London on the Potomac

When I arranged to spend the summer doing research in the Library of Congress, most of my friends judged me certifiable. “Washington in July and August, the humidity, the heat; that’s the last place, surely, anyone would choose to be then.” And indeed, on many mornings when, for the sake of exercise, I walked up Constitution Avenue, I wondered why on earth I, who have the good fortune to carry my office around with me, had not had the gumption to fix my schedule so that I did my research in the spring and autumn, and during the summer worked on a manuscript in some “quiet cafe restaurant in the sun.” But free though a free-lance writer is, his plans cannot always conform to his convenience. And anyhow, I was not staying in Washington itself, but in. Old Town, Alexandria, which is different.

“Unique” is an overused adjective. But it has to be applied to Old Alexandria. It was founded in 1749 by act of the Virginia General Assembly as a town that would be “commodious for trade and navigation and tend greatly to the best advantage of frontier inhabitants.” The Fairfax County surveyor was helped in the drawing of its first map by his seventeen-year-old apprentice, George Washington, and the town today is very much as it was planned by that young apprentice.

AW

About the Author

Alec Waugh

Featured Tags

When I arranged to spend the summer doing research in the Library of Congress, most of my friends judged me certifiable. “Washington in July and August, the humidity, the heat; that’s the last place, surely, anyone would choose to be then.” And indeed, on many mornings when, for the sake of exercise, I walked up Constitution Avenue, I wondered why on earth I, who have the good fortune to carry my office around with me, had not had the gumption to fix my schedule so that I did my research in the spring and autumn, and during the summer worked on a manuscript in some “quiet cafe restaurant in the sun.” But free though a free-lance writer is, his plans cannot always conform to his convenience. And anyhow, I was not staying in Washington itself, but in. Old Town, Alexandria, which is different.

“Unique” is an overused adjective. But it has to be applied to Old Alexandria. It was founded in 1749 by act of the Virginia General Assembly as a town that would be “commodious for trade and navigation and tend greatly to the best advantage of frontier inhabitants.” The Fairfax County surveyor was helped in the drawing of its first map by his seventeen-year-old apprentice, George Washington, and the town today is very much as it was planned by that young apprentice.