Prince William Forest Park in Virginia is a seventeen thousand-acre protected forest and watershed beside Quantico, notable as the largest natural area in the Washington region and the National Park System’s largest example of Eastern Piedmont forest. Its history stretches from Archaic-period Native American use to freed-slave and other local communities later displaced when the federal government assembled the land in the nineteen thirties. Developed through New Deal work programs, the area was later used secretly during World War Two to train Office of Strategic Services operatives. Today it preserves traces of those earlier eras while serving as a refuge for wildlife and a place for outdoor recreation.