Orange and Alexandria Railroad Freight House (Site)

These coordinates mark the exact spot where the building once stood. No visible remains exist.


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Here follows an excerpt from "A Seaport Saga: Portrait of Old Alexandria, Virginia" written by William Francis Smith and T. Michael Miller:

The Orange and Alexandria Railroad, headquartered in Alexandria, was chartered in 1848, laid its tracks to the southwest as far as Gordonsville, and by 1859 had extended its service to Lynchburg. On the outbreak of war, the line was in a very hazardous and exposed position so President John S. Barbour, member of an old and distinguished Virginia family and a former U.S. congressmen, organized crews to move nearly all the sixteen locomotives and a great majority of the rolling stock then in use to the south of Manassas Junction to keep them out of Federal hands. The roundhouse, located the crossing of Duke and South Henry Streets, was a circular brick structure with a turntable in the middle surrounded by stalls in which engines could be housed, cleaned and repaired. The open cupola and clerestory windows afforded light in the center of the building and helped release the large amount of smoke produced by the locomotives out of the building.


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Here follows an excerpt from the "Jaybird's Jottings" blog in 2010 as written by Jay Roberts:

Train Station in Old Town
Turning the pages through A Seaport Saga, I came to a series of photographs of a railroad depot that was located near the intersection of Henry and Duke Street.

The more I looked, the more I liked. Taken from Mathew Brady’s extraordinary body of work at the National Archives, these black and whites are the 19th Century’s version of Google street view, a series of panoramic shots showing every aspect of the station.

The yard occupied all of what is now Old Town Station, and part of Old Town Village. The track from Washington ran down Henry Street, curved to the right as it crossed Duke Street, continued to turn and then went due west along Wolfe Street, which no longer exists to the west of Route One.

I am familiar with this part of town so I decided to draw up an overlay map. Normally, this would be a fairly easy task, as most all of Old Town is laid out on a grid system. This part of the city, however, presents some tricky challenges. For one thing, Wolfe Street, as mentioned, no longer crosses South Patrick. Throw in the change in the traffic pattern for Route One (the part where the one-way Route One South (Henry) veers left back to two way (just after Duke), and the fact that the depot facility buildings weren’t oriented to the street, and, well, I had my work cut out.

My map is not 100% precise, but pretty darn close. As you can see, Old Town Village’s community center is built to resemble the old roundhouse and the city named one of the streets Roundhouse Lane. Also, they left a stretch of track about 20 yards long along the sidewalk on the west side of Henry as it approaches Duke.

One thing to be noted is I left out the railroad’s name. I didn’t want to clutter up my map further, and the map from Seaport Saga shows them.

Also, as it turns out, there is a commemorative plaque of the roundhouse, but it is at the Wilkes Street Tunnel, about nine blocks away.

I think it would be great if the City removed it from that spot, and re-dedicated the plaque at Old Town Village, or perhaps a Roadside Marker on Duke or Route One.