Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and George Washington Memorial Parkway are neighbors, shepherding travelers along the Potomac River to the nation’s capital and beyond. Through the years, the histories of the airport and parkway have intersected, linking the two in obvious and subtle ways.

Indigenous communities lived, fished, and traveled along the Potomac River for centuries prior to the development of the region by European settlers and the U.S. government. The area has been documented as the home of the Nacotchtanke Indians.  

Advantageously located adjacent to the nation’s capital, the federal government selected the banks of the Potomac River for two major transportation projects in the 1930s: Mount Vernon Memorial Highway and Washington National Airport. The soft, unstable soils of the Potomac River shoreline required extensive stabilization, filling, and construction for both projects. Amid the Great Depression, the federal government turned to the US Army Corps of Engineers for leadership and New Deal programs for labor. 

In 1889, the Corps of Engineers’ Brig. Gen. Peter C. Hains conducted the initial survey to determine the route for the future Mount Vernon Memorial Highway. After decades of delay, dredging operations began to stabilize the route along the highway under the direction of the Corps of Engineers.  The Roosevelt Administration’s New Deal comprised economic, social, and political initiatives that included several work relief programs. One of these, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) provided conservation employment opportunities to young men during the Great Depression. CCC laborers based at Fort Hunt planted trees along Mount Vernon Memorial Highway. 

Almost a decade later, the Corps of Engineers led similar operations at Gravelly Point, dredging the Potomac River, grading, stabilizing, paving, and installing utilities for the new airport.  The Main Terminal and runways of Washington National Airport were constructed through New Deal programs, with the Works Progress Administration assigning 3,500 men to the construction efforts.  During this construction effort, the highway was shifted west of its original location to accommodate the new airport.
 

In 1928, Congress called upon the U.S. Commission for the Celebration of the 200th Anniversary of the Birth of George Washington to devise the best route between the capital and the first president’s home at Mount Vernon. The Bureau of Public Roads zeroed in on two paths, selecting the route along the Potomac River. 

Mount Vernon Memorial Highway was no ordinary road:
 

Beyond its interest as an engineering project, the Mount Vernon Memorial Highway represented a new departure for the federal government as a landscape architecture project.”  Completed in 1932, Mount Vernon Memorial Highway was hailed as “America’s Most Modern Highway.” 

Following the completion of the highway, government officials, travelers, and private industries called for a new airport for the National Capital region. In 1938, Congress passed the Civil Aeronautics Act, which among other things created the Civil Aeronautics Authority (CAA) and empowered President Roosevelt to establish a new airport, Washington National Airport. Gravelly Point was an ideal location for the airport for several reasons, including its proximity to the recently founded Mount Vernon Memorial Highway. Upon completion, the CAA reported:

The new airport, described as the world’s most modern, as dedicated on September 28, 1940, when President Roosevelt laid the cornerstone of the terminal building. It was designed to serve as a model for all metropolitan air-traffic terminals. While not the largest in the world, it is designed to provide for airline traffic of the future. 
 

From the start both the Mount Vernon Memorial Highway and Washington National Airport channeled history connected to the nation’s first Commander-in-Chief.

President George Washington owned 8,000 acres along the Potomac River, stretching north to his estate at Mount Vernon, on to the Great Falls of the Potomac that he surveyed. Mount Vernon Memorial Highway was authorized as part of the Celebration of the 200th Anniversary of the Birth of George Washington and subsequently renamed and expanded as the George Washington Memorial Parkway in 1930. 

Washington National Airport also initially bore the name of the nation’s first president. In 1998, the airport was renamed Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, commemorating the 40th president of the U.S. as well as the first. Additionally, the airport harkened to aviation history with the main terminal’s completion date set for December 17, 1940 – the 37th anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ first flight. 
 

Mount Vernon’s classical architecture became the standard of Colonial Revival commercial architecture. Frequently, reproduced features included symmetrical designs with columns. When the Washington National Airport Terminal opened in 1940, visitors observed similarities with Mount Vernon’s architecture:
 

Its design, while meeting all the requirements of the most modern of all means of transportation, will conform handsomely to the classic tradition of the neighborhood. For instance, while the flying-field façade of this building is almost wholly of glass, it is masked by delicate columns more than a little reminiscent of those at Mount Vernon. The land side of the building, with its central colonnade and spreading wings, again recalls the best of the domestic classic architecture of colonial times. 
 

Around 1740-1741, Gerard Alexander built Abingdon Plantation on a hill along the Potomac. The Plantation profited from enslaved labor and proximity to the Potomac River, which facilitated convenient shipping and trading across the region. George Washington’s stepson, John Parke Custis purchased Abingdon Plantation in 1778, and it was the birthplace of Eleanor “Nelly” Parke Custis and George Washington Parke Custis, grandchildren of Martha Washington. 
 

Some enslaved people who lived and labored at Mount Vernon were relocated to Abingdon Plantation and transferred to the ownership of George Washington Parke Custis. Some of the names of those enslaved at Abingdon have survived including Dick, Bess, Robin, Stice, Nell, Nan, and David, among many others.

In 1930, a fire consumed most of Abingdon Plantation, though some structural remnants remain on the hill as a testament to the history of enslavement, agriculture, and the Washington-Custis families along the Potomac.
 

Abingdon Research Station was designed and constructed for the Bureau of Public Roads’ Division of Tests. The site had been purchased when the federal government was acquiring land for Mount Vernon Memorial Highway. The Abingdon Research Station buildings were built in the Colonial Revival style, a style thought appropriate to the location immediately adjacent to the ruins of Abingdon Plantation. The East and West Laboratory Buildings are closely modeled on the river elevation of the eighteenth-century Carter’s Grove Plantation, as it was modified in 1928.

Having previously constructed Mount Vernon Memorial Highway, the Bureau of Public Roads performed structural tests on concrete, investigations on other bituminous materials, and subgrade soil studies, while based out of the Abingdon Research Station. When the Bureau of Public Roads relocated to new facilities in the 1960s, the Federal Aviation Authority took possession of the Abingdon Research Station, converting it to airport functions.

Together, Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and George Washington Memorial Parkway continue to connect travelers to the National Capital region and beyond.
 

Cissna, Paul B. 1990. Historical and Archaeological Study of the George Washington Memorial Parkway from the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Bridge to the Lorcom Lane Turnabout on Spout Run Parkway, Arlington, Virginia. Occasional Report #4, Regional Archeology Program, National Capital Region, National Park Service, Washington, DC.
Bureau of Public Roads, Department of Agriculture. The Mount Vernon Memorial Highway. Description Prepared for Inspection Trip of Delegates to Sixth International Road Congress, October 8, 1930. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1930.
Howard Lovewell Cheney. “The Washington National Airport,” Presented at Airport Conference, October 30-31, 1941, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois. 
Michael Wilderman. Mount Vernon Memorial Highway Historic American Engineering Record, Written Historical and Descriptive Data.
“George Washington Memorial Parkway,” Highways in Harmony, https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/hih/george_washington/geor…. Accessed July 2, 2025. 
United States Department of Commerce. The Annual Report of the Secretary of Commerce. Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1941.
“President Roosevelt Lays Cornerstone at Washington National Airport,” Civil Aeronautics Journal, Vol. 1, No. 20, October 15, 1940, 446.
“President Roosevelt Lays Cornerstone at Washington National Airport,” Civil Aeronautics Journal, Vol. 1, No. 20, October 15, 1940, 446.