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ALEXANDRIA, Va. - On the morning of July 13, 1749, a group of buyers gathered along the Potomac River in what had recently been wilderness and farmland in Fairfax County, Virginia. What happened that day — the auction of 60 surveyed lots on land once owned by a Scottish merchant named John Alexander — was, on its surface, a routine real estate transaction. But it was also the founding of a city.
Alexandria had been coming for a while. Scottish and English merchants who owned land along the Potomac had been petitioning the Virginia General Assembly since 1748 to establish a proper trading town at a site known as West's Hunting Creek Warehouse. They needed a place to gather crops for export and receive manufactured goods from abroad. Tobacco had given way to wheat and corn in the upland farms of Northern Virginia, and those crops needed a port. The General Assembly agreed, and in the spring of 1749, a site was selected and named Alexandria — in honor of John Alexander, the early landowner whose family had held much of the surrounding acreage.
John West, the Fairfax County surveyor, laid out the 60 acres. By tradition, he was assisted by a 17-year-old named George Washington, who would go on to become the city's most famous resident, worship at its Christ Church, conduct business at its taverns, and review its militia on its streets for the rest of his life.
The lots went to auction on July 13. Within a few years, Alexandria was one of the busiest ports on the Eastern Seaboard — a hub for tobacco, flour, and trade that drew merchants, craftsmen, and enslaved workers to its wharves and warehouses. By the time of the American Revolution, it was one of the most prosperous towns in Virginia.
The city that grew from those 60 acres would go on to live a complicated and consequential American life. It hosted George Washington and five colonial governors at Carlyle House during the French and Indian War. It approved George Mason's Fairfax Resolves, helping lay the groundwork for the Revolution. It became part of the new District of Columbia in 1791 and was surrendered to British forces during the War of 1812. It became a center of the domestic slave trade in the 1820s and 1830s, with trading companies operating from a pen on Duke Street. It retroceded to Virginia in 1847, was occupied by Union forces throughout the Civil War, and emerged from that conflict transformed.
Through all of it — the prosperity and the shame, the occupation and the celebration — the city on the Potomac endured.
Today Alexandria is 277 years old. The lots auctioned off on July 13, 1749 are now Old Town. The wharves are a waterfront park. The Potomac is still there.
