Darin Gravel Pit (Site)

These coordinates mark the exact site where the gravel pit once stood. No visible remains exist. It was listed on the 1965 USGS topographic map.


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Here follows an excerpt from the Spring 2013 edition of the "Franconia Legacies" newsletter published by the Franconia Museum and written by Carl Sell:

For decades, farming was a way of life in Franconia. The land produced food for the table and money to pay for family needs. That was true through the Civil War, two World Wars, Reconstruction, the Depression, the discovery of electricity and the automobile. Things that were grown on the farm added to the bounty. What was hidden below the surface would produce a revolution in the way local landowners viewed their property.

Every farmer in Franconia was aware of the sand and gravel that lurked under the topsoil. All they had to do was try to dig a basement, or, in the “real” old days, a privy. The going was tough once you hit the gravel, rocks and the sand that surrounded it. Only after World War II, when economic growth took off in the Washington, D.C. area, did some begin to realize they were sitting on a new way of providing for their families.

The geological formations under some of Franconia produced much of the aggregate, as it is known in the industry, to build the concrete buildings, bridges and roads that began to spring up like weeds in the Washington area. Beginning in the late 1940s, much of the material used to construct new federal buildings, the Capital Beltway, the original Woodrow Wilson Bridge and the early office buildings in Rosslyn, Tyson’s Corner and downtown Washington came from Franconia.

For the most part, landowners leased their properties to large concrete, construction and trucking companies that competed for the right to extract the precious sand and gravel that was being gobbled up by the builders. Franconia became a collection of gravel pits where there once had been rows of corn, vegetable gardens, and horses for both work and pleasure amid a quiet country atmosphere. Instead, the steam shovels and bulldozers clawed at the earth and the trucks rolled by on nearby roads built for much less traffic.

Today, most people would not recognize the areas that once were working gravel pits. Residential, office and retail development as well as parks have taken the place of the pits. Examples are the residential and commercial areas of Kingstowne and Manchester Lakes. Also, communities such as Lansdowne, Amberleigh, Franconia Commons, Van Dorn Village, Brookland Estates, Loftridge, Wellington Green, and Fleet Industrial Park were once gravel pits. The new Wegman’s at Telegraph and Beulah is rising on what once was part of a sand and gravel operation. Lee District Park, Beulah Park and Franconia Park were sand and gravel extraction sites before being purchased by the Fairfax County Park Authority using citizen approved long-term bonds (mortgages).

The largest sand and gravel-mining operation was in the Kingstowne-Manchester Lakes area. All of the current houses and commercial areas are situated on former extraction sites. Kingstowne, for example, was built on what was known as the disturbed area while remaining trees were left intact. Manchester and its neighboring communities generally were built on land reclaimed from sand and gravel operations. One of the first was operated by Bill Clem on land where Fleet Industrial Park is now located. There were pits between the railroad tracks and what is now Springfield Forest as well as the property on which Springfield Mall was built. In those days, Franconia generally was located, at least in people’s minds, as being between Telegraph Road on the east, Springfield on the west and the intersection of Beulah Road and Telegraph on the south. Newington and Accotink were neighbors on the south with Alexandria on the north.

There were a number of operators in the Kingstowne area, the largest of which was Northern Virginia Sand and Gravel, which operated in tandem with Virginia Concrete. Clarence Jones, George Dodd, Marshall Gorham, Addie Tyler and others were involved in the area. At the corner of Beulah Road and Telegraph Road was the Gailliot property, the site of a poultry operation during World War II, then a gravel pit, then a landfill and now a burgeoning commercial center with a golf course built on the landfill. What is now Beulah Park was an extension of the large mining operation in that area of the original intersection of Beulah Road and Hayfield Road.

Vera Gorham recalls that most of the operators, including her husband Marshall, mined the gravel and then sold it to trucking companies who hauled it to the construction sites. Many of the drivers came from as far away as Piney River, about halfway between Charlottesville and Lynchburg. Some were relatives of Cockeye and Kirk Campbell, who lived there before they moved to Franconia and started hauling gravel. Vera says the drivers would stay in a big house near the intersection of Hayfield Road and Beulah Road during the week and go home on weekends. A popular spot for dining was Arrington’s Store and Restaurant at the same intersection. Much of the property there was owned by Charles Arrington, after whom the street between Beulah and Manchester Drive is named.

Lester Dove recalls gravel pits on both sides of South Van Dorn Street. On the west was the area now developed as Van Dorn Village and Runnymeade. On the other side a road led back to where Brookland Estates is today. Lester says gravel also was mined where Franconia Baptist Church is located. He should know as he worked at many of the operations. Northern Virginia Sand and Gravel mined a large area behind what is now Clermont Park.

When the Virginia portion of the Beltway was built in the late 1950s and 1960s, much of the gravel came from what was known as the Kronish Borrow Pit located between what is now Monticello Woods and the railroad, just a stone’s throw from the actual road. After the original four-lane Beltway was built, the Virginia Department of Transportation, as it was known then, sold the land to the Fairfax County Park Authority and it was named Franconia Park. Later when the Beltway was widened to eight lanes, more gravel was needed so a deal was struck to allow VDOT to extract more gravel in exchange for restoring the land and building the original fields and parking lots.

The area of Lee District Park covered by playing fields also once was a gravel pit. Like Kingstowne, the treed area of the park did not contain gravel and therefore was left in its natural state. A phenomenon called “marine clay” lurks below the surface in a large part of both areas, so mining was not an option. The clay shrinks and swells according to the water table and, as developers and the County learned, is not a good place to dig for gravel or build structures without extensive subterranean pylons and/or retaining walls. The County bought what is now Lee District Park at a bankruptcy auction.

Joe Alexander grew up on Beulah Road and there were few, if any gravel pits in the neighborhood when he was in high school. He went away to what is now Virginia Tech in 1947 and it seemed to Joe that by the time he finished college there were gravel pits everywhere. Just over a decade later, after a tour of duty with the Air Force in Korea, he would represent Franconia on the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors and be in the center of a controversy about how to control the expanding pits.

Gravel pits were beginning to threaten nearby homes and farms. Les Dorson, who had moved into Walhaven and become a community leader, saw the need for the establishment of some controls over the gravel operations. As Joe remembers, people were scared their homes were threatened as the pits began to close in on property lines. “There were cases of a 25-foot or more drop at the edge of people’s property,” Joe said. “We had to put a stop to that.”

Working with other members of the Board such as John Parrish and Herb Harris from Mount Vernon, Happy Bradley from western Fairfax and Chairman Fred Babson, Joe was able to put together a Natural Resources Ordinance that established setbacks from the property lines and restoration of the mined area. Joe credits Les for his work in organizing area citizens to help convince the Board of Supervisors to adopt the ordinance. Les’ community efforts are memorialized by a plaque on a huge rock from a nearby gravel pit that stands in front of the Franconia Governmental Center.

Most long-time residents of Franconia and the Beulah Road area spent many hours of their youth in the gravel pits, playing, courting, partying, biking (both pedal and motorized) and other activities. Some even went swimming in the ponds located in what is now Kingstowne Park. (In addition to Joe Alexander, Vera Gorham and Lester Dove, information for this article came from Marge Tharpe, Margie Simms, Sonny Wright and Margaret and Lyn Welch)


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Here follows an excerpt from the award-winning documentary film "The Gravel Pits: Before There was Kingstowne" as written and directed by Mike Salmon:

Kingstowne is a section of northern Virginia highlighted by residential, commercial, and recreational amenities that make it a go-to spot for families, singles, and seniors looking for a nice place to live. It wasn't always like that though. 50 years ago, it was a place known as "the pits." Owned by Lehigh Cement Company, it consisted of gravel pits, fishing holes, and motorcycle tracks.

"For a while there the motocross scene of the 1970s ruled as far as dirt biking goes, or four-wheeling, or anything. You just had so much land. That was just unheard of around here. The best thing about the pits was all the different riding, and you could ride there at any time, rain or shine. There was always a place to ride. I met all kinds of people. I met professional racers. I met the local guy, and I met all the friends I have now."

Open Space:
It was just open space. It was like if everybody had a park in your own backyard and there weren't a lot of problems. You didn't get a lot of trouble back there as long as you didn't mess with any of the equipment that they were still using. It was pretty much a free-for-all space in the evenings and on weekends. The "soundtrack" was a central meeting and racing spot for the guys and gals that rode out here. You had hills that would lead you down to the lakes and back up to the track which were a lot of fun. This turned it into a hair-scramble, racing atmosphere. You had the woods, trails, and the sand track. You had super-cross kind of features out here that were just kind of natural or helped out by the gravel pits excavation.

Trails:
This here is one of the original trails that we used to use to get back up in here. You can see the trail along the side of the baseball park. Even with games going on, we'd sometimes just kind of creep the trail along slowly and politely until we got up through here and then we just gassed it. Then we had 3,000 acres of all kinds of uncharted land. You may have to cross Hayfield Road or Beulah Street here and there. Those were actually named crossings.

People:
There were plenty of people from the neighborhood. Everybody had a motorcycle or dune buggy, and then there were people that came from out of town to to use the space too. It was a big draw for a lot of people. A band simply known as "Savage" is remembered for playing a few times at the gravel pits. Powered by a gas generator, partiers come out in droves. One concert of theirs in 1976 was even dubbed a local Woodstock and saw the attendance of not only a couple thousand people, but also the police. Rumor has it that the concert was so notorious that it was even mentioned in the local newspaper, "The Washington Star."

In addition to the motorcycles and rock bands there was also plenty of fishing and skinny dipping going on.
It was the 1970s, and this was out in the country in those days. At that time, there was a rumor going around that a planned neighborhood similar to Reston was going in, but no one really believed it.

Fun:
My favorite memories of going up to the gravel pits is that it was a place to have fun. We rode bikes and we we also partied with bonfires. In about 1980, I remember this guy from Hayfield. He brought his van up here and the next thing you know, he got his van stuck in the mud. He called up another guy in Hayfield that had a four wheel drive. It came up here to pull him out, and next thing you know, both of them are stuck. So, they knew some guy with a bulldozer and he came up here to pull the the truck and van out of the mud, only the bulldozer got stuck too. So then they called for a big bulldozer, and the guy running the big bulldozer was not happy. He pulled up here and finally the big bulldozer pulled out the other vehicles.

Starting circa 1990, they started to build along all the edges of the pits. All the good tracks were gone, and all the entrances to get into them were blocked off. It was just no fun anymore. There was nothing to do, so we started riding in other places. It was weird because you saw bits and pieces of the gravel pits disappearing. and getting bulldozed over. You sometimes had to avoid construction equipment, and then very soon there were actually some people moving in to the townhouses. We'd still be out there riding and they didn't seem to mind at all. They'd often just wave at us while they were having a deck party or whatever.
The unconstructed, open areas got smaller and smaller, and it became harder to find a spot to ride.

Kingstowne Proposed Developments:
There were three major proposals. The New Franconia and Hosanna developments were planned to fill 1,800 acres. They were going to have moving sidewalks take you to the shopping center and connect the communities, but both of them failed. Architects everywhere were taking a lot of inspiration from the 1971 opening of Magic Kingdom in Florida, and from Walt Disney's vision of a perfect town in Epcot. Obviously, these developments were before their time and too expensive for the Washington suburbs. It took the Miller and Smith and the Halie companies getting together and combining their resources to build Kingstowne section by section. It's been very successful; very well planned. There are beautiful vistas on the open road and when you look, you can see the power lines basically run through where the trails were, so you can visualize where some of that stuff happened.