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Virginia National Guard Battery D Barracks (Site)

GPS Coordinates: 38.7644727, -77.1185905
Closest Address: 6901 South Kings Highway, Alexandria, VA 22310

Virginia National Guard Battery D Barracks (Site)

These coordinates mark the exact spot where the battalion's buildings used to be. No remains are visible here.


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Here follows an excerpt from the "Abandoned & Little-Known Airfields" website written by Paul Freeman:

From 1950-59, the VA National Guard's Battery D, 125th Gun Battalion located antiaircraft artillery batteries on a site just to the northwest of the former Air Junction property, as one of 4 batteries which provided air defense coverage for the nation's capital. The battery was manned by 4 officers & 30 enlisted men. In 1958, a site just to the southwest of the Air Junction site was used by the Naval Research Laboratory for the highly classified development of the AN/GRD-6 Direction-Finding Antenna, for which they constructed 2 large circular antenna fields.

When the NRL project wrapped up in 1971, the property was declared surplus by the federal government. In 1975, the Interior Department, under its "Land to Parks" program initiated during the Ford administration, sold 1,261 acres of surplus land (including the former Air Junction site) to Fairfax County for $1. The land was to be used "exclusively for public park or public recreation purposes in perpetuity”, and it became the Huntley Meadows Park.

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Award-winning local historian and tour guide in Franconia and the greater Alexandria area of Virginia.

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Nathaniel Lee

c/o Franconia Museum

6121 Franconia Road

Alexandria, VA 22310

franconiahistory@gmail.com

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