They built the road they would be forced to walk: a brief history of Little River Turnpike

Little River Turnpike, near the author’s house.

By James Albright, from the Living Life in 4D blog

From my front porch, looking over my garden, I can see the two blocks to the intersection of my street with the Little River Turnpike here in Lincolnia. I typically walk there once a day or so on my way to the local coffee shop or to Green Spring Gardens, a stunning horticultural center that reminds me of why I live here in Fairfax County. All in all, it is an idyllic life – early 21st century troubles notwithstanding.

Little River Turnpike carries its history in its name. It was the turnpike – the toll road – that led to the Little River, some 34 miles to the west. One of the first-ever roads constructed in this country, it stretched from Alexandria through farm and field countryside. Today it has many names along the way, but right here in Annandale, it is still called the Little River Turnpike. 

Stone bridge at Aldie, the end of the turnpike.

Although its six-lanes are not often loved, its history is indelibly connected to the counties it passes through. But that history – of sleepy farmers on slow carts, bearing their produce to the wharves of Alexandria – is really just one side, one happy side, of the road’s past. 

The rest of its history is something that I suspect few in my area know about. For the Little River Turnpike is a road built by enslaved Americans that served, eventually, as the path their children and their children’s children, would take when shackled at the feet, they were marched away from their homes to the Deep South.

When I look up the street to the Turnpike, I see only cars racing by on their way to Alexandria, about four miles to the east. Like so many roads, we don’t see really see it. We see cars, bicycles, stoplights, street signs, storefronts, but we don’t see what went into the making of the road – why it went here, who did the work, and what happened to them.

The Turnpike was an incredible challenge – the structure of the road itself was very modern, very expensive, and very arduous. Since this was early 19th century Virginia, the builders turned to the labor market they were comfortable exploiting: enslaved Americans who were to be rented under contract. 

Twenty men were retained to do the work of the overseers over the next few years. The proceeds of the work did not go to those who did the actual work; no, that money went to those who enslaved them. Although we have never really listened to their voices, the workers clearly spoke – a number ran away from the job, a number large enough that they had to find another group to keep the work going.

In my mind’s eye, I can see the men clearing fences and trees out of the way, shoveling the soil to build the mounded center of the roadway and then sloping it away from the crown. Stones had to be lain just so, so water would drain; ditches would need to be dug to carry water away. The road had to be dry – or at least mostly dry – so that the mud that bedeviled so much cartage and horses in that day wouldn’t impede travel and justify the 10-cent tolls. 

A coffle of slaves being marched from Virginia west into Tennessee, c. 1850. [Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation]

The climate in Virginia can be terribly hot or numbingly cold – there is no doubt in my mind that the overseers would not care too much about the comfort of their workers. The task at hand had to be completed.

It took eight years of hard work until December 1811 when the final pieces were put in place. From that point, the road became a major thoroughfare, one so popular that towns sprang up along its path and shaped the infrastructure that underpins Northern Virginia. 

One can look at a map of the whole area and still trace the straight line that was the Little River Turnpike, now routes 236 and 50, from the city to the hills. The road became the backbone of transportation from the Piedmont and the Shenandoah Valley to the waterfront of Alexandria.

Because the road was so efficient a mover of produce and carts, it also served to move men, women, and children from what was called the Tidewater all the way to Louisiana and Mississippi. 

Once the nation had restricted the “slave trade” – the seizure of humans from Ghana, Senegal, Biafra, Congo, Angola, and other places – and the nature of agriculture in the young country had shifted from tobacco in the mid-Atlantic to cotton in the Deep South, the demands of labor also shifted. 

White landowners in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas found a new way to profit – many had their enslaved workers sold to cotton slave camps in the south. Families were broken up, children separated from adults, communities shattered as merchants of the enslaved found what is now called the “domestic trade” to be a profitable exercise. 

In Alexandria, prisons full of these men and women were used to house them while sales could take place. These prisons still stand along Duke Street in Alexandria. From these prisons, the enslaved were either sent by boat to New Orleans or shackled together in “coffles” and walked overland to Louisiana.

To describe the experience of the coffles would be impossible without falling prey to minimizing the horror. For our discussion, however, it is the passage itself that concerns. For those prisons sent the enslaved in coffles to trudge down Duke Street – the starting point of the Little River Turnpike. From the prisons, the coffled men and women would ascend towards Shuters Hill and the Turnpike. The last stop: New Orleans.

Bound together, moving slowly, the groups of enslaved would probably manage about 20 miles a day. If they left early in the morning, they would be reaching the outskirts of Green Springs Farm in Lincolnia (then Uniontown) probably mid-morning. Coming up the Little River Turnpike where it crests the hill after Turkeycock Run, they would walk along the field of the large farm, the promise of water from its fresh spring perhaps used to entice them to quicken their pace.

If one of those walking in shackles looked to the left, they would see fields of corn and maybe a small orchard, looking right at the place my house would be built in another hundred years. They might see other enslaved Americans working in those fields, fields that were now poor after long periods of cultivation, workers straining in the sun. They might have looked at each other – both enslaved in the only land they had known right there where Cherokee Avenue meets Little River Turnpike, where a dentist and a daycare center now watch the car dealer across the street. They might have wondered what would become of the other?

The Historic House at Green Spring Gardens.

And like that, they would part, one to his plow the other to the stony path ahead of him. At some point in those years, the continuous passage of these thousands of enslaved men and women trafficked to the South, would get less attention. Maybe the workers in the fields wouldn’t even look up much anymore – just another group moving past, like so many before. Or maybe they would be glad that they were not being torn from their families, their children.

I think about this a lot as I walk along Little River Turnpike, nearly 200 years after that time. Only a little of that time remains – the beautiful house of Green Springs that was there before the Turnpike was built now hidden behind the car dealer, the streams that still flow to this day at the foot of the hill, the hills themselves that posed a serious challenge to the builders. Even those people who worked in the fields, they remain. For their descendants surely settled in this area after the Civil War was fought for them. Lincolnia, just down the way on Little River Turnpike, was primarily a Black American community, with a school, stores, churches, and cemetery.

The decimation of the American community brought on by the domestic trade of the enslaved remains a central character in the nature of our country. So, in a way, the story of the road that edges my neighborhood is both a story of the past and a story of the future.

Much of the factual basis for this post (but not the opinions) comes from an article from 2017 by Debbie Robison in local history blog, Northern Virginia Notes, an article by the renowned historian Edward Ball, “The Slavery Trail of Tears” in Smithsonian, and Edward Baptiste‘s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.