GEORGE WASHINGTON MEMORIAL PARKWAY ADMINISTRATIVE HISTORY Barry Mackintosh Park History Program National Park Service Department of the Interior Washington, DC 1996 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION . 1 I. THE MOUNT VERNON MEMORIAL HIGHWAY • • • 7 II. THE CAPPER-CRAMTON ACT 21 III. EXPANDING THE PARKWAY, 1931-1952 • 33 IV. EXPANDING THE PARKWAY, 1952-1970 57 V. THE UNFINISHED PARKWAY. 87 VI. ARLINGTON HOUSE .•• . • 117 VII. THEODORE ROOSEVELT ISLAND . • 133 VIII. OTHER ADDITIONS AND SUBTRACTIONS • . • • . 147 Fort Hunt •.. • • . • • . • • . 147 Jones Point . • • . • • . • . • • . • • . • • • . 150 Dyke Marsh and Daingerfield Island . • • • . • • . • 153 Arlington Memorial Bridge, Memorial Drive, and Columbia Island • . • • • • • • . • • • • . • . • 164 The Nevius Tract • • . • . • • • • • • • . • • • . • • • 176 Merrywood and the Riverfront Above Chain Bridge • • • . 184 Fort Marcy . • • • • . • • • • . • • . • • • . 187 The Langley Tract and Turkey Run Farm • • • • . • • • 188 Glen Echo Park and Clara Barton National Historic site • 190 GWMP Loses Ground • • • . • • • • .. • . • • . • • • 197 INTRODUCTION The George Washington Memorial Parkway is among the most complex and unusual units of the national park system. The GWMP encompasses some 7,428 acres in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. For reasons that will later be explained, a small part of this acreage is not administered by its superintendent, and a greater amount of land formerly within GWMP now lies within another national park unit. Some of the GWMP acreage the superintendent administers is commonly known by other names, like Great Falls Park in Virginia and Glen Echo Park in Maryland. While most national park units may be characterized as predominantly natural, historical, or recreational, GWMP comprises such a diverse array of natural, historic, and recreational resources that it defies any such categorization. Further complicating matters, GWMP's superintendent also administers four other areas classed as discrete national park units-Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial, Virginia; Clara Barton N~tional Historic Site, Maryland; and Lyndon Baines Johnson Memorial Grove on the Potomaq and Theodore Roosevelt Island in Washington, DC-plus Arlington Memorial Bridge and certain other features in National Capital Parks, another park system unit. George Washington Memorial Parkway is also unusual among national parklands in not being primarily a destination area. People may go to recreate at certain of its features, but they 1 normally do not set out to visit "the parkway.n Even when not using it to commute to and from work, most view it a way of getting somewhere else, such as Washington National Airport or Mount Vernon or Great Falls. Insofar as public use is concerned, this was its chief intent. As John Nolen and Henry V. Hubbard noted in 1937, parkways of its type were "enjoyed mostly by people traveling primarily for other purposes," providing "a quick and pleasant channel of traffic between the country or the suburbs and the town-between horne and work-for millions of' automobile owners, rich and poor."l It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that the GWMP was created solely for transportation-utilitarian or recreational. The destination of Mount Vernon figured prominently in the conception of its initial component, and later road construction was spurred by commuting considerations. But the parkway was conceived primarily as a means to another end: environmental conservation. A parkway' is generally thought of as kind of road. In fact, a parkway of GWMP's character is more properly defined as "an attenuated park with a road through it."2 What makes the whole a parkway depends largely on the natural and designed landscape through which the road passes. In the case of the GWMP, that landscape is the Potomac River valley above and below Washington, IJohn Nolen and Henry V. Hubbard, Parkways and Land Values (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937), p. xii. 2Ibid. 2 and the parkway was devised as a way of preserving and enhancing it. Although roads would later lose favor among park proponents, a road was always an integral part of planning for park development of the Potomac riverbanks. Why a parkway rather than a roadless park, a "purer" form of preservation? This course had a pragmatic dimension: a road that would serve practical transportation needs as well as recreational motoring would attract broader public and political support for the project. Governments were not then in the habit of acquiring expensive land for wholly aesthetic or ecological purposes. But a road was also favored on its merits as a park amenity, as a desirable means of maximizing public enjoyment of the acquired park land and adjoining water. Declining to make the valley's scenic and historic attributes easily accessible in this manner would not have occurred to contemporary park planners. A brief look at the evolution of the parkway idea will put the George Washington Memorial Parkway in context. Parkways originated in the late 19th century as boulevards adjoining urban parks, such as that proposed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux to link Brooklyn's Prospect Park with the Atlantic Ocean and the East River. The prototype of the GWMP and other "modern" parkways was built in New York's Westchester County between 1916 and 1923. "It was only with completion of New York's Bronx River Parkway after World War I that the modern parkway came into being with its clear set of distinguishing 3 characteristics," Norman T. Newton has written of this project. "The term now denoted a strip of land dedicated to recreation and the movement of pleasure vehicles . The parkway was not itself a road, it contained a roadway." Like the GWMP, the Bronx River Parkway project had a broader conservation purpose: to clean up the valley through which it ran. 3 The most important characteristic distinguishing the Bronx River Parkway from earlier boulevard-type parkways was limited access. There was no median divider, a standard parkway feature later, but the denial of access to abutting private landowners and the separation of crossing traffic via stone-faced concrete arch bridges permitted more unimpeded movement of larger volumes of traffic. 4 The Mount Vernon Memorial Highway, built 1928-32 as the first component of the GWMP, had occasional grade intersections but otherwise closely followed the Bronx River precedent. This was not surprising given that several designers and builders of the Bronx River and later Westchester County parkways-notably engineer Jay Downer, landscape architects Gilmore D. Clarke and Wilbur H. Simonson, and horticulturalist Henry Nye-worked for or consulted with the Bureau of Public Roads on the Mount Vernon highway project. 3Ian J. W. Firth, "Historic Resources Study, Blue Ridge Parkway," draft for NPS Southeast Region, June 1992, p. 12; Newton, Design on the Land: The Development of Landscape Architecture (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 597. 4Newton, Design on the Land, p. 597; Glenn S. Orlin, "The Park and Planning commissions and the Development of the American Parkway," paper in NPS History Division, Washington, DC, p. 23. 4 As suburbanization accelerated, so did the need for high- volume traffic movement. According to a recent study of parkway evolution, parkways were becoming "landscaped trafficways" in the mid-1930s, and by the time the GWMP roads in Maryland and above spout Run in Virginia were designed and begun in the 1950s, "the sole remaining function of parkways was the utilitarian transport of people, particularly commuters, between downtown Washington and the inner suburbs."5 This statement does scant justice to the aesthetic and preservation values of the upper GWMP, however. The Virginia road won critical acclaim for showing "a superb handling of the variable median, achieved by a carefully studied interplay of two curvilinear roadways."6 Its users can hardly fail to appreciate its remarkably attractive quality, the beauty of its landscaped borders, and the exceptional views of the valley and the city it offers. The Maryland road, now known as the Clara Barton Parkway, is less impressive aesthetically but provides pleasing glimpses of the river and Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and access to the historic waterway at several of its locks. Again, moreover, the parkway on both sides of the river is.far more than the roads that run through it. It encompasses much publicly acquired land on which the roads scarcely impinge, ensuring that the Potomac 5Glenn S. Orlin, "The Evolution of the American Urban parkway," Ph.D. dissertation, George Washington University, 1992, pp . 174, 24 6 • 6Christopher Tunnard and Boris Pushkarev, Man-Made America: Chaos or Control? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 203. 5 riverbanks between Washington and Great Falls will remain largely undeveloped. The GWMP was intended to conserve both banks of the Potomac between Great Falls and Mount Vernon in public ownership. This objective was imperfectly realized, and there is no prospect that it will be completed as envisioned. Even in its incomplete form, however, it is a magnificent achievement. Its story is well worth telling. 6 CHAPTER I: THE MOUNT VERNON M.EMORIAL HIGHWAY The earliest interest in what ultimately became the George Washington Memorial Parkway focused on a road linking Washington, D.C., with Mount Vernon. In 1887-88 a group of Alexandria residents obtained a Virginia charter for the Mount Vernon Avenue Association. As outlined by E. W. Fox in his National Republican newspaper, it sought to receive public and private contributions for a road extending from "a point south of the Aqueduct Bridge or the northern boundary of the government park, reservation or cemetery known as Arlington, on the Potomac River; thence through the county and city of Alexandria, passing through Washington street . • . , and through the county of Fairfax to the grounds enclosing the tomb of Washington, known as Mount Vernon, over the most practicable route to be selected by the trustees of the Association ..•. "1 Congress responded promptly to the association's efforts by appropriating $10,000 for a survey, conducted by Lt.