Ravensworth Flag Stop (1920-2000) (Site)

These coordinates mark the exact spot where the flag stop was located. The concrete platform is still here, as are the brick ruins of a construction company building nearby. The photograph above is an exact replica of what this flag stop looked like, with the standard Pennsylvania Railroad shelter directly abutting the railroad tracks.

A railroad flag stop is a station where a train will only stop if a passenger waiting on the platform waves a flag or gives a signal to the conductor, essentially requesting the train to stop; this is typically used at lightly used stations where trains wouldn't normally stop unless someone needed to get on or off. Many stations would have a box on the platform or station containing a white or green flag that the passenger would wave at the train. If it was a staffed station, the agent or clerk would flag the train. The conductor of the train would acknowledge they had seen the flag by sounding two short whistles.


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Here follows an excerpt from "The Iron Road of Franconia" book about the railroad written by local historian Nathaniel Lee.

RAVENSWORTH FLAG STOP: 1920-2000

This railroad line through Fairfax County changed its name several times, which continues to be the cause of much confusion for armchair historians. The Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad Company was chartered in 1834, and the line was finished as far as Fredericksburg by 1837. From this point, passengers bound for Washington took a coach to Aquia Creek and then took a steamboat up the river. The line then extended to join the Pennsylvania Railroad's subsidiary line, the Alexandria and Washington Railroad after the Civil War. In 1872, the name was changed to the Alexandria and Fredericksburg Railroad Company. In 1890, the Washington Southern Railway took control of the railroad through Fairfax County, and then folded into the Richmond - Washington Company as a part of the RF&P Railroad in 1920, which is what most people remember. CSX Transportation finally took over operations along the line in 1991. Confused yet? You should be. That's about six name changes over 150 years for the railroad in Fairfax County. Please read the book "The Iron Road of Franconia" for a more detailed explanation of all the changes.

On February 20, 1871, Anna Maria Fitzhugh had nineteen acres of land condemned for the railroad right-of-way. Her property would host a waiting shelter called Ravenworth. Oral history claims that the letter "S" was dropped from the name Ravensworth to differentiate this railway stop from the Ravensworth Station already in existence on the Orange and Alexandria Railroad not far away near what is today Lake Accotink in Springfield. The waiting shelter was located on the western side of the track on the Cinder Bed Road pathway found directly to the west of what is today Amberleigh Park. When local historian Nathaniel Lee walked along the right-of-way in the park, fragments of the concrete station platform were found eroding into the creek. Access to the railroad at the time was by a path leading from Back Lick Road through what is today the Loisdale Estate neighborhood.

Anna Maria Sarah Goldsborough Fitzhugh was born in 1796 to parents Charles and Elizabeth Goldsborough of Maryland. Her father was a longtime member of Congress and Governor of Maryland. Anna Maria married William Henry Fitzhugh in 1814, an only child and principal heir to the Ravensworth land grant. The name Ravensworth honors the family's ancestral estate in England, the seat of the Barons of Ravensworth. At age 38 in May of 1830, he died suddenly and unexpectedly of a stroke while visiting Anna Maria's father in Maryland. Dying without an heir since they had no children, his wife was left the Ravensworth mansion in Springfield and 11,000 acres of land covering what is today Springfield south of Braddock Road. Anna Maria passed away in 1874. The Ravensworth home survived until it was burned down by an arsonist in 1926.

The Richmond-Washington Company incorporated on September 5, 1901 as a holding company owning both the RF&P Railroad and the Washington Southern Railway. Freight traffic over the new Richmond-Washington Line increased quickly, and the train dispatchers running the show from Richmond found that the single track they had was inadequate for the number of trains they wanted to run. The number of trains allowed on a single track at the same time is severely limited because trains cannot run too close to each other without risking a collision. For this reason, they added a second track along the entire line between Richmond and Washington in a process called "double tracking." They also realigned the tracks onto the course they follow to the present day during this four-year construction project between 1903 and 1907. They eliminated or smoothed out sharp curves and reduced hills in grade, including lowering the peak of Franconia Hill underneath Franconia Road by a staggering twenty feet. You can still see this massive cut today by looking down at the railroad from Franconia Road along Fleet Drive. They put almost the entire line of track in a new location between Quantico and Alexandria, all in an effort to speed up transit times along the line.

Once the railroad had been realigned, the decision came not to relocate the Ravenworth flag stop onto the new rail line. Two factors played a role in that decision. First, the platform and rails were prone to frequent flooding from the Long Branch stream located mere feet away from the tracks. Secondly, its location on the north-south Back Lick Road doomed the station, since freight traffic was primarily coming from the west to the east on the Old Fairfax Pike, now known as Franconia Road. The railroad company wanted to focus on the stations nearby at Accotink and Franconia that sat at these important east-west crossroads. However, the important South Franconia interlock and an industrial siding also bearing the name of Ravensworth would soon come to take its place. The Ravenworth shelter had been in service for 31 years.

The Ravensworth name would make a comeback after 1920, with service to Barry Road. It helped that in 1952, Frank Parr built the massive Parr-Franconia Warehouse Complex located on Loisdale Road. Its flagship warehouse had the largest wooden roof truss system east of the Mississippi River at the time. When completed, the complex offered a staggering total of 1.5 million square feet of storage space. Upon reaching an agreement with the RF&P Railroad, they extended the old Ravensworth railroad spur. The spur formed the shape of a letter “C.” The warehouses are located on the western side of the main RF&P Railroad line. For access, the spur branched off from the main line south of the warehouses where a slow curve brought trains parallel to the north side of Metropolitan Center Drive. Upon reaching the western side of the property a sharp 180-degree turn brought trains across Metropolitan Center Drive and facing eastward so they could pull in alongside each of the warehouse storage units for easy loading and unloading.

The tale of the property’s ownership is an interesting one. Frank D. Parr, a devout Methodist from San Francisco, had built up a fortune in commercial real estate over his lifetime. In 1954, Parr was looking to sell his properties to the Methodist Church. The legal advisor for the church at the time was Paul R. Russell who practiced law at Shearman, Sterling and Wright in New York City. Mr. Russell was a member of the struggling Park Avenue Methodist Church in New York, and arranged the sale of the warehouse here in Franconia to that church. The rental revenues over the years allowed the church to become solvent and embark on new community programs. When the federal government bought the property outright in 1966, Mr. Russell created a trust fund for the church.

The General Services Administration has been the major tenant at the Parr-Franconia Warehouse Complex since its inception. The RF&P Railroad gave the stop at the warehouse complex the name of Ravensworth, spelled with an “S” this time, unlike the original 1872 stop nearby. The name Ravensworth pays homage to the original Fitzhugh family land grant that covered most of Springfield, including the land upon which the warehouse complex stands. After 48 years of service, the federal government removed the tracks in the year 2000 to make way for the Springfield Crossing apartment complex built on the north side of the property.

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Here follows an excerpt from the Fractured Fairfax website:

The Parr Franconia Warehouse, also known as the GSA Warehouse, is a large warehouse complex owned and used by the General Services Administration in Springfield.

The warehouse was constructed by the Parr Warehouse Company of San Francisco, owned by Fred A. Parr. Parr was the winning bidder on the GSA's solicitation of September 19, 1951, for 1.25 million square feet of warehouse space within 15 miles of Washington, D.C.

Beginning in the fall of 1952, the Barrett and Hilp company of San Francisco constructed two buildings, designed by architects Ward and Bolles, also of San Francisco, at a cost of nearly $7 million.

The facility was novel not only in its scale; the larger of the two warehouses constructed was 500 feet wide and 2000 feet long, but in its method of erection, being one of the first commercial examples of tilt-up construction. The concrete walls were poured flat, then raised by crane to their final position before being topped with prefabricated arched wood trusses to support the roof.

By August 1953, the GSA had moved in to the still-incomplete facility.

On June 24, 1954, the Park Avenue Methodist Church of New York City purchased the building for $6,634,000.

Incidents:

A section of the wooden roof measuring 75 by 100 feet collapsed late on February 4, 1961.

40-year-old supervisor David Beaddy was shot in the left side with a .22 caliber rifle while operating a forklift at the complex on February 13, 1973. Four local youths, aged 13 through 16, who had been using a Marlin rifle to shoot birds, were arrested and charged with maiming.

A 20,000 square foot section of the roof, which was being repaired by the A.A. Beiro Construction company of Alexandria, collapsed on July 27, 1978.