Explore a Park: Ecological restoration and history at Fitzhugh Park in Annandale

This article is part of the Annandale Blog’s Explore a Park series. Previous parks in the series include Manassas Gap Park and Luria Park in Annandale and Lillian Carey Park in Bailey’s Crossroads.

Fitzhugh Park is a 10-acre park in Annandale between the Bristow Village condominium, the Ravensworth-Bristow neighborhood, and the beltway.

Features: Playground, basketball court, and paved trail. The 2020 park bond includes $200,000 for playground renovations.

Access: Americana Drive at Schuyler Drive and the dead-end at Kalorama Drive.

Nature: Fitzhugh Park is a small forest fragment within a heavily urbanized landscape. The most common trees are tulip poplar, American beech, white oak, and red oak. The park also contains a small floodplain forest community and a small meadow.

Ecological restoration: In 2017, the Fairfax County Park Authority began a restoration project led by ecologists in its Natural Resource Branch. The project was a component of the county-wide Helping Our Land Heal program.

The restoration was needed because Fitzhugh Park was beset by forest fragmentation, urban stormwater runoff, deer overabundance, invasive species, and illegal trash dumping.

The goals of the project were to eliminate invasive species, restore the forest understory structure, increase biodiversity, and transform a half-acre thicket of invasive vines into a native grass and wildflower meadow. Temporary fencing was installed to keep out deer and project the young plants. The project was completed in June 2020.

The Virginia Department of Transportation used mitigation funds from the beltway Express Lane expansion to fund the restoration project.

A sound wall separates Fitzhugh Park from the beltway.

History: Fitzhugh Park is named for the Fitzhugh family and also has some associations with Robert E. Lee’s family.

William Fitzhugh inherited a huge property in Northern Virginia known as the Ravensworth Tract. He served in the colonial House of Burgesses, in the Virginia House of Delegates, as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress in 1779, and as a Virginia state senator. He was a close friend of George Washington.

The Ravensworth manor house was located in what is now the Ravensworth Shopping Center on Braddock Road and Port Royal Road. It was the largest of the three 18th century manors built by the Fitzhugh family. The others were Ossian Hall, at Braddock Road and Ravensworth Road, and Oak Hall, off Wakefield Chapel Road. Oak Hall is the only one still standing.

Related story: Explore a Park – Walk through history in Annandale’s Manassas Gap Park

Ravensworth became the country residence of William Fitzhugh, and later William Henry Fitzhugh, Mary Lee Fitzhugh Custis, and William Henry Fitzhugh Lee.

Anna Mary Sarah Goldsborough, the widow of William Henry Fitzhugh III (1792-1830), was the sister-in-law of Mary Lee (formerly Mary Anna Randolph Custis), the wife of Gen. Robert E. Lee. After their wedding at Arlington House in 1831,  they honeymooned at Ravensworth. And after Mary Lee fled Arlington House in 1861, she took refuge at Ravensworth then fled to Richmond.

Upon the death of Anna Goldsborough Fitzhugh in 1874, her nephew, former Confederate Gen. William Henry Fitzhugh “Rooney” Lee, the second son of Robert E. Lee, inherited the Ravensworth manor house and 563 surrounding acres. He lived there until his death in 1891. At that point, the remaining acres were divided among the other four surviving Lee children.

The property of Rooney Lee passed next to his two sons, and then to his surviving son, Dr. George Bolling Lee in 1922, who used the residence as a summer home. The house mysteriously burned on Aug. 1, 1926.

Dr. Lee’s widow sold the property in 1957 to the developer of the Ravensworth subdivision.