After the Civil War began in 1861, railroads became strategically important for transporting troops and supplies. The Orange and Alexandria Railroad, chartered in 1849, connected the port city of Alexandria with Gordonsville in central Virginia. This section of the line, whose original rail bed lies beneath the Lake Accotink Park access road, fell under Union control early in the war, and Confederates targeted it to disrupt Union troop movements. On Dec. 28, 1862, Confederate Gen. J.E.B. Stuart raided nearby Burke Station, tearing up rails and cutting telegraph lines, and he sent twelve men under Gen. Fitzhugh Lee to burn the wooden train trestle over Accotink Creek. The trestle was repaired and carried Union supplies for the rest of the war. Confederate Maj. John S. Mosby's Rangers and civilian sympathizers continued nighttime raids, often hiding in drainage culverts beneath the rail bed while waiting to sabotage passing trains. After a derailment attempt failed on July 26, 1863, Union Gen. George G. Meade ordered severe punishment for civilian saboteurs. To protect the railroad, the Union's 155th New York and 4th Delaware Regiments camped along the tracks there. After the Dec. 28, 1862, raid, Stuart and his men stopped at Sully Plantation in western Fairfax County, now Sully Historic Site. The longest continuous surviving stretch of Orange and Alexandria Railroad bed in Fairfax County runs through Lake Accotink Park, on land once part of the twenty-two-thousand-acre Ravensworth tract that William Fitzhugh purchased in 1685. The Fitzhughs were related to the Lees, who often visited Ravensworth. Robert E. Lee's mother died there in 1829, and two years later Robert E. Lee and Mary Randolph Custis honeymooned there after their marriage. Mary Custis Lee inherited Ravensworth after the war and moved there after Robert E. Lee died in 1870. Their second son, William Henry Fitzhugh "Rooney" Lee, inherited the tract when his mother died in 1874. The house, built about 1796, burned in 1926.
