Abingdon

I was dropping my best friend off at the airport yesterday. Not Dulles, thank God, which is in another county altogether, and requires a major expedition and a compass to get to.

It had been another one of those weekends, too short and filled to the brim. A fellow officer had appeared by chance at a restaurant where we sat, proud of the life relationship the couple could now talk about since the strictures of the Uniform code of Military Justice had slipped away into retirement the year before.

I was happy for them. A little happiness can be a good thing. Otherwise, life in the Capital continues to churn ponderously down the home stretch to the elections. The Democrats are claiming that the Republicans are going to bring back the draft and confiscate $500 dollars a month from my parent’s Social Security. That is alarming. I don’t think they can afford it.

Mr. Kerry is also rooting around in the closets of the Cheney family, and while it appears unseemly, he is altogether unfazed by the reaction to his intrusion into an innocent woman’s privacy. He said this morning he thought it was mentioned in a supportive way. The Republicans are outraged, and promptly turned a private matter into another grenade to hurl back at the enemy.

The Republicans have come around to the general contention that the Democrats are hallucinating, which in fact is probably true, since apparently they believe that anything they say about the President and his merry men must be true, since the reality is unquestionably worse to the enlightened mind. Stem cell research to a woman’s right to choose, pick your poison.

They are making some of this up- the draft and social security parts, anyway- and thus I have no way of knowing if there is anything to any of it. Politics has certainly been this ugly before, but normally something like a lynching would end it.

I listened on the radio, trying to avoid the moment before the departure, hurtling across the 14 th Street Bridge. News came from the hermit state of Burma that the State Law and Order Restoration Committee, the ruling Junta, had locked up the Prime Minister, Lieutenant General Kim Yuent. Is Burma starting to crack apart? Where does that fit in the puzzle?

I preferred Burmese politics in the days I had something to do with it, back in the mid-1990s. Good guys and bad guys were easily identifiable, which they are not here.

Something called early voting has already begun in some states, a festival of two weeks to get out the vote to make sure that no vote is uncounted more than a couple times, I presume that means the fraud has already begun. Someone told me a Republican had to have at least an eight-point lead in urban areas, due to traditional and understandable errors in the count, but there were roaming gangs of GOP operatives in the last election.

Iraq is still with us. There is controversy twisted into election hyperbole over the actions of a group of Army Reservists in Iraq. They either had mutinied or made a helpful suggestion to the chain-chain-of-command that the assigned mission was un-executable as planned. Take your pick.

The departing flight was blessedly leaving out of Ronald Reagan National Airport, the field right in the Nation’s capital.

Washington has always had a problem with air travel. Back in the day, the Army and the Navy both conducted flight operations on the District side of the River, at the Anacostia Naval Station and Bolling field, respectively, and on the Virginia side of the river there was Hoover field, which opened in 1926 on the muddy flats where the Pentagon now stands. To the south, across Military Road, the Washington Airport opened the next year.

It was good use for the flats along the river. Big Agriculture was dead. The Virginia side of the river had been in decline since the Union Army occupied it to defend the Capital in 1861. They immediately began to dig, throwing up ramparts and connecting a net of forts on all the high ground. Many of the fortifications were still there, looking down at the earth-moving machines and the graders drawn by mule teams.

Time was, the plantation houses sat high on the bluffs and the slaves worked the tobacco fields. In Colonial times, ships crossed the wide ocean and entered the Chesapeake Bay and sailed north to the mouth of the broad river. They passed the Virginia plantations of Mount Vernon, Stratford Hall, Kenmore and Woodlawn. The docks of Georgetown in Maryland were the last place where ocean-going ships could navigate, since the river began to rise to the mountains. To the south, on the Virginia side, were the plantations of Arlington and Abingdon.

Arlington is still mostly intact, since it was the home of Robert E. Lee who married into the Custis family, who had owned the property since before George was King. The Federal Army confiscated the estate during the Civil War and began to utilize it as a burying ground.

The first of the honored dead were laid in the vegetable garden adjacent to the manor house, so that General Lee could never look out his window without thinking of the 72 nd New York Regiment. The property is still intact, though on its lush fields are now located the Pentagon, the sprawling national cemetery and the garrison of Fort Myer.

In 1930, the economics of the Great Depression caused the two airports on the Virginia side to merge to form Washington-Hoover Airport. Highway One ran along the inland side, and there were high-tension electrical wires string there. A tall smokestack marked the southern approach and a dump delineated the northern portal. The one runway was intersected by busy Military Road, which lead up to the old ring of forts along the river. Guards were posted to flag down traffic during takeoffs and landings.

Abingdon is known, insofar as it is these days, as the only Colonial plantation ruin preserved on a major urban airfield.

The Daughters of the American Revolution call Abingdon the “Birthplace of Nelly Custis” because she was the only child in the Custis family who was born there.  After her father’s death, George and Martha Washington raised their granddaughter, Nelly, as their own child. So if you desire a connection to the very foundation of this nation, Abingdon is it.

The plantation survived the Union occupation, but just barely. The plantation life was over, the slaves freed, and the economy of the County was ruined. It would be fifty years before things really began to come back, and a century for it to rise again. The encroachment of industry along the river took its toll on Abingdon, the smokestack and the dump and the airfield below, and the house fell  into disrepair.

It was a wreck, but a recognized historical treasure. Accordingly, I assume some progressive developer torched it in 1930, which has been the traditional way for Northern Virginia developers to eliminate competition with the past.

Eight years later, the land was seized by Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the site of an airport that would eliminate Military road and provide world-class air service to the Nation’s Capital. 

What was Abingdon is located between Garage A and Garage B/C. I remember when they constructed the garages. You have never seen a nightmare like trying to get to the terminals when they were throwing them up. I didn’t know it, but the Metropolitan Airport Authority built them. I was parked on the third deck of the B/C garage. I took the moving walkways to the pedestrian bridge from the new terminal building to Garage B. There was a sign pointing to the Abingdon site, and being a little sad, I followed the signs to a long covered walkway between the garage complexes.

A concrete walkway snakes up across a lush hill. About twenty yards along there are informational placards detailing the history, the brightly colored sort of information that does not say where the slave cabins were located, or that the District fought hard for this part of Virginia to be once more under its jurisdiction, since the airport is built on filled land, and it owns all of the river to dry land. That means the airport should, in the view of the bureaucrats, belong to Washington.

I read that this land was originally granted to Robert Howson in 1669, only sixty years after the first English settlement in the New World. Howson sold it to John Alexander for 6,000 pounds of tobacco, one of the early real estate â€ï¿½flips” in the region. The city of Alexandria was named for John, and so was the County that was created out of the Virginia part of the District that was given back to the Old Dominion in the 1840s.

It eventually became too confusing, the city and county having the same name, and the local authorities renamed it after the Custis-Lee plantation: Arlington.

The first house on the site between the A and B/C garages was likely built in the 1740’s by Gerard Alexander the First, John’s great-grandson.

Abingdon had flourished for generations. Through the years, ownership of the property changed hands among the Alexander, Custis, Stuart and Hunter families, all great names of Northern Virginia. George Washington’s adopted stepson, John Parke Custis lived on the site for several years.

But history was closing in. Freedman’s villages came to grounds of Arlington after the war, and in 1892, a railroad was built west of Abingdon plantation. The land was sold off, and in the l920’s, the George Washington Memorial Parkway that leads from the Falls of the Potomac to Mount Vernon was constructed.

After the place was torched in 1930, the Washington Branch of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities stabilized the ruins and commemorated the site with a plaque in 1933. The remains were largely untouched and unnoticed until 1998, when miraculously the Airport Authority was presented with the opportunity to either bulldoze the brick foundations and complete a unified garage structure, or submit to the plaque.

The Airport Authority blinked at the intransigence of the preservation activitists.

A portion of the brick foundations of two structures are preserved on the hill. The informational signs say they are what remains of the Main House and Kitchen. For all the history of the place, the footprint is as small as the first little house I was able to afford out in the suburbs.

The signs tell you the preservation of the Abingdon Plantation site is part of the ongoing Capital Development Program at Ronald Reagan National Airport. The artifacts found during the archeological dig on the little knob between the garages are contained in an informational display in terminal A, the original National Airport building.

Terminal A itself is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It has little meteorological domes on the top, with moving hatches for the old-time weather-guessers to look out and take observations. The National Seal is over the door.

It is well worth a look, if you ever find yourself flying Midway Air or Northwest, and if you do, you might actually stumble over Abingdon’s display case.

I’ve been flying in and out of this airport for thirty-three years and it was news to me.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra

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