George Washington Memorial Parkway
Park History
Sourced
George Washington Memorial Parkway runs along the Potomac River through Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia, protecting the river’s landscape and natural shoreline while offering scenic vistas of Washington, D.C., and the Great Falls of the Potomac. Congress established it on May 29, 1930, through the Capper-Cramton Act. Its first leg, the Mount Vernon Memorial Highway, opened in 1932, the bicentennial of Washington’s birth; the 2014 foundation document calls it the first comprehensively designed modern motorway built by the federal government, a pioneer of limited access, grade-separated intersections and cloverleaf interchanges. The northern section was completed in 1962, and the Maryland side was renamed Clara Barton Parkway in 1989. [2] [1]
The park covers 7,600 acres by the park brochure’s count (7,374 in the foundation document) and more than 25 sites. [1] At Great Falls, the largest waterfall on the Potomac, the river rushes over jagged rocks into Mather Gorge beside the remnants of the Patowmack Canal, whose construction Washington presided over; the 15-mile Potomac Gorge is, in the foundation document’s words, one of the most biologically diverse natural areas in the national park system. Fort Hunt Park, once part of the Mount Vernon estate, had batteries that defended the river during the Spanish-American War; in World War II, as the site of P.O. Box 1142, it served as a prisoner-of-war camp and the interrogation center for many high-profile German prisoners. [2]
The parkway’s lands hold prehistoric American Indian sites, and it also manages Theodore Roosevelt Island, a Civil War training area for the Union Army that included the first United States Colored Troops, and Clara Barton National Historic Site at Glen Echo. [2]
Indigenous peoples
Theodore Roosevelt Island lies in a stretch of the Potomac valley that people have used for over 15,000 years, a Park Service history of the island explains. Projectile points about 9,000 years old are its earliest archeological record; people came to fish, hunt, gather shellfish and nuts, and, archeologists suspect, revisited such camps over generations. Around 4,000 years ago people of the Savannah River Culture brought soapstone bowls, and settlement on the island peaked in the Middle Woodland period (700 B.C.E.–1000 C.E.). By the Late Woodland the region’s tribes included the Powhatan coalition in Virginia and the Piscataway and Nanticoke in Maryland, and John Smith’s map of 1607–08 records the nearby settlements of Namoraughquend and Nacotchtanck. English encroachment disrupted the economies and social structures of Virginia tribes, the history notes, yet many Native people still live in the Potomac valley. [3] The foundation document records American Indian archeological sites along the parkway, including on the bluff at Clara Barton’s house. [2]
Women
Clara Barton’s house at Glen Echo, Maryland, went up in 1891 on land given by developers Edward and Edwin Baltzley, who also supplied the labor and some of the materials, hoping her fame would sell lots around their Chautauqua. Barton — Civil War nurse, women’s rights suffragist, and founder and first president of the American Red Cross — lived there briefly in 1891 and again from 1897 until her death in 1912, kept a small farm of cows, horses, chickens and goats, and presided over the Chautauqua’s Women’s Executive Committee. [4] The house was the Red Cross’s first permanent headquarters from 1897 to 1904. The foundation document notes that Barton won international recognition at a time when women were not given the same opportunities as men, and that the site, established in 1974, was one of the first national historic sites dedicated to the accomplishments of an American woman. [2]
Black history
In 1863 the island, then called Analostan or Mason’s Island, became Camp Greene, where the 1st Regiment of United States Colored Troops was mustered. The Emancipation Proclamation had opened Union enlistment to African Americans that January, but Black soldiers could not rise to officer rank and were paid seven dollars a month against thirteen for white soldiers of equal rank. The District of Columbia mustered the regiment in May 1863, and some 3,500 Black men from the District enlisted by the war’s end. Walt Whitman visited and called it the pleasantest camp he had yet seen. On July 30, 1863, the regiment left the island for the siege of Richmond and Petersburg, later fought at Wilmington, and lost 185 enlisted men before it was decommissioned in 1865. [5]
Labor & the New Deal
In May 1933 about 3,000 delegates to a second Bonus March of World War I veterans were bused to Fort Hunt, where Eleanor Roosevelt visited them; when Franklin Roosevelt offered places in the new Civilian Conservation Corps, 2,657 enrolled. CCC Camp NP-6 opened there on October 17, 1933, with 200 enrollees of Company 1241 from New York and Virginia, who cleared dead timber, built bridle paths and landscaped the capital’s parks. A third march camped at Fort Hunt in May 1934, including 270 African American delegates, and 565 more veterans joined the Corps. Company 2387, which replaced it in 1937, planted trees and shrubs along the parkway, and between 1933 and 1938 some 20 enrollees built relief maps and models of parks in Fort Hunt’s “Model Laboratory.” [6] On Theodore Roosevelt Island, CCC crews from 1935 graded paths and, with the Historic American Buildings Survey, excavated the Mason House foundation in 1936. [7]
Sources
- NPSHistory.com: George Washington Memorial Parkway archive page — overview (NPS brochure text) and establishment block
- Foundation Document, George Washington Memorial Parkway, District of Columbia–Maryland–Virginia (NPS, 2014)
- NPS, A History of Native American Life on Theodore Roosevelt Island (nps.gov/this, last updated May 23, 2024)
- Cultural Landscapes Inventory: Glen Echo Park–Clara Barton House (NPS, 2011)
- NPS, Camp Greene (nps.gov/this, last updated May 23, 2024)
- Matthew R. Laird, “By the River Potomac”: An Historic Resource Study of Fort Hunt Park (NPS, August 2000), ch. 5
- NPS, Civilian Conservation Corps at Theodore Roosevelt Island (nps.gov/this, last updated May 23, 2024)
CONFIRMED REMOVED: Interpretive materials
Long before George Washington Memorial Parkway became a national park, this land was home to Indigenous peoples whose connection to it spans thousands of years. The interpretive materials now being reviewed tell their story — often developed through years of formal tribal consultation, as required by federal law.
From the internal review records: “Sign including tribal land acknowledgement at Great Falls Park, VA. This is in an encased bulletin board and removable. Short term options include removing entire sign or covering up the tribal land acknowdlegement section and keeping other information available to visitors.”
Why this matters: The Indigenous history presented at George Washington Memorial Parkway was developed through formal tribal consultation — a legal requirement under federal law. The language being reviewed was often specifically requested by tribal nations whose ancestors lived on this land for thousands of years. Revising it without renewed consultation would violate both the spirit and the letter of that process.
- “Tribal Land Acknowledgement” — removed
- “Sign at Great Falls” — removed per NPS court filing
- Tribal land acknowledgement posting; reason: Disparages Americans past or living; now: In the park
- Sign at Great Falls; reason: Disparages Americans past or living; now: In the park
Sign including tribal land acknowledgement at Great Falls Park, VA. This is in an encased bulletin board and removable. Short term options include removing entire sign or covering up the tribal land acknowdlegement section and keeping other information available to visitors.
FLAGGED FOR REVIEW: Interpretive materials
Long before George Washington Memorial Parkway became a national park, this land was home to Indigenous peoples whose connection to it spans thousands of years. The interpretive materials now being reviewed tell their story — often developed through years of formal tribal consultation, as required by federal law.
From the internal review records: “Tribal land acknowledgement posted on encased bulltein board at Theodore Roosevelt Island. Printed on paper; can be removed from bulletin board display. Decision was conveyed to remove. Removed on 7/2/2025.”
Why this matters: The Indigenous history presented at George Washington Memorial Parkway was developed through formal tribal consultation — a legal requirement under federal law. The language being reviewed was often specifically requested by tribal nations whose ancestors lived on this land for thousands of years. Revising it without renewed consultation would violate both the spirit and the letter of that process.
Tribal land acknowledgement posted on encased bulltein board at Theodore Roosevelt Island. Printed on paper; can be removed from bulletin board display. Decision was conveyed to remove. Removed on 7/2/2025.
Photos courtesy Save Our Signs (public domain)
Photographs attached to this park's records in the leaked NPS review database.
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