Burke's Station (Historical Marker)

Here follows the inscription written on this roadside historical marker:

Burke's Station
This building is the original Burke's Station. Named for prominent local resident Silas Burke, it opened here in 1851 on the new Orange and Alexandria Railroad, which linked northern and central Virginia. John A. Marshall, first postmaster of the town later known as Burke, bought 50 acres here in 1852: he and his wife. Mary. who were significant in the community's development, are buried in the Marshall Cemetery about 350 feet southeast. The Union army used the station as a storage and transportation depot during the Civil War, and it was the target of several Confederate raids, including one by Maj. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart in Dec. 1862. The railroad was rerouted about 800 feet to the north in 1903.

Erected 2021 by Department of Historic Resources. (Marker Number BW-3.)


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More about this marker. In 2021 this marker replaced the original BW 3 marker. The new marker was unveiled in 2022. The earlier marker was replaced to provide more information about the history of the site. The new marker was the result of a petition by Burke resident Corazon Sandoval Foley, Founding Chair of Foley Community Center Project.

Regarding Burke's Station. Station is on the original site, but has been turned 90 degrees. It is a State Farm Insurance Agency office. The railroad tracks moved two blocks north in the early 20th century. The raid recounted on this marker is known as Stuart's "Christmas Raid".

Here follows the inscription written on the old Burke Station historical marker:
Burke Station was raided in December, 1862, by Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart. It was from this site, originally Burke Station Depot, that he sent his famous telegram to Union Quartermaster General Meigs complaining of the poor quality of the Union mules he had just captured.
Erected 1986 by Department of Conservation and Historic Resources. (Marker Number BW-3.)


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Here follows an excerpt from the Clio Foundation website as written by Benjamin Woodard:

Introduction
Burke's Station, built along the Orange and Alexandria Railroad around 1857, was the center of the town of Burke for decades as well as an important location during the Civil War. Several skirmishes occurred in and around Burke and the railroad, the most famous of which was Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart’s Christmas Raid of 1862. Burke's Station was where Stuart sent his famous telegram to the Union Quartermaster General complaining about the quality of the mules he had captured. The railroad was moved north in the early 1900s and the old station was rotated ninety degrees. Today, it is home to a Nationwide Insurance office. The current station, built in 1972, is located in Pohick Park and is serviced by Amtrak and the Virginia Railway Express.

Backstory and Context
Silas Burke purchased a tract of land in Fairfax County in 1824. Burke was a prominent citizen and active in the community. In 1848, he was the founding director of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, which intended to connect Alexandria to Virginia’s existing railway system. By 1851, the tracks had reached Burke’s land; they would reach Gordonsville in 1854 and Lynchburg in 1860. A station was built near Burke’s home around 1857 and christened Burke’s Station.

The Orange and Alexandria was an important strategic target during the Civil War. Burke’s Station was seized by the Union and used largely for transporting lumber. Laborers, many of them escaped slaves (known as “contrabands”), worked in the surrounding forests as “wood choppers”. Federal wagon trains would then transport the cut timber to Burke, where it was loaded onto trains and taken to Union camps closer to Washington. There it was used to construct fortifications, railroads, and bridges, as well as for firewood. In 1863, the US Military Construction Corps built a siding in Burke to speed the loading process.

While Burke remained in Union hands for the duration of the war, it was sometimes threatened by Confederate raiders. The most famous of these occurrences was during Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart’s Christmas Raid of 1862. Stuart had previously raided Dumfries and Occoquan and was headed towards Fairfax Courthouse/Station (now Fairfax City, Virginia), where a Union force was waiting to meet him. On December 28th, a woman ran up to the station at Burke and told the telegraph operator there, J.A. Flagg, that Stuart’s forces were but a few miles away. Flagg quickly forwarded this warning to Washington and to two conductors in the area, who summarily pulled their trains back across the Accotink Bridge and to Alexandria. Flagg also found a government wagon train, operated by African Americans (possibly “contrabands”), trying to hide in the woods near Burke. Pretending to have a pistol, he threatened to shoot then ordered them to take their wagons with haste to Fairfax Courthouse, where most of the logistical forces in the area had previously been removed for protection.

Stuart arrived at Burke around seven o’clock in the evening and sent a small band of raiders to capture the station before Flagg could alert Washington or the men at Fairfax Courthouse. Stuart seized the rest of the town without a fight, as the bulk of the Federal troops had been ordered to Fairfax Courthouse. Stuart had his personal telegrapher, one Mr. Sheppard, take over from Flagg and listen in on the communications of the surrounding forces. Meanwhile, his troops tore up the Orange and Alexandria rails in the vicinity. Before midnight, he gave Sheppard an order that would send the raid down in history. Stuart requested that the following message be sent to General Montgomery C. Meigs, the Quartermaster General of the United States Army, in Washington: “General Meigs will in the future please furnish better mules; those you have furnished recently are very inferior.” (The exact text of the telegram is not known, but this is how it was recorded by a contemporary Confederate soldier.) Stuart added that the mules were of such low quality that they hindered the transport of the other supplies he had captured.

Later that evening, William Holsapple, a local doctor and supposedly a Union sympathizer (it was later revealed that he had voted for secession), saw a fire at the station and, along with two sutlers, headed towards it. The men were promptly captured by Stuart’s men; though local Confederates tried to intercede for Holsapple, calling him a “quiet and peaceful man,” Stuart forced him to stand on the railroad tracks until he and his troops were out of sight. They eventually left, riding to Fairfax Courthouse; preferring to escape rather than engage with a superior force, Stuart ultimately turned south and west and headed back towards Confederate lines. (Supposedly, Stuart’s raid on Burke’s Station was the inspiration for the Confederate ballad “Riding a Raid.”)

Nearly a year later, on October 28th, 1863, a group of Confederate raiders captured a Union wagon train, consisting of 25 mules plus the wagon master and a crew of “contrabands,” in the Burke vicinity. The Confederates intended to force the wagon master to lead them to the Union garrison at Burke’s Station, which they would then capture; however, one of the “contrabands” was able to escape and warn these troops. Alerted by the warning, the Federal soldiers put the raiders to flight and recovered the wagon train.

After the war, the Orange and Alexandria Railroad was heavily damaged and in need of significant repair. Control of its lines passed to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in 1873 and then to the Southern Railway in 1894. Southern moved the lines north of Burke and built a new station in the early 1900s; reportedly, the old station was then rotated ninety degrees. Commuter service to the new station was discontinued in 1967, and it was torn down not long after. Yet another station, known as Burke Centre, was constructed in Pohick Park in 1972. The tracks at this station are still owned by what is now the Norfolk Southern Railroad, but the station itself is serviced by both Amtrak and the Virginia Railway Express.


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Here follows an excerpt from the 1970 Fairfax County Master Inventory of Historic Sites which contained entries from the Historic American Buildings Survey Inventory:

The community of Burke was named after Silas Burke, a local land owner who was prominent in Fairfax County affairs of his time. According to lifelong residents of Burke, Mrs. Rena Carter, Mr. Harry Marshall and Mr. William J. Harlow, the station was built about 1857, as the Orange and Alexandria Railroad was being completed. It is from this building, according to local tradition and published sources, that General J. E. B. Stuart sent his famous message to President Abraham Lincoln deploring the condition of Union Army mules which he had captured.

In 1903 the railroad, having been consolidated with the Southern Railway after the Civil War, relocated its right-of-way on land donated by Robert E. Marshall, in return for the station and the old right-of-way. The building was used for various purposes -- as a community hall, a school and a Sunday school -- before it became a recognized church.

The building originally faced the railroad right-of-way, now State Route 652. It contained a passenger waiting room, a ticket office, and a telegraph office. It was probably of board and batten construction, as shown in a postcard picture taken of it in the first decade of the twentieth century. About 1940-42 the waiting room was razed and the remaining building was rotated ninety degrees counterclockwise so that the original east side now faces north. William Harlow was engaged at the time to do carpentry work in order to convert the building to church use. He found many newspapers of the Civil War period, most of which are still contained within the walls of the church. Mr. Harlow applied the asbestos shingles to the exterior walls and built the vestibule, steeple, and cross.


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Here follows a history of the town on Burke from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Burke is an unincorporated section of Fairfax County, Virginia, United States, traditionally defined as the area served by the Burke post office (Zip Code 22015). Burke includes two census-designated places: the Burke CDP, population 42,312 in 2020 and the Burke Centre CDP, population 17,518 in 2020.

History:
Burke is named after Silas Burke (1796–1854), a 19th-century slave-owner who built a house on a hill overlooking the valley of Pohick Creek in approximately 1824. Burke was a farmer, merchant, and local politician. He was a judge, sheriff, director of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad Company, president of the Fairfax Agricultural Society and the Fairfax Turnpike Company, among other leadership titles. He was also an overseer of the Fitzhugh’s plantation, which meant that he managed the Fitzhugh’s slaves and farming tasks. Burke also had personal slaves for his own farm. The Silas Burke house still stands.

When the Orange and Alexandria Railroad was constructed in the late 1840s, the railroad station at the base of that hill was named "Burke's Station" after Burke, who owned the land in the area and donated a right-of-way to the railroad company. The community that grew up around the railroad station acquired a post office branch in 1852. The railroad tracks located on the same historical line are owned by the Norfolk Southern Railway and form part of the Manassas Line of the Virginia Railway Express commuter rail system, which has two stations (Rolling Road and Burke Centre) in the Burke area. The original Burke Station building can still be seen in the community, turned 90 degrees from its historical footprint.

Strip mall in Burke:
During the Civil War, the railway station was garrisoned by Union troops. The Bog Wallow Ambush occurred nearby in 1861. On December 28, 1862, Confederate cavalry under General J.E.B. Stuart raided the station. Stuart seized supplies from the area, destroyed a nearby bridge, monitored Union messages passing over the telegraph lines, and then famously sent a telegram to Union Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs complaining of the poor quality of the mules he had captured. Further action was seen in the neighborhood in 1863.

In 1903, Henry C. Copperthite changed the name of the post office from Burke's Station to Burke after buying the Burke House and 241 acres (98 ha) to build a racetrack for trotting and pacing horses. Copperthite was a wealthy man and the largest non-government employer in Washington, D.C.; in 1914 his factory in Georgetown produced 50,000 pies a day, earning him the nickname "King of Pie". Copperthite built four hotels, stables and expanded the general store. Burke became a popular summer destination where people attended fairs and saw horse races, foot races, motorcycle races, exhibition boxing matches and baseball games. Trains ran to Burke from Washington Union Station in Washington, D.C., Alexandria, Prince William, and Loudoun counties and as far away as Richmond. Copperthite installed the first phones in Burke, and his stables housed the horses of President McKinley and Vice President Theodore Roosevelt. The site of the racetrack is marked by a historic marker erected by Fairfax County in 2016.

The area remained predominantly rural into the mid-20th century. After World War I, Burke's population grew as federal government workers moved into the area within easy commuting distance to Washington.

In 1951, the U.S. Civil Aeronautics Administration announced plans to condemn 4,520 acres (1,830 ha) of land in Burke to construct a second airport to serve the Washington metropolitan area. After a lengthy lobbying campaign by area residents, the government in 1958 selected a different site near Chantilly, Virginia, which would become Washington Dulles International Airport. Land that had been purchased to build the airport was later developed into Burke Lake Park and the planned community of Burke Centre.

The first large subdivision in the vicinity, Kings Park, was constructed beginning in 1960, and was followed by many others over the next two decades, converting Burke into a densely populated suburban community.

A historic marker in Burke denotes the Huldah Coffer House, owned by a prominent resident of the county for many years. Another privately erected historical marker indicates the site of the former Lee Chapel Methodist church, which was intentionally burned in 1951 after having been abandoned for some years, but whose cemetery remains on the site.

Historic sites
Mulberry Hill (c. 1790), located at 9417 Windsor Way
Silas Burke House (original c. 1820; rebuilt c. 1853), located at 9617 Burke Lake Road
Burke Methodist Church/Burke Station (c. 1857), located at 9415 Old Burke Lake Road, Burke
Little Zion Baptist Church and Cemetery (1891), located at 10018 Burke Lake Road, Burke