African American Waterfront Heritage Trail

The African American heritage trail along Alexandria’s waterfront follows two interconnecting routes that begin at Waterfront Park and trace several centuries of the city’s Black history. Three African American neighborhoods once stood around Oronoco Bay: The Berg and Fishtown to the south and west, and Cross Canal to the north. In the 19th century, Fishtown was a seasonal workplace where free and enslaved laborers cleaned and prepared fish for market when the Potomac River was full of business and fish. Alexandria became part of the District of Columbia in 1801, and its return to pro-slavery Virginia in 1847 affected Black residents’ lives. Alexandria was also once one of the nation’s largest centers of the domestic slave trade, with thousands and thousands of people trafficked by ship from the wharves on the Potomac to slave markets in the Deep South. An enslaved ship captain, George Henry, sailed the waters of the Chesapeake, including Alexandria, before seeking his own freedom in the 1840s. The waterfront also reflects African American labor and community in other eras: the U.S. Naval Torpedo Station employed African Americans during and after World War II; the steamship River Queen, once used by President Lincoln and his generals, also speaks to the river as a place of leisure for African Americans in the 20th century; and the experience of Charles, an enslaved ship carpenter’s apprentice, sheds light on maritime Alexandria. Free African American residents formed the neighborhood of Hayti, whose history has been documented through research and archaeology. During the Civil War, thousands of formerly enslaved people came to Union-controlled Alexandria seeking refuge and freedom, and new neighborhoods emerged nearby. A small group of African Americans founded Zion Baptist Church in 1864 at an earlier site closer to the river, and by the end of the Civil War it was one of five African American Baptist churches in Alexandria; in 1882 the congregation dedicated the new church building where it still stands.

Alexandria, Virginia · United States