A long time ago, Justin Timberlake once described my hometown of Virginia Beach as “a desolate area of the world” with “nothing but strip malls and Chick-fil-A’s.” Personally, I take great offense to that. There weren’t that many Chick-fil-A’s in Virginia Beach when I grew up.
It’s true that Virginia Beach has a seemingly endless stream of retail and shopping centers along its main thoroughfare, Virginia Beach Boulevard. From the main artery of the boulevard, retail veins spring from all directions, including the most important to my childhood, Lynnhaven Parkway. About a half mile up the road from my main childhood mall and shopping area stood Toy Castle, standing alone like a mansion on a hill in a valley of mediocre retail and chain restaurants.
Since standalone toy stores have vanished in favor of small sections in larger retail stores like Wal Mart and Target, it’s hard to find a modern day comparison. When I was a kid, my mom would take me there every so often. I would go in, my ActionToy Guide in my hand, ready to pick out the latest and greatest action figure.
Formerly Toy Castle, Virginia Beach (Google Maps Screencap)
Toy Castle was definitely a place reserved for special occasions. Toy stores in the late 1980s were a paradise, and visiting one was a special treat reserved for accomplishments, like A’s on math tests. Toy Castle, however, was extra special. The large standalone building looked exactly like an old school Playmobil castle. The yellow exterior was flanked by two large turrets on either end of the building. The bottom of the structure was covered in rocks, giving the effect that the parking lot was a giant asphalt moat. The icing on the cake was the drawbridge door that led you into into its great hall of retail.
But the magic wouldn’t last. When I was a teenager, Toy Castle closed and became something entirely different: a craft store. Paul’s Arts and Crafts stayed there for a number of years until it eventually became a Salvation Army, which is still there today. Remarkably, the turreted building never drastically altered its appearance. Sure, it’s had a few paint jobs over the years, but the structure’s bones have remained intact.
This idea of retail rebirth is something that has always sparked my fascination. Businesses and restaurants close down. New businesses open, but the remnants of past establishments remain. If you look closely, you can see instances of this phenomenon all over the place. Wendy’s restaurants become a cash advance. Extinct department stores become grocery stores. Later, the extinct grocery store becomes a fitness center.
Toys R US/Aldi, Alexandria VA (2018/2020)
Fast forward to the present day. I have lived in northern Virginia for almost seven years, and in that time I have already seen a bevy of businesses change hands, leaving the shell of their former selves to molt and emerge from their cocoons as something entirely different. It would be an interesting project to document these businesses. Although the buildings may not hold the mythical grandeur that Toy Castle once held in my heart, it’s important to tell the story of the changing landscape of the area. It’s also a great way to get feedback from viewers reading this who know of a place that has undergone such a restoration. Surely there are hundreds of places in the area that have closed down and reopened as something else. We would love to hear your feedback.
We are starting this new series on our Instagram, so make sure to check it out and check back often. Although we are documenting these buildings now, they might give us ideas for future posts of Offbeat NOVA. We are always looking for new ideas, and the list is ever-expanding.
Follow us as we update content in the next week and beyond with the hashtags #offbeatnova and #NOVAcancy. The first few we will debut this week are naturally in our neck of the woods in Fairfax County, but we’d love to hear what you have to say. Drop us a line in our Instagram DM or email us at offbeatnova@gmail.com. Enjoy NOVAcancy!
I have a confession to make. It’s going to be a hard one to admit to fellow music lovers. Here it goes.
I wasn’t into Nirvana until much later in life. I know…I KNOW.
I was very young when “Smell’s Like Teen Spirit” became the Seattle earworm that congested radio and television airwaves in the early 1990s. When Nevermind was released in 1991, I was only seven years old. My experience with music up until then had been whatever my dad listened to. If you wanted to mosh to some Dan Fogelberg, James Taylor, or Jackson Browne in the early 1990s, I was your guy. I knew all the words to “Somebody’s Baby” and “Run for the Roses” long before I committed the mantra-like meanderings of the band’s biggest hit inside a poorly-ventilated high school gymnasium to memory.
My first real exposure to Nirvana came just before the end the band in 1993 for the televised Unplugged in New York concert on MTV. They played it on the station so much afterwards that I had plenty of time to sneak into our room above the garage to watch it. The entire concert blew me away. What impressed me the most, though, was their drummer, Dave Grohl. I didn’t know anything about him seeing him on stage for that televised concert. Throughout the concert, Grohl played an acoustic drum kit and sang backup vocals perfectly. He even picked up an acoustic bass for one of the songs. How could he be so good at more than one instrument? I had to know more. By the time I did my research about Grohl and the rest of the band (which in the early 90s meant combing through magazines at the local bookstore), Nirvana was over. Cobain died by suicide in April 1994 and the band broke up forever shortly after. Would I ever see my newfound musical hero again? As it turns out, I would.
Grohl recording Foo Fighters (Photo by Michel Linssen/Redferns)
Unbeknownst to me, Grohl had been secretly recording his own songs while he played drums in Nirvana. Not only was he good at drums, singing, and bass, he was a hell of a guitar player. He could do it all. Six months after Cobain’s death, Grohl booked six days in a local Seattle studio to record what would become the first Foo Fighters record. Besides a few guest appearances, he recorded every instrument and sang every word.
Foo Fighters was released on Roswell Records on Independence Day, 1995. When I heard about the release with my friends, all of which were now enamored with Grohl and grunge music culture, I begged my dad to go to the local music store to get it. He eventually acquiesced my request, and we went to Planet Music in Virginia Beach. I can remember bringing my SONY discman with me so I could listen to it immediately after ripping off the impossibly-hard-to remove shrink wrap encasing the compact disc.
Keep in mind, Foo Fighters would not be my first grunge music purchase at that point. I had several already in my collection by July 1995, including Pearl Jam’s Ten, Soundgarden’s Superunknown, The Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream, and of course, Nirvana’s Unplugged in New York. I had never been more excited up to the point getting a record than when I did with Foo Fighters. “This is a Call,” their first single, released on the radio a few weeks before, and I was in love with the overall sound. It sounded like Nirvana, but more polished. It was punchier and faster paced. One might say it had the existential qualities of punk rock music, a genre I would also embrace less than two years later. But for 1995, it was all about this release.
Foo Fighters (Roswell Records/1995)
The first couple of songs were fantastic off the bat. To this day, there are very few first tracks that hit harder than “This is a Call.” The next two songs, which also became singles and iconic music videos to boot, still resonate with me. It’s the middle of the album that I continue to go back to, with one song in particular. Standing up among a three song set exploring some differing styles such as eighties post-punk nostalgia (“Good Grief”) and grunge-drenched shoegaze (“Floaty”) is the two minute and forty-six second brain melt that is “Weenie Beenie.”
“Weenie Beenie” was the first song I ever heard that felt truly aggressive to me. The aggression felt good, even for a middle class kid with a b-plus average. The song starts loud and ends louder. Grohl’s characteristic scream is put on display there for the first time. The drums are open ended with plenty of hi hat filling the empty space between the drones of bass and guitar. The snare hits like hammers on your ear drums. The guitars are tuned down and turned up to a nearly uncomfortable level. In the immortal words of Nigel Tufnel, the amps “go to eleven.” It’s a sound I would identify with for the rest of my life. Just because a song sounds angry, doesn’t mean it IS about anger. Without sounding too nostalgic, the song is an emotional one. Every music lover has a genesis to their obsession. Mine happens to be “Weenie Beenie.”
My first experience with music, c. mid 1990s.
I couldn’t play a single instrument when the eponymous release came out in 1995, but it undoubtedly spurred me to pick up my first, a black and white bass guitar, for my birthday in 1996. I still own and cherish that bass to this day. Over the course of middle and high school, I made it a goal to learn all the instruments Dave Grohl could play. I can play all of them now, in varying degrees of precision (or lack thereof).
It wasn’t until I was in college at James Madison University that I found out through some old archived interview that “Weenie Beenie” was named after a northern Virginia fast food stand nearby where Grohl grew up. I had to go. But geography, my lack of vehicle, and my studies (…right) kept me from making a pilgrimage to this fast food holy grail. After a while, I simply forgot about it, even if I continued to make that album part of my rotation throughout my high school years and beyond.
It’s been twenty five years since Foo Fighters was released. What better time to FINALLY go to this iconic northern Virginia establishment than now? Once we started the Offbeat NOVA project, it was the first thing I wrote down. We had to finally go. I was not disappointed.
Weenie Beenie is located just north of the Shirlington neighborhood in Arlington. The small restaurant, offering walk-up service only (no doubt a great boon for business in the currently pandemic) sits unpretentiously in a small parking lot across from a park. The restaurant is the last remaining of a chain of restaurants created by notorious pool shark Bill Staton and his uncle Carl in 1950. According to the Arlington Public Library, Staton funded the first stand alter collecting nearly $30,000 in earnings from a profitable gambling trip in Arkansas. The namesake of the establishment became the nickname of the pool player for the rest of his life.1
The food tasted amazing (Angela H. Eng Photo)
I asked Angela to put the song on as we drove down Shirlington Road. where the restaurant was located. After twenty five years, I had finally arrived.
When I looked it up, Google said it was known for “BBQ sandwiches and hot dogs.” I wasn’t feeling a hot dog on a hot summer day, so we decided on grubbing on a pair of barbecue sandwiches and fries. As we ordered, our daughter Zelda charmed all of the waiting customers around us. It was so unbearably hot and humid that day (nearly 100 degrees), that all of us waiting for our food attempted to hang out in the small amount of shade the tiny orange eaves the restaurant provided from the direct sunlight. After about fifteen minutes, we finally received our hot bag of food. I brought it back to the car and cranked the air conditioning before eating my sandwich. The first thing I noticed was the bun. Normally a soggy afterthought to barbecue sandwiches, the bun was thick and toasted, holding all of the seasoned meat and cool coleslaw together.
I took my first bite of the barbecue sandwich as Dave growled into the chorus of the song inspired by the place I was finally eating at. The meat was warm and well seasoned, with just a hint of spice to it. It also had a tang to it reminiscent of the North Carolina-vinegar style I love so much. The coleslaw was not unlike the restaurant itself, simple and unpretentious. The sandwich reminded me of a better version of a famous drive-in restaurant I grew up eating at in Norfolk, VA, Doumars. Whereas those sandwiches were small and soggy, the one dished up at Weenie Beenie was large, crispy, and filling.
Zelda and I patiently wait for our food (Angela H. Eng Photo)
But I’m not finished. I haven’t talked about the fries yet. I don’t have a picture of the fries because we ate them too fast. Weenie Beenie serves large, wedge-cut fries with an addicting seasoned coating on them. Complimented by the sugary, umami taste of ketchup, they were crispy and perfect. By the time the song was over, we were halfway through our entire meal. It was gone completely in another two minutes. We drove away from Weenie Beenie still sticky with sweat but full and content with delicious food. It’s definitely not a meal you can have all the time, but surely worth waiting nearly thirty years for. Eating there closed a very important chapter of my life, when music was new and exciting.
I highly recommend giving this local business your patronage. When you roll up on the unassuming establishment in your car, don’t forget to crank the seventh track on the first Foo Fighters album while you do.
Footnotes
Arlington Public Library, “The Weenie Beenie,” Link.
(This is the last edition of a three-part series on Alexandria’s historic Wilkes Street Tunnel. Read PART I | Read PART II)
Matthew Eng, Offbeat NOVA
PART III: Out of the Dark and Into the Light
The Wilkes Tunnel, once a fixture of the local newspaper in the mid to late 1900s, lost its journalistic spotlight at the dawn of the twentieth century. The tunnel never made large headlines again and retreated to the minutiae of daily life. Minor repairs were done at the turn of the century, such as new safety signals in 1899 that regulated the speed of the incoming trains to a more respectable five miles per hour. Public opinion remained unchanged into the new century. By 1905, citizens still lodged ineffective complaints against the tunnel, particularly the east end. Under the headline of “A Dangerous Trap,” a May 12, 1905, article pulled out all the old theatrics of Alexandrians nearly two generations ago. “Sooner or later some careless child or nurse will precipitate a baby carriage and its occupant to the railroad track below, or a pedestrian tumble down the incline in the night, when a damage suit against the city will follow,” the article mused. Not long after that article was written, a young child happened fulfill the complaintive prophecy and fall into the tunnel. A young boy named Norton, a resident of tunnel town, fell into the tunnel just in front of his home off Wilkes Street in early September 1907. He as in fact the second child to fall in the tunnel that year. It became such an issue that the city Mayor at the time, F.J. Paff, to create a fence around the Western entrance. It was never confirmed if a fencing was put in place, as the complaints continued in the first decade of the new century.
A collection of articles from the early 20th century about the Wilkes Tunnel (Alexandria Gazette)
Vagrants were caught playing poker in the concealed light of the tunnel’s entrances. Other children continued to jump on railcars and use the tunnel like some long-gone fortification to throw stones at railcars and pedestrians passing by. On April Fool’s Day 1911, the Gazette reported a prehistoric skeleton of a mastodon was “unearthed” from the east end of the runnel where the railroad company was making repairs. It was enough news for a small crowd of excitable residents to congregate at the tunnel the next morning, only to find the ruse a product of the mere changing of a calendar page and a forgetful public gullible enough to belief such a ruse.1
During the First World War, the tunnel was deepened to accommodate higher boxcars for the war effort. A recent archaeological investigation by the Office of Historical Alexandria unearthed a second rail line curving at Union Street and converging at the eastern end of the Wilkes Tunnel near a recent park construction. According to Archaeologist Garrett Fesler, the track was built between 1921 and 1941 before ultimately disappearing by 1964.2 Four years later in 1968, the Wilkes Tunnel was included in the first state-wide survey conducted by the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER). The sketches reside on the Library of Congress’s website. By this time, the surveyor sketching the drawing noted that the tunnel now lied “abandoned in the heart of Alexandria.”
The tunnel continued in use until 1975 when the tracks were removed, this time for good. The tunnel was soon repurposed as the pedestrian and bike pathway as it stands today. Somewhere between then and today, a historical marker was placed forward of the eastern entrance, detailing the history and legacy of the tunnel. That faded sign, like the tunnel, has also seen its better days. Plaques on the western end of the tunnel tell more of the tunnel’s history and connection to the once influential railroad that traversed through it. It’s hard to tell if anyone notices beyond the casual tourist or the jogger taking a short breather.
The closure of the tunnel was likely due to the decline of industrial activity on the Alexandria waterfront. The Old Town area has only increased in popularity in the years since the tunnel’s closure, becoming a Northern Virginia showpiece of new posh ships, stores, and restaurants still showing a feint veneer of the city’s past. The heart of this area is the regal intersection of King Street and Union the very road where the former Orange and Alexandria track once passed through before curving into the Wilkes Tunnel a half mile later.
Nearby Hoof’s Run Bridge, on the National Register since 2003 (Matthew Eng Photo)
The tunnel is not currently listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Alexandria is a city where you can’t throw a stone without finding the rounded bronze plaque bequeathed by the Department of the Interior. In all, there are forty-nine properties and districts listed under the National Register in the city of Alexandria. That includes six National Historic Landmarks (like the Historic District itself or Gadsby’s Tavern). The Wilkes Tunnel does not apply to either. Interestingly enough, the only other surviving portion of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad present down the street from the tunnel, the Hoof’s Run Bridge, has been on the National Register since 2003. In the nomination form for the bridge, the author references the “tunnel in Alexandria” on multiple occasions but treats it as the lesser of two surviving structures to the now-defunct railroad. Perhaps those deep-seeded misgivings of the residents of “tunnel town” were too much after all.3
That doesn’t mean the tunnel has left the public eye in recent years. In the Internet information age, the tunnel has made a resurgence of interest in travel websites, biking blogs, Yelp reviews, and Flickr pages. It’s a popular place for local couples to take wedding or engagement photos. If they only knew the irony of those photos given its history and connection to unchecked domestic violence. Less than a mile away from the Old Town Alexandria Ghost Tour hub on King Street, the tunnel has made its rounds among the macabre musings of several amateur writers such as this humble entry into the historical/pop culture lexicon. If anything, the tunnel is photogenic and short enough for light to pass through your camera lens, making it eerie, but not eerie enough.
Define Irony: Taking engagement photos in a tunnel where a jealous husband tried to kill his younger, spendthrift wife (Google Image Screenshot)
Looking at Google Maps, the overhead satellite map shows the curved road where the track from Union Street bent sharply into the Wilkes Street Tunnel. That is where the high-priced townhomes are located today, standing guard like affluent sentinels standing guard over their not-so historic landmark. How many have actually contemplated the tunnel’s history before passing through it?
High-priced condominiums nearby the tunnel’s eastern entrance off Union Street (Matthew Eng Photo)
A small park called Windmill Hill just over the bluff where Fairfax Street passes over the tunnel, providing the bookend to the overpriced homes of the city’s nouveau riche on the right of the eastern entrance. There is a spacious basketball court and playground where kids play; no doubt they are local to the area. One would highly doubt they refer to themselves as residents of “tunnel town” today as they did so long ago.
Walking through the tunnel, you don’t feel any “cold spots” that some bloggers love to pontificate about in their content. You can still see the simplistic vaulted sandstone walls as you walk into it. The farther you walk in, the more you take in the landmark’s dank, mossy bouquet, especially on a warm day. At the tunnel’s center point, approximately half of the one-hundred-and-seventy-foot distance, it is very dark, even in the daytime. Your mind does wonder if you are standing at the exact point where Private Scotten was murdered. Where they dragged the dead body to be crushed by a passing train during the Civil War. And, of course, where Mollie McKinley struggled with her violent husband before being shot four times. You walk in the same blood-soaked path she did in near darkness before she sought help out into the daylight. You don’t feel an otherworldly presence while you are in the tunnel, but your mind will at least wander with its strange and complex history carefully in tow.
Graffiti inside the tunnel (Matthew Eng Photo)
Very little else of the historic track remains in Alexandria. But then again, Alexandria is no longer the type of city that sustains railroads, foundries, and tanneries as it did in its commercial and industrial heyday. The tunnel once attracted anything form concerned parents, drunkards, vagrants, to the occasional murderer. Nowadays, it’s a breezeway for runners and bicyclists’ daily workout regimen. The tunnel, in many cases, is one of the few remaining pieces of that city’s history untainted by gentrification and modern conveniences. The city that exists around it today is much different. Alexandria, for better or worse, has evolved into tunnel town’s polar opposite. “It wasn’t always high-priced townhomes, archaeologist Garrett Fesler once said. “It was a working, thriving city.” Whatever tiny part the Wilkes Tunnel played in that narrative; it kept its working class literally on track.
Footnotes
Alexandria Gazette, September 4, 1907; Alexandria Gazette, April 1, 1911.
Evan Berkowitz, “Construction Unearths 20th-Century Railroad Tracks,” Alexandria Times, July 20, 2017. Accessed 12 July 2020, Link.
Virginia Department of Historic Resources, “Orange and Alexandria Railroad’s Hoof’s Run Bridge,” PDF Upload (April 2018), Accessed 11 July 2020, Link.
Have you ever traveled down a road and wondered if it was named after a certain person or place? That question led me down a rabbit-hole of Northern Virginia history, culminating in a search for nineteenth-century ruins and long-forgotten gravestones.
While my husband and I were driving through Springfield one day, not long after moving to Alexandria, we ended up on a long stretch of highway called Old Keene Mill Road. We noticed that the name “Keene Mill” seemed to have significance: the name showed up on a school, several shopping centers, and apartment complexes.
“I wonder if there really was a mill here,” my husband mused.
The short answer: yes. There was, in fact, a Keene’s Mill.
Keene Mill Historial Marker on Huntsman Rd. in Springfield (Matthew Eng Photo)
Keene’s Mill was a saw and grist mill that stood approximately at the intersection of Pohick Creek and Old Keene Mill Road. I found the historical marker for the site online; it states that the mill was built “by James Keene between 1796 and 1800, when it was expanded, stood on the north side of the original Keene Mill Road right-of-way.”1 What caught my attention was the final line on the marker: “Two mill races are all that remain on the site.”
From then on, I had two goals:
Find out more about Keene’s Mill, and
Find out what a mill race was and try to find them.
History of the Mill
Alexandria Gazette, November 1, 1855
As I searched for information about the mill, I learned something quite shocking: William H. Keene, James Keene’s grand-nephew and owner of the mill from 1849 until 1855,2 was in jail for murder. An Alexandria Gazette article from November 1, 1855, stated that “a man named Hall was stabbed by a man named Keene . . . on last Saturday, from the effects of which he died on Monday.”3 Two days later, on November 3, the Gazette revealed that Keene was in jail. Keene did not appear again in my searches until April 4, 1856. The Gazette briefly mentioned that “Wm. H. Keene, confined in the jail of Fairfax county, for the murder of Lewis Q. Hall, escaped on Wednesday.” Further in the paper was a description:
He is about 45 years old, 5 feet 1C or 11 inches high, broad shoulders and stout made, long hair and bushy whiskers, high cheek bones, large nose turned up and spreading at the end, and depressed about the centre, small grey eyes, and very bad countenance.
Alexandria Gazette, April 4, 1856
It seems, though, that Keene’s freedom was short lived—he was caught the next day and returned to jail. His trial commenced in November, and in a Gazette article on November 15, 1856, he was found guilty of murder and sentenced to hang in January 1857.
Jack Hiller, a Northern Virginia historian, took an interest in Keene’s case in the late 1980s. He meticulously combed through archives and court records to find out exactly what had happened between William Keene and “the man named Hall.” One document he found was an inquisition, held at the house of a woman named Maria Sutherland.4 The inquisition stated that “Lewis Q. Hall came to his death by William Keene on the 27th day of October 1855 by means of a knife in the hands of said Keene.”5
Another document, a statement Lewis Q. Hall signed before his death, gave a few more details: he was accompanied by a man named John Barker, and he was looking for a woman named Maria Hall. He continued, “when I left his door yard followed by said Keene and proceeded at two steps toward his mill he threw his arm around me and inflicted the wound.” He told Barker that he had been cut. A third document, Barker’s testimony, stated that he saw Keene take out the knife and stab Hall; Keene then invited Barker for a drink and Barker accepted, but since Keene could find no liquor and Hall followed, Barker took Hall to Maria Sutherland’s home. The cut was quite bad; Barker said, “the bowels had come out through the cut.”6
Hiller puzzled over this turn of events, asking why Keene would attack Hall for no reason, or why Barker would accept the invitation for a drink, even when he knew Hall was wounded. Hiller suggested that none of them were “rational,” and it turns out he was correct. Hiller recounted several letters from Keene’s family members and acquaintances, all lending their own extra details: drinking may have been involved, “Maria Hall” was a red herring, and it was all an accident.7 One letter even said that one of the jurors had been pressured by the other jurors to give a guilty verdict.8
In light of this evidence, the governor of Virginia at the time, Henry Wise, postponed Keene’s punishment twice. Eventually, Wise commuted Keene’s punishment to ten years in prison. In 1857, Keene went to the Virginia State Prison in Richmond; he was forty-seven at the time. Keene’s fate after that is unknown; any prison records that may have existed were destroyed in the Civil War.9
Keene Mill property drawn by Jack Hiller (Jack Hiller)
The property was sold in 1857, and records indicated that by 1869 the mill was no longer standing.10 Since then, the land had changed ownership several times. Portions of it were abandoned and others developed. One account of the Old Keene Mill Road development read, “What is now Old Keene Mill Road was originally called Rolling Road No. 2. It was built by William Fitzhugh to transport his tobacco to market in Alexandria. In the 1920s, the rise of the automobile led to confusions between the two Rolling Roads. As the Keene Mills had ceased operation, Rolling Road No. 2 was renamed “Old Keene Mill Road.”11 However, I could not locate any other sources or information about it, though Hiller mentioned that Old Keene Mill Road, once two lanes, was converted to four lanes in 1979.
Currently, the land is that contains the mill races is part of the Fairfax County Park Authority.
Searching for the Mill Races
When I began my research, I had no idea what a mill race was. However, I was intrigued that such an odd part of history still had some visible traces, and I wanted to find them. I found out that mill races were man-made channels that essentially run water to and from mill wheels, so we’d be looking for ruts in the land, essentially. One other person had looked for—and found—the mill races in the winter of 2009 and provided photos, so I was convinced we’d be able to find them.12 The same person also noted that a Keene family graveyard was nearby, in a subdivision.
I’d underestimated how tough it would be to find the mill races in the summertime. Also, the day before we’d had tropical-storm-level wind and rain, so the ground was soft, wet, and extremely muddy. Nevertheless, Matt and I entered the Pohick Trail one hot afternoon. The trail ended as fast as it began. From the end of the trail on, there was a carpet of green and fallen branches with no indication of where to go. Matt forged ahead, though, and moved deeper into the woods.
“What direction should we go?” he asked.
“The guy in the article said he walked in the direction of Pohick Creek,” I answered. So we moved on. Nothing resembling what we’d seen in the photos was visible. I tried to remember that the photos were taken over a decade ago and in the dead of winter, so they’d definitely look different by now. Our feet squished in the earth and thorns ripped at our jeans. I walked into multiple spiderwebs, which reminded me I was definitely not an outdoorswoman.
I did, however, feel an appreciation for the history that had happened on this land. Somewhere nearby, Lewis Hall and William Keene had gotten into a fight. Hall had died and the course of Keene’s life had changed forever—and the mill for which the road was named would only exist another ten or so years.
We eventually came upon the creek. It was a pretty, quiet space. The water ran clear, an indication that human hands hadn’t meddled with it too much. However, the beer cans nearby suggested that we weren’t the only ones who had ventured this far into the woods. We both recalled Hiller’s hand-drawn map of the mill races, and walked up the creek trying to find one of them.
Possible section of mill race off Pohick Creek (Matthew Eng Photo)
Eventually we came upon a small rut in the earth that fed into the creek. If our map calculations are correct, this was one of the mill races. We decided to walk further down along the creek and see if we could find the other one. We found piles of hand-cut stones, and, after consulting the map and a couple of other sources, surmised that they may have been pieces of the original Old Keene road.13
We blundered around for a bit and thought we may have found the other mill race, but as we walked, we realized it was just a man-made runoff. Along the way, we found a large rusted-out car, more beer cans, and deer tracks.
Keene family plot, Fairfax County (Matthew Eng Photo)
When we emerged from the woods, a storm was threatening. There was no way we could venture back in, so we decided to review our photos when we got home. We did, however, track down the Keene graveyard. It sat right in the center of a townhome complex about a mile and a half away—a small fenced-in plot with two visible gravestones, one of which read “Addison Keene.” A couple of yards away, a kid played on a basketball court and watched us with a wary eye.
Conclusion
I met both the goals I set for myself. I did find out more about Keene’s Mill—most notably that the final Keene that owned the mill was tried for murder, found guilty, sentenced to hang, escaped from prison, and eventually had his death sentence commuted. I do have to wonder if anyone who named the road, the school, the shopping centers, and the residential complexes knew of this history. It’s a subtle reminder that roads and other places could be named after people or events with a dark past.
As for the mill races, I’m not completely sure we found one. However, having the opportunity to hike through the woods and experience something I wouldn’t have otherwise was a treat—mosquito bites and all.
Footnotes
“Keene’s Mill Historical Marker,” HMdb.org: The Historical Marker Database, last modified July 29, 2016, Link.
Hiller, Jack. “Murder at the Mill: My Search for William H. Keene,” Online PDF. According to Hiller, Keene turned the mill over to a Fairfax attorney in 1855 and gave him the power to sell it pay off legal and personal debts.
Alexandria Gazette, Nov. 1, 1855.
Hiller, “Murder,” 57. The house where Barker took Hall after the stabbing.
Hiller, “Murder,” 55.
Hiller, “Murder,” 56.
Hiller, “Murder,” 58-60.
Hiller, “Murder,” 61.
Hiller, “Murder,” 78.
Hiller, Murder,” 77.
John Pasierb, “Was There Ever a Mill on ‘Old Keene Mill’ Road?” accessed on August 1, 2020, Link.
Andy99. “Suburban Archaeology 1: On the Trail of Keene’s Mill,” March 22, 2009, Link.
(This is the second of a three-part series on Alexandria’s historic Wilkes Street Tunnel. Read PART I)
Matthew Eng, Offbeat NOVA
PART II: The Curious Case of Mollie McKinney
Naturally, the track fell into disrepair during the Reconstruction period, adding insult to the already dilapidated condition of the tunnel. At one point, there was a resolution that instructed the Committee on Streets to take steps to have the problematic east end of the tunnel walled in and filled. The resolution never gained any speed and was soon forgotten.1
After the Panic of 1873, the railroad consolidated into the Virginia Midland Railway, one of the many times the tracks under the tunnel would change corporate hands before ultimately meeting its end as a rail tunnel over a hundred years later. The tunnel became a popular place for young boys and aspiring prepubescent vagabonds to congregate, arousing the suspicions of the citizens of tunnel town. The police reported several instances of vagrancy for these boys, who had the habit of jumping from the top of the tunnel onto the passing cards below. “This is an exceedingly dangerous practice,” said one concerned citizen, “and should be put a stop to by police before some of these bold children are crushed under cars.” Meanwhile, the tunnel continued to be as one person put it, “not only unsightly, but dangerous.” The people of tunnel town and Alexandria would soon find out how dangerous it could be on an unusually cool day in the late summer of 1882.2
Alexandria Gazette, August 17, 1882
Twenty-two-year-old James Cliff walked with his young wife Mollie McKinney on the morning of August 16, 1882, to the Potomac Ferry Company Wharf. Mr. Cliff’s sixteen-year-old bride fancied a trip to Washington, D.C. Money was tight for the young couple. Mollie had allegedly come up with funds for a nice trip into the big city. At the time, the couple had only been married for about five months. Three months after they were married, Mr. Cliff was let go from his job as a tinsmith due to poor health, draining their cash flow considerably. Although he protested her trip that morning, he insisted on escorting his wife. Mr. Cliff suggested they take a shortcut to the ferry on King Street through the Wilkes Street tunnel. Midway through the tunnel, at its darkest and most concealed point, James slapped his wife and drew a small caliber pistol and proceeded to fire several shots at her. Mollie was hit in four places: on her right ear, on her head above the ear, in the fleshy muscle of her right arm, and her left hand. Ms. McKinney’s screams were heard by several people in the neighborhood, yet nobody seemed to detect foul play at first glance. Two young boys who happened to be walking through the tunnel at the time of the struggle had a visual on the struggle in question. Upon hearing Mollie’s cries, they approached the helpless woman before being told by Mr. Cliff to turn around and leave, who reportedly fired two shots at them. Mrs. Cliff emerged from the tunnel moments later, visibly weeping and covered in her own blood. Mr. Cliff followed close behind his wife, carrying himself cool and calm as if the recent burst of violence were merely a lover’s quarrel.3
Mr. Cliff stopped to chat with several parties in attendance nearby, admitting to them that he had in fact shot his wife. “So great was the surprise at his action,” the article stated, “that no one attempted to arrest him.” He proceeded to walk casually down Royal Street in the direction of the canal. Several women encountered the gravely wounded Mollie McKinney on the corner of Royal and Wilkes and escorted her home. After nearly passing out from blood loss, the helpful women brought her back to life until a doctor arrived to remove what projectiles he could out of her body. The doctor removed the balls from her hand and arm but waited to remove those in her ear and head until she had “calmed down.” The wounds were serious, but not fatal, thankfully.4
Mollie was hit in four places on her body by her husband, James Cliff.
A crowd soon formed around the house of Mollie McKinney. Oddly enough, it took a great amount of time before anyone in the vicinity began to search for the husband who had walked away from the crime scene so calmly and casually. What kind of man was he, and what possessed him to make an attempt on his wife’s life?
James Cliff had spent the better part of two months sick with consumption, which forced him out of his job, unfit and unable to work. Mollie, not one to shy for the finer things of life, asked for fine clothes, food, and companionship, which her husband answered with jealousy, physical abuse, and emotional abuse. This was all well documented by those that knew the couple. Neighbors reported that Mr. Cliff was known to “whip” his wife, but not in a manner that would suspect further efforts of deeper foul play. His friends said he was possibly insane. Yet in the realm of Gilded Age romance, Mr. Cliff and Mrs. McKinney had forgivable differences. Mollie’s habit of seeking “lively company” made Mr. Cliff insanely jealous, which was likely the prime motive for the attempted murder. Such behavior is never an excuse, however distasteful it may be to a sick husband strapped for cash at the beginning of an unhappy marriage, for murder. For all intents and purposes, he casually walked away from the city unmolested.5
After the altercation, James Cliff took the Washington Road outside the Alexandria jurisdiction where he waited until evening when he returned to the city feeling too weak from his illness to move further. He went directly to his sister’s house on Duke Street. His sister proceeded to call for the police who took him into custody. The Alexandria Gazette reporter met with Mr. Cliff in his jail cell the following morning to speak to him about what happened. When the reporter arrived, Mr. Cliff was reading the very report on the incident published that morning. He then preceded to tell his side of the story, correcting the report’s ostensible misinformation “in a very indifferent manner.”6
Much of the offender’s account played out like the article from the previous day. Mr. Cliff insisted that it was his wife’s own idea to go to the wharf for the express purpose of borrowing money for a trip to Washington. Mr. Cliff stated that his wife had not secured money for a tryst in the big city quite yet. How she would get it was up for speculation. The tunnel route, in his eyes, was her idea. He also said that he had a very loving marriage with Mollie until he got sick. It was only after this that she “would never stay with a consumptive man, hoping God might paralyze her if she did.” He continued his tale of sorrows for several more lines, regaling the reporter with a litany of jealous notions and suspicious of infidelity. To him, whatever had happened in the previous morning, was justified. Meanwhile, down the street in their home, Mollie rested from her serious injuries, with one of the balls in her ear still lodged firmly in place. Sadly, the article summarizing the second day of the event ended on a somber note indicative of the time period:
“Mrs. Cliff, it is understood, does not want her husband punished for his crime, and is willing, like a woman, to blame herself entirely for the affair.”7
Alexandria Gazette, August 18, 1882
It was an ominous warning of things to come. If not prophetic.
Two months went by before there was a conclusion to the Cliff assault case. In the middle of October 1882, the Commonwealth set out to convict the prisoner James Cliff, who had the “intent to maim, disfigure, disable, and kill” his wife. Neither party had apparently seen each other since the incident in August, but circumstances that played out would prove that to be highly unlikely. After taking time for the selection of jury, witnesses were called, including Mollie McKinney herself. In a shocking turn of events, she refused to testify in court against her husband, giving no reply when asked about the events on the 17th of August. When she did finally speak up later on during questioning, she merely said that “she had nothing to tell” and objected to other leading questions that would have assuredly convicted Mr. Cliff. All the prosecutor could get from the witness after several attempts to get her to tell the truth was a smile. The smiling grew infectious, and soon laughter was heard in the courtroom. When asked if she had been talked to or influenced before the trial, she responded with a submissive and inaudible “yes.” She then refused to say anything else on the matter of the trial, which forced the prosecutor to send his star witness to jail for contempt of court for the evening. The trial reconvened on the follow day, October 16, 1882, with the witness in a hopefully better position for testimony. She agreed to “tell part, but not all” of her story. Whatever she said must not have been compelling as the end of the trial neared. Other witnesses were examined, playing into the hands of the defense, who asked for a plea of transitory insanity before the jury retired.8
Sometimes, things do not go like you think they will, especially during the Victorian Era. (Alexandria Gazette, October 16, 1882)
A verdict was reached later that evening after a short deliberation. Foreman Joseph Kauffman presented a verdict of not guilty. James Cliff, now a free man, left the court room with his wife “arm in arm, as loving as if nothing has ever happened to disturb their domestic relations.” Applause could be heard audibly in the court room after the verdict was delivered. It was said that the insanity plea put up by the defense “was worked with a success in this case that even the family of the prisoner did not anticipate.” Who would? Such was the time and delicate circumstances that let a jealous man with anger issues get away with some of the worst instances of domestic abuse. It was the unfortunately product of the time period. The vehicle for that violence was eerily enough the Wilkes Street tunnel, which provided Mr. Cliff with the perfect location to strike her in a jealous rage. The Gazette later reported that Mr. Cliff met his end later on in the Wilkes Tunnel, but that could not be confirmed at present.
If you or someone you know are being abused domestically, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-79907233. If you cannot speak safely, log onto thehotline.org or text LOVEIS to 22522.
It’s not hard to grab a newspaper in the Old Town section of Alexandria, Virginia. Stroll down King Street and you’ll see a number of newspaper and circular boxes: pamphlets for things to do and see in Old Town, ads for ghost tours, copies of the Alexandria Times and the Zebra. However, at the intersection of King and Union Street is a lone newspaper box for the Alexandria Gazette Packet. The Gazette is an unassuming, small paper that averages about 15 pages per issue and costs a quarter. It also has the distinction of being one of, if not the, longest-running newspaper in the United States.
Alexandria Gazette Newspaper Box on Union Street, Alexandria. The box sites nearby the location of its post-fire offices. (Eng Photo)
Alexandria’s history of printing dates to 1784. The city’s first printing plant belonged to George Richards and Company, and it stood at the intersection of Princess and Fairfax Street.1 This plant produced Northern Virginia’s first paper, titled The Virginia Journal and Alexandria Observer.2 The present-day Alexandria Gazette can trace its origins to this first paper.
The year 1800 marked the arrival of Samuel Snowden to Alexandria. Snowden, a New Jersey native, began a paper that same year with another collaborator and called it the Alexandria Adviser. However, Snowden soon bought the Columbian Mirror and Alexandria Gazette,from William Fowler in December of 1800.3 Snowden initially called this combined paper The Alexandria Advertiser and Commercial Intelligencer, he changed the name multiple times before settling on the Alexandria Gazette sometime between 1826 and 1828.4 Snowden continued to run the Gazette until his death in 1831; Snowden’s 21 year- old son, Edgar Snowden, resumed ownership of the paper.
In 1860, the United States was on the brink of war. Lincoln was elected President in November. Not long after his inauguration in March 1861, the Civil War began with the firing on Fort Sumter on April 12. A little over a month later, on May 23,Virginia seceded from the Union. On the morning of May 24, Union soldiers marched to Alexandria from Washington, D.C. and occupied the city. At the time, Snowden and his son, Edgar Snowden Jr., were running the Gazette. There was one rival newspaper, The Virginia Sentinel, which had begun the previous year.5 It is unclear whether the editors of the Sentinel disbanded or fled, but when the Union occupation began, the Gazette was the only remaining paper in Alexandria.6
Edgar Snowden, Jr. (sparedshared3)
Under Union occupation, the Gazette did not thrive. Snowden and Edgar Jr. continued to print the paper, but “telegraph communications were denied the publishers and Alexandria had become stagnated economically.”7 By the summer of 1861, the paper had disappeared. However, that fall, Edgar Jr. began a small paper called The Local News. It was a “small non-committal sheet with almost no editorials.”8 Overall, it had varied content: news stories, advertising, current events—it could even report on the crimes of Union soldiers, such as fights and break-ins.9
The Local News ran smoothly and without incident until February 1862. Then, on Sunday, February 9, an event occurred that caused Snowden to publish—what was for the time—an inflammatory editorial.
“ARREST OF A MINISTER WHILE AT PRAYER IN A CHURCH—GREAT EXCITEMENT”
The headline of the first column in the February 10 edition of the Gazette hints at a wild story to follow. However, the story is recounted in an objective, straightforward manner. St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, founded in 1808 and currently at 228 South Pitt Street, was the site of a disturbance between Union soldiers and Alexandrians. The Reverend K.J. Stewart conducted Sunday services at the church, and at the services on February 9, he began to read the litany. However, several Union soldiers in the congregation, including Captain Elon Farnsworth, noticed that the Reverend did not recite the prayer for the President of the United States. The soldiers demanded he read the prayer, but he ignored them. Farnsworth then decided to arrest the Reverend, so “the prayer book was taken from Mr. Stewart’s hand, he was seized and conducted out of the church, followed by bis little daughter who clung to her father, and was held by one of the soldiers.”10 Michael Lee Pope’s account of the event adds a bit of flair: when soldiers removed the Reverend’s prayer book, he continued to recite the litany from memory. Also, as the Reverend was dragged out the church door, a lady in the choir gallery threw a book at a Union soldier.11 A history of the church on the St. Paul’s website also acknowledges, “ a warning was issued to ‘females and others,’ threatening arrest for offensive remarks and demonstrations prompted, no doubt, by the actions of several St. Paul’s ladies, including one who is said to have dropped her prayer book from the gallery onto the head of an offending officer.”12
The Local News (February 10, 1862)
The Reverend was taken through the streets of Alexandria, in his clerical robes, to Farnsworth’s quarters. The General Montgomery was summoned from the services he was attending at the nearby Christ Church to deal with the situation. He later released Reverend Stewart at the direction of government in Washington, D.C.
However, the column on the far right of that paper’s edition tells the same story—with less objective details. The editorial describes the event as never having “a parallel among civilized nations, certainly not in the history of this country.”13 The story continues, “an interruption occurred of the character which the law designates as ” brawling”—that is, the intervention of noise and tumult by certain persons, who had come to the church with the intention of interrupting the service should it not proceed according to their wishes.” When the Reverend refused to read the prayer for the President, Farnsworth “undertook to officiate in prayer (if prayer it can be called) by reading the prayer for the President of the United States.” Then he demanded the arrest of the Reverend and called him “a rebel and a traitor.”14 The column continues to deplore the actions of the Union soldiers and declares, at the end, “It will, however, be well to state that Mr. Stewart only insists upon the right of all ambassadors to communicate with their King, untrammeled by civil or military interference.”
So incensed from the event was Snowden, that he ends the column with a listing of prominent men present in the church and states that they will “testify to the facts as above stated.” He then ends the column with a statement that copies of the paper have been sent to the President and George McClellan, the Commanding General of the Union forces.
Though the event ended peacefully, the Union unrest was far from over.
Gazette House Burning Detail, 310 Prince Street, Alexandria, VA (Eng Photo)
That evening, the offices of the Alexandria Gazette at 310 Prince Street caught fire and burned. How the fire began remains unknown. Several sources call the fire “mysterious,” but other sources claim that the fire was started by Union soldiers as retaliation for the editorial.15 Regardless of origin, the scars from the fire remain on the side of the building to this day, a testament to the historical event that occurred on this spot.
On May 13, 1862, Edgar Snowden Jr. revived the Gazette from the ashes. The paper’s offices were moved to 104 King Street, over a local bookstore. The May 13th edition of the paper states it as “a continuation of domestic annals commenced by the Alexandria Gazette in 1799, and, together with the sheets of ‘The Local News,’ completes the connection between the sixty-second and sixty-third volumes of the Gazette.” The text describes the summaries as “necessarily brief” and “without details.” The first item listed is the fire on February 10: “The Alexandria Gazette office burned, and further issue of “The Local News” suspended.” In the opposite column, in a brief yet somehow triumphant fashion, the last item reads: “May 13.—Alexandria Gazette resumed.”
And resume it did. The Alexandria Gazette runs to this day. While hunting for the location of 104 King Street, I spied the old, battered newspaper box in front of Mia’s Italian Restaurant with a plain sticker plastered on the side: Alexandria Gazette Packet.18 I jumped out of the car and ran to see if there were any old copies inside. Lo and behold, I pulled out a July 16, 2020 edition of the Gazette. While we were never able to pinpoint exactly where 104 King Street sat, it crossed our minds that the newspaper box sits the closest it can to the original office.
At the top of the paper, in small letters, is a brief and powerful tagline: “Serving Alexandria for over 200 years.”
Rawson, David. “Samuel Snowden.” Index of Virginia Printing, http://indexvirginiaprinting.org/bio/393/. Rawson notes that Fowler had the publication for only two months and it was financially troubled.
Rawson, “Index.” The name Alexandria Advertiser and Commercial Intelligencer only lasted until 1803. The succession of names included: Alexandria Daily Advertiser, 1803-1808; Alexandria Daily Gazette, Commercial and Political, 1808-1812; Alexandria Gazette, Commercial and Political, 1812-1817; Alexandria Gazette and Daily Advertiser, 1817-1819; Gazette and Daily Advertiser, 1819-1821; Alexandria Gazette and Daily Advertiser, 1821-1822; Alexandria Gazette and Advertiser, 1822-1824; and Alexandria Phenix Gazette, 1825-1833. At some point between 1833 and 1834 the “Phenix” portion of the name was dropped.
Cappon, Lester. “The Yankee Press in Virginia, 1861-1865.” The William and Mary Quarterly. Vol. 15 No. 1 (1935): pp. 81-88. The Sentinel only lasted from 1859-1861. Cappon describes it as “pro-secession and radical.”
Cappon states the paper “disbanded,” but Anderson, citing a different publication by Cappon, states that the editors “escaped” to Warrenton, Virginia.
Anderson, “Printing,” p. 18.
Cappon, “Yankee Press,” p. 81.
Tuyull, et al. “Sic Semper Tyrannis: The Alexandria Gazette under Union Occupation.” Journalism in the Fallen Confederacy (New York: Palgrave, 2015), pp.18-41.
The Local News, (Alexandria, VA) February 10, 1861.
Pope, Michael Lee. Wicked Northern Virginia (Charleston: History Press, 2014), p. 107.
The Local News, (Alexandria, VA) February 10, 1862.
Interesting side note: Captain Elon Farnsworth later died at the Battle of Gettysburg on July 3, 1863.
Anderson and Pope claim that Union forces set the fire, as does the historical marker at 310 Prince Street. However, Jeremy Harvey (author of Occupied City: Portrait of Civil War Alexandria, Virginia) states the fire began under “mysterious circumstances.” https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=41832
Anderson, “Printing,” p. 18.
Alexandria Gazette, (Alexandria, VA) May 13, 1862.
Mia’s address is 100 King Street. We could not locate 104 King Street, but we assume it was on the second floor (since Anderson points out it was above a bookstore) and probably absorbed into the restaurant space.
(This is the first of a three-part series on Alexandria’s historic Wilkes Street Tunnel.)
Matthew Eng, Offbeat NOVA
There is an ordinary looking tunnel one-half mile away from the heart of Old Town Alexandria’s bustling King Street waterfront. The tunnel, approximately one hundred and seventy feet long, extends between South Royal and Lee Streets, passing under Fairfax Street. Long ago, the citizens that lived in its proximity referred to the area as “tunnel town” after the aforementioned structure. Nowadays, it’s better known by the name of the street it passes through: the Wilkes Street tunnel. The street and its tunnel are named after John Wilkes, a radical English statesman who championed the cause of the American colonies against King George III.
The tunnel’s connection to the city and Northern Virginia is not unlike the structure itself, with beaming rays of light peaking at either end amidst long periods of murky gloom and blackness. After awakening some of its past ghosts, maybe this in depth look at the troubled history of the Wilkes Street tunnel will coax others out of the darkness and into the light.
PART I: Tunnel Town
To tell the story of the Wilkes Street tunnel, you have to start at the creation of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, the first set of tracks to pass through the tunnel’s arched walls. The Orange and Alexandria Railroad Company chartered the railroad in 1848. This first incarnation ran from the Potomac River docks at the far end of Union Street in Alexandria to Gordonsville in Orange County. At its peak just before the American Civil War, the railroad extended to an expanse in the Commonwealth nearly one hundred and fifty miles from Alexandria to Lynchburg.1
Bridge on Orange & Alexandria Railroad (Library of Congress Image #LC-DIG-ppmsca-33468)
T.C. Atkinson, Chief Engineer of the railroad, put a notice in the local newspaper in February 1850 for Alexandria’s portion of railroad construction, including a tunnel “about 360 feet in length with support walls, bridge, and culvert masonry.” According to former Alexandria City Archaeologist Pamela Cressey, the local firm of Malone and Crockett won the contract and soon began work in earnest.2 George H. Smoot, then President of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, stuck a shovel in Wilkes Street between Fairfax and Lee (then-called Water Street), which became the first work done for the tunnel. By April of the following year, the American Telegraph reported that the tunnel was proceeding “with vigor” and would soon be completed. By that time, the company had already laid the rails for the Orange and Alexandria railroad on Union street.3
On May 6, 1851, the first locomotive was placed on the track for the Orange and Alexandria Rail, traveling “from the north end of Union Street to the tunnel on Wilkes Street.”4 The news snippet reported that “the performance was good, and gave general satisfaction.” The dutiful work of Malone and Crockett, however, decreased in quality after the initial victories of the tunnel design. It deteriorated so much that they were eventually taken off the project, according to chief engineer Atkinson. It was not until October 1855 that the Gazette reported that the railroad company, now in charge of construction, planned to complete the eastern end of the tunnel overlooking the Potomac River. By early July 1854, locals hoped for a speedy conclusion to the tunnel’s initial construction, as “it should not be suffered to remain in its present condition any longer.”5
The tunnel was officially completed in 1856, over budget and over schedule. The tunnel’s original intended purpose was as a route service and major connector to the railroad carrying supplies and goods from wharfs and warehouses on the Alexandria waterfront to all points south. A nearby large depot and roundabout house was located up the track in the present-day Carlyle/Eisenhower business district. The tunnel’s sandstone vaulted walls stretched to nearly sixteen feet in height at the top of its brick arch. The western end of the tunnel featured a long ramp with brick wall sides. Architecturally, it is known as a “cut and cover” bridge, a common technique later popularized by the highly unpopular Washington Metro Area Transition Authority in Northern Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C.
Order for the Superintendent of Police to enforce improvements on the Wilkes Street Tunnel (Alexandria Gazette, August 14, 1857)
Problems with the tunnel’s “completed” construction began almost immediately. In 1857, the Alexandria Committee on Streets reported in the Gazette about the poor condition of the tunnel, particularly the drainage and its already decaying eastern end that faced the Potomac River and Union Street.6 The tunnel’s condition became a pressing issue that continued well into the summer of 1857, coming to a head in August. The shoddy craftsmanship came up once more in a Board of Alderman meeting proceedings in the August 14, 1857, issue of the Gazette. The Superintendent of Police had given notice to the Orange and Alexandria Railroad Company to “put the work near the eastern part of the tunnel on Wilkes and Water Streets, in good order.” The work to be done included the replacement of decaying wooden flooring with new timber and better protection on the tunnel’s front. The same order was later published in the newspaper in November and April of the following year, so it is unclear when the work was actually finished, if at all.
Alexandria’s location to the proximity of Washington, D.C., made it an important political stop for many candidates seeking victory in the hotly contested election of 1860. Locals came out to support then-Presidential candidate and Alexandria native John Bell and the Constitutional Union Party in a torch-light procession and meeting on September 28, 1860, less than two months before election day. With a large sign emblazoned with an eagle declaring, “The Constitution, the Union, and the Maintenance of the Laws,” a train carrying Bell traveled through the Wilkes Tunnel on its way to the White House amongst a throng of “Tunneltown boys” carrying big bells and cheering huzzahs and other garish exultations. This is the first instance that you see a newspaper refer to the area around the Wilkes passageway as “tunnel town.” The article ended with a conclusive “assurance” that Alexandria would “speak for the Union in November next, in thunderous tones.” It was hardly thunderous. Bell was embarrassed in the election, and Alexandria voted to secede in 1861 at the start of the American Civil War.7
During the war, Alexandria was a city with Confederate sympathies that quickly fell back into the watchful eye of the Union across the river on May 24, 1861, remaining in Federal hands until the end of the conflict. During that time, the Union Army made the city a major center for troops and supplied being sent to the front lines. Wounded soldiers were brought back to local hospitals in the area, like the Lyceum and, perhaps most famous, Mansion House Hotel depicted in the short-lived PBS series Mercy Street. The Orange and Alexandria Railroad, like so many others at this time, were also taken under control by the Union Army for the war effort, which included the use of the Wilkes Tunnel.
It was not until this brief period of Federal occupation that we begin to see the dark history connected to the tunnel. The Alexandria Gazette, a paper that decidedly leaned its journalistic integrity towards the Confederacy, included several stories of odd occurrences and malfeasance by Union soldiers in the dark tunnel. After the first major battle in Manassas (Bull Run), the newspaper reported that a woman threw rocks collected in her apron at “panic-stricken” Union Zouave soldiers as they escaped through the tunnel onto awaiting gunboats along the Alexandria waterfront. It was the first “baptism of fire” for these men, but hardly the last casualty in Alexandria during the war.8
Under the heading of a “SERIOUS ACCIDENT,” the Gazette reported on the first major incident involving the tunnel in occupied Alexandria on August 26, 1862. According to the brief writeup, a soldier’s right leg was cut clean off above the ankle after lying on the railroad track at the eastern entrance to the Wilkes Tunnel the previous night. He was undoubtedly under the “influence of liquor” and, in an attempt to cross the track, fell with his leg across the rail as a locomotive passed over it, too drunk to move out of the way in time. He was later taken to a hospital and treated for his injuries. It was never reported on the condition of the soldier afterwards. It’s clear from this incident and other snippets from the paper that the Federal occupying force were adept at finding new ways of causing trouble as time dragged on and idleness set in. The newspaper also reported on the necessity to clear out Union stragglers around the city “who had thronged the streets” outside of their encampments.
Some time later in 1864, it was also reported that some “fiends” who murdered an individual put his dead body on the tracks near the western end of the tunnel. The corpse’s head was crushed as an oncoming train on the rail passed over it. It was never specified if the individuals responsible were Union soldiers or local citizens.9
Pvt. Scotten walked into this entrance and never walked out. (Matthew Eng Photo)
The most heinous and unsettling event of the war period occurred two years later in March 1864. On Friday, March 11, 1864, James Scotten of Company G, 4th Regiment, Delaware Volunteers, walked into the Wilkes Tunnel at around six o’clock in the evening and never walked out. According to the report, Scotten was approached by an individual and stabbed in the back of the neck five times. One cut severed his jugular and made a “considerable incision” in his windpipe. One cut from the autopsy report showed the instrument entering the spinal column, which ultimately killed him. Despite his windpipe being cut, one civilian near the tunnel was able to hear Scotten’s pain-stricken groans. By the time he arrived, he was dead.
Scotten was seen walking into the tunnel with another individual who became the prime suspect, John Rush of the 72d Regiment, New York Volunteers. Scotten had just received four months’ pay on the day he was murdered, with very little money found on his person at the time of his death. Rush was arrested on suspicion of murder where he awaited examination. “The victim wore new clothes and there was every reason to suppose he had enlisted in order to procure several hundred dollars bounty,” the report noted. According to Army records, Rush later mustered out of the war several months later on June 8, 1864, in New York City with the rest of his battle-hardened unit. It is safe to say he was never convicted of any wrongdoing. A perpetrator of the crime was never found, and Scotten is listed as “murdered” on Delaware Civil War veteran logs and online registers today.10
Private John Rush was mustered out of the military in June 1864, indicating he was never convicted of a crime. (Matthew Eng Image)
Life continued on for the city after these two incidents in 1862 and 1864, respectively. Complaints included in the local newspaper also continued for the sake of safety after a child fell through a set of broken blanks in the tunnel and was considerably hurt. By the time the war ended, the Gazette was back to reporting on the “ruinous condition” of the tunnel that was becoming more dangerous with each passing day.11
Footnotes
Pamela Cressey, “Wilkes Street Tunnel is Important Piece of Past,” Alexandria Gazette Packet, October 19, 1995. Accessed July 11, 2020, Link.
Ibid.
The American Telegraph, April 14, 1851.
Alexandria Gazette, May 7, 1851.
Alexandria Gazette, July 1, 1854.
Alexandria Gazette, June 1, 1857.
Alexandria Gazette, September 28, 1860.
Alexandria Gazette, March 31, 1922.
Alexandria Gazette, March 10, 1909.
Alexandria Gazette, March 12, 1864.
Alexandria Gazette, September 24, 1864; Alexandria Gazette, January 10, 1865.
When the COVID-19 quarantine began in the middle of March, Angela and I were faced with a number of new realities:
How do we entertain a 4-year-old while still maintaining a relatively normal work schedule for telework?
How do we maintain our sanity stuck at home for weeks on end with said 4-year-old who wants nothing else to do but go outside, see family, and play with others?
What will we do with everything in between that will feel like fun, teach our daughter a few things, and keep us from going insane?
We could only do so much at once, so we spent most of March and April working on the first two of those problems. I will be the first to admit that it was very hard at first. It was hard for everybody. But we persevered after stumbling through the first few weeks to establish a good rhythm to our daily work schedule. But how would we control our “off time,” when we’re at home 24/7?
We did watch a lot of television at first. In some ways, it was nice to catch up on shows we either forgot to watch or always wanted to. Naturally, we watched Tiger King like everyone else. We took the opportunity during the episode where it was clear that Carole Baskin killed her husband to down a bottle of wine together. That was the first time that we allowed ourselves to relax during the entire quarantine. It felt good, but we knew it wouldn’t last. Watching lots of television got old real fast.
(imgur)
One of the other shows we watched during this time of quarantine was Mindhunter. I actually started it almost a year ago, but stopped after four episodes once Angela discovered that I had straight up Netflix-cheated on her. She wasn’t happy, but I remedied the situation, using the opportunity in quarantine to get Angela’s trust back. We started watching it in early May and blew through both seasons within a week and a half. The show got both of us thinking about what strange events and occurrences happened around our area. But how could we search those out in quarantine?
The one way we took back some of the freedoms we used to have without being an entitled asshole who thinks life should go on regardless (if you’re one of those people, thanks for reading but you’re a huge selfish asshole) was to get in our car and drive around. It’s something we both agreed would be both productive and let us “stretch our own legs” in relative safety. Most of the time, we would go into Washington, D.C. Angela loves to drive around the city and people watch. Only there weren’t many people to watch from our car. Once the tragedy of George Floyd happened at the end of May, much of the district was restricted (either by closed roads or a punk-ass wall around the White House). We had to look for other options.
We spent most of June driving around our neck of the woods in Northern Virginia. With such a big territory to cover (over 1,300 square miles), we had to start planning where we were going, so Angela sought out sites that drew her interest. I did the same. We found two or three places that each of us that we wanted to go, packed up our car with our daughter, water, and snacks, and hit the road.
With a car, we could go essentially anywhere to look for whatever clues we could about the area’s past. At first, these targeted drives were a sheepishly fun act of mild historical voyeurism. It was only when we got home that things really started to connect. At night, I would think about the places we went to our weekend drives, wondering how they might fit together in a story or video. When I stayed up at night looking at my phone, I was not chatting with good friends or being sociable. I was feeding my curiosity and secretly filing them away in Google Chrome tabs and scattered notes on my tiny 6.1-inch iPhone screen.
It turns out Angela was doing the same thing. This was the beginning of Offbeat NOVA.
Here’s what you can expect from Offbeat NOVA in the near future:
A local legend that doesn’t get nearly enough credit for how creepy it is.
There’s a tunnel in the heart of NOVA’s gentrified mecca with a dark and mysterious past filled with intrigue, abuse, and murder.
What is it like getting a soda and Cheetos at the same 7-11 where police put John Bobbitt’s dick on ice in a hot dog container?
Did you know that Northern Virginia had its very own theme park one hundred years ago?
Just how many dead bodies are found in local area motels? It turns out…a lot.
Offbeat NOVA 