soon as Virginia joined the Confederacy, the area became an armed camp, occupied by the Union Army (See Map 3).
Following the First Battle of Bull Run in the summer of 1861, the Mount Olivet Church building was commandeered by a retreating New York regiment. The church was used as a hospital, a commissary, a guard post and then a stable. Eventually the church was torn apart by the troops for firewood. When the claim for damages was finally settled in 1904, it was used to build the parsonage.
Bazil Hall voted against the succession of Virginia from the Union and Hall’s Hill became a Union encampment. After the Second Battle of Bull Run, Hall’s house was shelled by Confederate troops. Hall himself was caught between the two lines of fire and his barn burned. Later the Union troops advanced and burned the house and cut all the timber to get a clearer line of fire. Hall’s farm, situated on a hilltop, later became a Union camp. It was described by a military historian as well-watered and containing a woodland, which furnished fuel for the camp during the winter of 1861-1862. Bazil Hall moved into his sister Mary’s summer house on Glebe Road and was employed by the Union Army to cut wood.
Mary Hall was a colorful local character. According to census records, she operated a “boarding house” with 13 female residents in ward four of the Federal District. After the war, Bazil Hall’s Hill became a Freedmen’s Settlement and remains an African-American community to this day. Mary seems to have prospered during the war and afterwards built a stylish house on her property.
Vanderwerken also was a Union supporter and his property was used by Union troops. The house became a hospital, and the carpentry shop a headquarters. In return Vanderwerken asked General Hancock to protect both the buildings and his “grove of fine trees.”
Two forts were built about a mile north of the watershed to protect Chain Bridge. Military Road was cut through to connect those forts with the chain of fortifications built further to the south to protect the National Capital from attack. Military Road was built in three days through what was described as “mainly broken and densely wooded country.” An old lithograph of Military Road at the time indicates that it was a road of great muddy ruts, stumps and potholes, and that the trees along the sides had been clear-cut.
During the war years, woods, barns, furniture and homes were destroyed for firewood. The end of the war left the inhabitants impoverished and exhausted. Although most of locals had supported the South, some of the Yankee soldiers stayed on and married local women. In the next decades more newcomers trickled into the area and slowly civilization took hold again. A little community, called Wunder’s Crossroads after a local farm, grew up at the top of the watershed, where Glebe Road crossed the Georgetown-Fairfax Road, which had evolved from the Sugarland Trail and later became Lee Highway (See Map 4). The first public school in the neighborhood was built in 1871 on Glebe Road. It was a one-room school, with one schoolmaster and about ninety pupils of assorted ages. It was replaced by a larger building with several teachers in 1885. A general store was located next door to the school. In 1888 a Post Office opened in Rosslyn, and residents no longer had to use the Georgetown Post Office for mail.
The Trolley, the Automobile and the Development of an Early Commuter Community (1890 – 1929)
The rebuilding of the Aqueduct Bridge after the 1889 flood and the arrival of the trolley improved access to the Federal City. Public safety also improved. After the war, the Commonwealth and local governments had been left very weak and unable to confront the criminal and gambling element which operated openly along the waterfront adjacent to the Federal District. Rosslyn was a very rough area, and residents returning from market in Georgetown sometimes traveled through it in armed convoys. In 1902 a reform government was elected, and the undesirable elements along the river were brought under better control. These improvements encouraged a new group of well-to-do Washingtonians, in search of desirable locations for summer homes, to locate in reaches of the watershed. The most notable of these was Dr. Presley M. Rixey (1852 – 1928).
Dr. Rixey was born in Culpeper, Virginia, and joined the U.S. Navy Medical Corps in 1874. He became the personal physician of President and Mrs. William McKinley, was with McKinley when he was shot in 1901, and attended him until his death nine days later. President Theodore Roosevelt asked him to remain at his post as White House physician. Rixey became Surgeon General of the United States (1902 – 1906) and was a member of the Roosevelt inner social circle. Rixey had a home in the District – first at 909 16th St. and later at 1518 K Street. Not long after the reopening of the Aqueduct Bridge, Rixey bought the handsome Mary Hall farmhouse and farm. When the Washington and Old Dominion Railway (trolley) line was laid along what is now Old Dominion Drive, Rixey built a whistle stop station for his family and guests. It was “the flossiest on the line” with a sign in foot high brass letters that said ‘Rixey Station.’ Roosevelt was a frequent guest and often went riding in the surrounding woods. (See Map 5)
Rixey had a valet named Richard Wallace, who had previously been a chauffeur for Roosevelt. Wallace, a black, discovered the old abandoned Birch cabin in the woods and asked Rixey if he could fix it up and use it as his cottage. Rixey agreed and Wallace made himself comfortable there.
In 1908, Rixey sold 75 acres to the Washington Golf and Country Club, one of the earliest golf clubs in the Washington area. When the new golf course was being laid out, Richard Wallace, who was assisting the surveyors, realized that one of the greens was to be located at his cottage. Wallace took the liberty to move the markers so that his cottage would be spared. Rixey realized what Wallace had done. Rixey was interested in local history and appreciated Wallace’s effort to save the old Birch cabin. Rixey later deeded that portion of the estate to Wallace. This little historical footnote is of interest to me, because if Wallace had not moved the marker, the land where my house is located would be part of the golf course and I would be living somewhere else. The gnarled apple trees in front of the now remodeled cabin are said to have been planted by Wallace.
In 1914 Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft were honorary members of the Washington Golf and Country Club and Woodrow Wilson was an active member. Wilson Boulevard is named for Woodrow Wilson, who would travel out that street to Glebe Road on his way to play golf. In 1919 an additional tract of land was purchased by the club. Over the years there have been several clubhouses. The current clubhouse was built in 1958.
In 1907, Frank Lyon, a newspaper owner, a leader in the reform government, and an early real estate developer, built Lyonhurst, an elegant estate, at the top of the watershed. Lyonhurst (now Missionhurst) was the first home in Arlington to use electricity, which was tapped from the trolley line. Lyon was one of the first to begin developing Arlington as a middle-class residential community. Lyon Park and Lyon Village are Arlington neighborhoods he helped develop and which perpetuate his name.
Closer to the Potomac, on the left bank of the Donaldson run, Florian Roberts, a prominent Washington printer, built a summer home in 1906 with a magnificent view over the palisades. Stone for the foundation and chimney was quarried from the palisades. The family usually traveled across the river by boat from Fletcher’s Boat House.
The development of the electric trolley lines, one of which ran from Rosslyn through Cherrydale, and out to McLean and Great Falls, brought the first touch of urbanization to the heights settlement at Glebe Road and Lee Highway known as Wunder’s Crossroads. The growth of the Federal City during the First World War also brought additional newcomers. But it was better roads and increasing use of private automobiles that would have the greatest impact on the watershed. What had been a rural community and a summer resort for the wealthy was becoming a community whose residents lived in Arlington year round and commuted to work across the river. The first Lee Heights Subdivision appears on the map published in the 1920s . (See Maps 6 and 7.) When the trolley ceased operation about 1925, Rixey deeded the triangle of land where Rixey Station was located to the Episcopal Church. St. Mary’s Episcopal Church now stands on that property.
America’s love affair with the automobile intensified during the Roaring Twenties. In the 1920s the Federal Government designated a network of National Highways, numbered from 1 to 100. The highway starting at milepost 1 in the Federal District and running across Key Bridge and through Arlington to Falls Church was given the number 29. It continued through central Virginia and down to Mobile, Alabama. To honor Robert E. Lee, Highway 29 and sections of National Highways further west connecting to the West Coast at San Diego were designated “Lee Highway.” US Highway 29 in Arlington and through much of Virginia is still called Lee Highway.
Sometime during the 1920s a resident built a private swimming hole in lower Donaldson Run by building a cement dam across the run. The dam was finally broken apart by Hurricane Agnes is 1973. A little down the run there is the ruin of a rustic stone wall across the run. I have not been able to determine its origin, but have been told it may have been part of the stone and gravel quarrying operations.
A major milestone in the urbanization of Arlington was the inauguration in 1925 Washington-Lee High School built, about a half-mile south of our watershed. Before then, County public school students wishing to attend high school attended public high schools in the District of Columbia or Alexandria.
In November 1927 a public water supply, connecting Arlington with the District of Columbia water system, was turned on. Prior to that the County had been served by a variety of public and private wells and springs. The new system brought Potomac River water from the Dalecarlia Reservoir in the District of Columbia through a main running under Chain Bridge, where it was pumped up to a main running down Glebe Road. A series of mains carried the water from Glebe Road to other Arlington communities. The process of gaining approval to connect to the DC water system was a lengthy one. It required approval by both the State legislatures of Virginia and Maryland, by the US Congress, and ultimately by the voters of the County. Among those who had campaigned most avidly for the water bonds were a number of real estate developers who were acquiring farms and other properties. One of the captains was Mrs. Ruby Lee Minar, one of the first to develop subdivisions in our watershed.
In January 1927 Minar purchased the tract of land on which my house would be built from Presley Rixey. At that time land values were rising. Minar and other developers got County approval for the development of streets and subdivisions at the head of the Donaldson Run watershed. By 1929 she had sold a number of building lots.
The Depression, the New Deal and World War II (1929 – 1950)
The Great Depression led to falling real estate prices, and the postponement of most of the subdivision developments envisoned for North Arlington. The Washington Golf and Country Club, lost many members, operated in the red and came close to bankruptcy and closure. However, infrastucture improvements financed by the Federal Government continued. Memorial Bridge was inaugurated in 1932 and the first section of the George Washington Memorial Parkway running south to Mount Vernon was opened. The next section of the Parkway, along the river as far as Spout Run was delayed by World War II and not opened until 1950.
In 1932 the County Board/County Manager form of governance, which has served the County well, was adopted. One of the first major initiatives of the new County Board was the rationalization of street names. Prior to the renaming of the streets, each community in the county named its own streets. As a result, there were eleven Washington Streets or Avenues, ten Arlington Streets or Avenues, and five Lee Streets scattered about the County. The Committee appointed to carry out the street renaming divided the County into a north and a south area, separated by Lee Boulevard, now Arlington Boulevard, and numbered the streets running parallel to the Boulevard. The perpendicular streets were named alphabetically starting in the east, beginning with a one-syllable, then a two-syllable, and finally a three-syllable alphabet. The system was rational but resulted in strange anomalies, when it was applied to the winding streets and roads which came into being as the hillier parts of North Arlington were developed in the 1940s and 50s. A few major thoroughfares such as Glebe Road and Military Road were allowed to keep their old names.
Home construction was slow throughout the 1930s. An exception was the enclave known as Beechwood Hills, on the right bank of the Run, just north of Military Road, developed in the mid-1930s. The native beech trees on the hills there have been preserved.
Little home construction took place during World War II. Meanwhile the population of the greater Washington District grew apace. After the war development of subdivisions and the construction of single family houses in Arlington accelerated rapidly. The population of Arlington tripled between 1930 and 1960. In the 1940s alone Arlington’s population increased by 138 percent.
In 1948, the old Rixey estate was purchased by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Mary. Marymount-on-the-Potomac was founded as a Junior College in 1950. The first class had 13 students. The 1998 graduates of Marymount University numbered over 650.
1950 to the Present
During the late 1940s and 1950s housing development in the watershed burgeoned and the hillsides soon were covered by sprawling subdivisons of one-family suburban houses. The 1920s and 1930s subdivision maps were often altered to cope with the hilly terrain and to provide places for schools and services. (See Map 8, an example of a 1938 subdivision plan.) About 1950 the Broyhill Forest Subdivision was completed and N. 26th and N. 31st St were joined, creating one of North Arlington’s stranger street name anomalies.
The new families moving into the watershed at the height of the Baby Boom required newer, larger schools. In 1954 Taylor Elementary School opened on Stuart Street off Military Road and the smaller, older Marshall School on Glebe Road was closed. This marked the beginning of a shifting of the pole of human activity in the watershed away from the Glebe Road ridge. The polling place for the Marshall precinct was also shifted to Taylor School.
During the period 1940 to 1958, Belleview Forest, to the east of Military Road, was developed. Although it called for a plethora of cul-de-sacs, a modest effort was made to preserve old trees. It also left lower Donaldson Run as a relatively untouched area, bounded by Belleview Forest on one side and Beechwood Hills on the other.
In 1958 the Donaldson Run Community Swimming Pool was opened and was the first such community pool in Virginia. Establishment of the community pool, in the face of opposition from the County Board, where there was fear that a community pool might lead to racially mixed swimming, helped bring the neighborhood together. All homeowners in the pool area are eligible to join and the pool is an informal meeting place for residents from mid-May until mid-September. It offers swimming and diving teams, swimming classes, water aerobics, opens at 6 in the morning for early-bird lap swimming, has an adult only brunch on Sunday mornings and occasional evening activities. It and Taylor Elementary School are the two institutions that today make the Donaldson Run watershed a human neighborhood.
Some of the founders of the community pool and recreation association went on to become leaders in county politics, where they were among the founders of Arlingtonians for a Better Community (ABC), a nominally non-partisan group, which almost always supports the Democratic Party. The Marshall precinct, which includes most of the watershed, has voted Democratic in recent elections. Clinton carried the precinct by large majorities in 1992 and 1996.
The section of the George Washington Parkway north of Spout Run, the most costly stretch, was delayed until the CIA decided to build its headquarters at Langley and money for the project appeared in the Federal Budget. There was much public approval when the National Park Service acquired the river frontage up to Chain Bridge from the old Smoot Sand and Gravel Company. However, as the blasting for the parkway grew louder voices were raised to protest the “massacre” of the Palisades. The new stretch of parkway quickly became popular, some think too popular, as a scenic commuter route.
The controversy surrounding the Parkway’s construction did not deter plans for additional freeways. An Arlington County Master Plan of 1961 included various horrific projects. Among the most environmentally harmful proposals were: ramps to the GW Parkway from Glebe Road at Chain Bridge; a high-level bridge across Gulf Branch (the stream north of Donaldson Run) to Arizona Ave. in the District; and an extension of Yorktown Boulevard which would have paved over the main branch of upper Donaldson Run, and left it as a storm sewer.
However, public opinion was shifting and the green and rocky banks of the river became the focus of efforts to preserve familiar neighborhoods and pleasant streams. Many old trees were felled as Glebe Road, Military Road and Lorcom Lane were widened, but the Three Sisters and Arizona Avenue Bridges were erased from the plans.
The Yorktown Boulevard extension was also set aside. Donaldson Run, now bordered by a bike path, today runs through the Zachary Taylor Nature Area. Remnants of the 1961 Master Plan are the peculiar entrance to Yorktown Boulevard off of N. 26th St. and a lonely fireplug standing along the wooded bike path. Although the Nature Area, is hardly a haven for native plants, it is a pleasant place to jog, ride a bike or walk a dog. There are lovely, big tulip poplars, but most of the under-story has been over run by English ivy, vinca, multiflora rose, Japanese honeysuckle, lesser celadon, garlic mustard and other alien species which crowd out most of the native wild flowers. Poison Ivy and May Apples endure and a Wood Thrush sings sweetly on summer evenings.
The water quality of the Run has degraded and the aquatic life in the stream is of the more pollution tolerant varieties. The stream absorbs a great deal of fertilizer run off from the golf course and from neighborhood lawns. A troubling problem pollution problem has been the County leaf mulch pile, which receives the fallen leaves of the entire county and is located near the top of the run. As the pile grew larger, the brown acidic runoff became a significant pollutant point for the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Several years ago, the County built a cement floor under the leaf mulch pile to deter the acid runoff. The clarity of the water is now much better. A significant numbers of eels enter the Run every year. Last year (1998) there was a large “die off” of eels in the Run. The cause of the “die off” is not known, but too much fertilizer in the storm sewer run off is among the suspects.
In 1970, the Potomac Overlook Regional Park was established, preserving the last significant undeveloped area amid the suburban sprawl surrounding the Donaldson Run Watershed. The Regional Park is administered by the Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority, which the County joined in 1959 in an effort to pool resources to acquire significant tracts for preservation as public nature preserves.
As land values have increased even the least desirable building lots in the watershed have been filled in with ever larger houses. Caleb Birch’s cabin now faces onto an asphalt cul-de-sac. Several backyards of the new houses around the cul-de-sac have experienced slumping as either the land fill placed on top of what was once a steep ravine, or the clay beneath the surface, has slipped. Except for properties fronting on Lee Highway, current zoning in the watershed is for one-family, residential housing. Lot size is 8,000 or 10,000 square feet.
Despite the development, most of which has happened in the last 50 years, a surprising amount of wildlife still inhabits the Donaldson Run watershed. The list of mammals includes possums, shrews, moles, bats, rabbits, chipmunks, woodchucks, flying squirrels, white-footed mice, Norway rats, house mice, foxes, raccoons, and deer. There are few if any amphibians in the waters of the Run today. Copperheads are still found on the Palisades.
The bird list is lengthy and varied, reflecting the mixture of habitats present. The habitats include a wooded stream, backyard bird feeders, an open golf course, old trees and a variety of suburban nooks and crannies. The birds include Great Blue Heron, Turkey Vulture, Black Vulture, Sharp-shinned Hawk, Red-shouldered Hawk, Red-tailed Hawk, Broad-winged Hawk, Mourning Dove, Rock Dove, Yellow-billed Cuckoo, Screech owl Great Horned Owl, Barred Owl, Common Nighthawk, Chimney Swift, and Ruby-throated Hummingbird, Blue Jays, both Crows, Carolina Chickadee, Tufted Titmouse, White-breasted Nuthatch, Brown Creeper, Carolina Wren, House Wren, Ruby-crowned Kinglet, Blue-Gray Gnatcatcher, Swainson’s Thrush, Wood Thrush, Robin, Catbird, Mockingbird, Cedar Waxwing, Starling, Cardinal, Indigo Bunting, Towhee, Chipping Sparrow, Fox Sparrow, Song Sparrow, White-throated Sparrow, Dark-eyed Junco, Common Grackle, Baltimore Oriole, Brown-headed Cowbird, House Finch, American Goldfinch and House Sparrow. Six species of woodpecker, five flycatchers, four vireos and four swallows are also present. The bird list compiled for Potomac Overlook Park includes thirty species of warbler, most of them spring migrants. Along the Potomac one can also see Cormorants, Canada Geese, Mallards, Wood Ducks, Black Ducks, Herring and Ring-billed Gulls, Kingfishers and Ospreys. The Bob White Quail, whose calls could be heard when we bought our house 24 years ago, is gone from the watershed. They disappeared with the filling in of the last empty lots in the neighborhood.
Overall the human neighborhood in the watershed seems to be aging gracefully. The houses are well-maintained and many have been attractively remodeled. Streets are in good condition and public services are dependable. More could have been done to preserve the quality of the woodland environment and the water quality of the stream. On the other hand, things could have turned out much worse and the neighborhood is fortunate to have as significant areas of parkland and green space. The greatest drawback to living in the community is the noise from the planes taking off from Reagan National Airport, a problem that is shared by much of North Arlington and Northwest Washington.
Bibliography
Allen, Roy C., The Shaping of Arlington County as a Geographical and Political Unit, term paper University of Maryland (1968)
Rose, C.B., The Indians of Arlington, Arlington Historical Society (1966)
Steadman, Melvin Lee, Jr., Falls Church by Fence and Fireside, Falls Church Public Library (1964)
Stephenson, The Cartography of Northern Virginia, 1698-1915, Fairfax County, Virginia (1983)
Templeman, Eleanor Lee: Arlington Heritage, New York: Avenal Books (1960)
Williams, Martha and Cannan, Deborah, Atlas of Historic and Cultural Resources in the Arlington Palisades, Frederick Maryland: R. Christopher Goodwin and Associates (1992)
Agricultural Census for Alexandria County, Virginia, 1850, National Archives, microfilm T-1132
Final Report of the Potomac Palisades Task Force, Arlington County, Virginia (1990)
Geology and Ground-Water Resources of Washington, DC and Vicinity, US Geological Survey, US Government Printing Office (1964)
Historic Arlington, Arlington County Bicentennial Commission (1976)
The Arlington Historical Magazine:
Gen. John Barnard’s Civil War Map, 1865
Map of Alexandria County 1878
Map of Alexandria County 1900 – G.P. Sturm for Va. Title Co.
Map of Alexandria County 1920
Map of Arlington County 1927
Plat Book of Arlington County, Philadelphia: Franklin Survey Co. (1952)
The author would also like to thank the staff of the Virginia Room of the Arlington County Public Library, Martin Ogle of Potomac Overlook Regional Park, Bill Draeger of the DRRA, and Gayle Baker, a Birch descendant, for insights and help in finding information about the Donaldson Run water shed.
1724 - Lord Fairfax grants land to James Robertson. This land would become the inheritance of his daughter Janet Bowmaker Robertson, who later married John Birch.
1800 – Caleb Birch, Robertson’s grandson, moves to upper part of Rock (Donaldson) Run and builds a log cabin, thereby settling the land.
1855 – Mary Hall buys the Caleb Birch property.
August 28, 1929 – Sherrier and Thomas acquire lot 809.
April 1936 – Jack Goddard bought lot 809 from Sherrier and Thomas, who had defaulted on their loan.
April 1943 – The Goddard property sold to the La Portes by the trustees. The Goddards appears to have defaulted on their mortgage.
Jan 1946 – Marie K. and Joseph La Porte sell lot 809 to the Shillingburg and Shreve for the amount of a deed of trust dated June 7, 1943 for $7,500.
May 1946 – C. Samuel and Mabel R. Shillingburg and T. Keith and Pearl Shreve sold lot 809 and house to Thomas B. and Eleanor A. King for $12,000.
Feb 1952 – The Kings sell the property to Arnold B. and Susan K. Christen for $16,000.
Nov 1960 – The Christens sell to Hamilton and Mai-Britt DeSaussure.
June 1969 – The De Saussures sel to Mr. And Mrs. Stanley P. Mayers, Jr.
Aug 1971 – The Mayers sell to David A. and Catherine Richie.
Feb 1974 – The Ritchies sell to Larry E. and Helen Brady Lane.
Donaldson Run
Human Impact on a Potomac River Watershed
Research Paper
USDA Graduate School Course, ENATH 166:
Washington DC: Its Development on a Natural Basis