By Dr. Dan Lee
Alexandria, VA – Alexandria celebrates its 276th birthday and the USA’s 249th on Saturday, July 12. The celebration takes place at Oronoco Bay Park from 6 to 9:45 p.m. Admission is free. The designation of July 13 as Alexandria’s birthday commemorates the auction of lots in today’s Old Town, which took place on July 13 and 14, 1749. Alexandria has grown exponentially since then, but today’s article looks at that first year as a chartered town.
1749, of course, was not the first year humans used the land that makes up today’s Alexandria. For centuries, Native Americans lived, traveled through, hunted, and fished within today’s city limits. The Cheroenhaka (Nottoway), Chickahominy, Chickahominy Eastern Division, Mattaponi, Upper Mattaponi, Monacan, Nansemond, Nottoway, Pamunkey, Patawomeck, and Rappahannock are some of the state and federally recognized tribes and nations of Virginia.
In 1654, the first female barrister in the English colonies, Dame Margaret Brent received a patent for 700 acres including much of today’s Alexandria. The granting of a charter in May of 1749 from Virginia’s House of Burgesses made the town official.
John West, Fairfax County surveyor, and by tradition, his assistant, the 17-year-old George Washington, laid out 60 acres of plots. Washington later made a new map, showing 58 lots sold between July and September 1749, which is seen here. Included in the list of owners is John Carlyle the wealthiest resident of the new town, John Alexander of the family for whom the Alexandria is named in the charter, and Washington’s brother Lawrence. Plots were set aside for a marketplace and public landings along the river.
The town plan of Alexandria, a straightforward grid with streets set at right angles, along a riverbank, is very similar to other towns in Virginia and Maryland founded in the early to mid-eighteenth-century. For example, the 1749 Alexandria town map looks very similar to the 1721 plan for Fredricksburg.
Two other aspects of the 1749 jump out to the modern reader. The first is using the grid, asserting that these settlers could bring rational order to a natural landscape that included hills and a river. The second is the hierarchical naming system of the east-west streets. The streets descend from King to Prince to Duke going south, and Queen to Princess going north. What would have been Duchess Street is instead Oronoco, another name used for tobacco at the time. The intersection of Cameron Street and Fairfax Street was to be the civic center of the town. Historians have concluded that those streets were named to curry the favor of Thomas, Sixth Lord Fairfax, Baron Cameron. Thomas is one of the two men to have two streets in Old Town named after them, the other being Patrick Henry.
Over 276 years, Alexandria’s history and fortunes have evolved and changed, at times as a preview, at others as a reflection of the changes in the United States. Readers are invited to celebrate the cty’s founding all of those years ago.
