Why did a playground that moved only 25 to 30 feet uphill take from 2020 to 2026 to finish? At Fort Ward Park, 4301 West Braddock Road, the delay traces back to what lies beneath the ground. The new playground opened on August 14. Where it sits, how it was built and who watched the digging all come from the fact that this park was once a neighborhood, and parts of it are still a cemetery.
A bad spot at the bottom of the hill
The old playground sat in what the city calls Area 1, at the bottom of a steep hill with poor drainage. That's a hard place for a stroller, and harder still for a wheelchair. Replacing it was part of a broader set of accessibility projects grouped under the Fort Ward Park and Museum Area Management Plan.
The city's own Fort Ward implementation project tracker shows how slowly the plan moved:
- June 2020: The city showed a first playground design and asked for public comment.
- 2022: After community feedback on that proposal, staff started studying new ways to make the playground accessible. That included a May 21 site walk and a June virtual meeting covering several candidate locations.
- February 2023: A relocation concept study narrowed the choice to two sites, Option B and Option D, with open houses and a virtual meeting on February 22.
- May 2023: At a May 11 community meeting, staff presented Option B, at the top of the hill, as the final location. By October, Lardner/Klein Landscape Architects had been hired to draw the plans.
- November 2024: A new consultant, Gordon, was brought on to finish the construction documents needed for permits.
- September 2025: The construction contract went to Stevens Construction Corporation of Annandale.
- November 2025 to summer 2026: The contractor mobilized, worked through snow delays over the winter and installed equipment in April. The playground reopened August 14.
Each step on that list waited on a review of what the digging might disturb.
What the park was before it was a park
After the Civil War, a neighborhood known as The Fort grew up around Fort Ward, one of the Union forts built to defend Washington. In the 1950s and 1960s, the city moved the residents out to create Fort Ward Park and Museum.
Archaeological work between 2009 and 2014 began with a ground-penetrating radar survey. Fieldwork that followed documented 22 graves, 19 of them unmarked, in the Jackson Cemetery on the west side of the fort, the Old Grave Yard next to Oakland Baptist Cemetery and the Adams graves in the eastern part of the park. The excavations also found foundations and artifacts from one of The Fort's earliest households, that of Burr and Harriet Shorts, and from an African American school.
Those sites are now marked on the ground. In 2023, the Office of Historic Alexandria and descendants of Fort community families installed a memorial stone for Robert Adams beside the grave of his wife, community matriarch Clara (Shorts) Adams. Later that year, hairpin-style fencing, typical of 19th- and 20th-century cemeteries, went up around all four burial areas: the Old Grave Yard, the Adams burial plot, the Clark burial plot and the Jackson Cemetery. A memorial for the Jackson Cemetery honoring Fort landowner James Jackson is being developed with family descendants.
The city's history of The Fort explains why a playground here couldn't just go wherever the ground was flattest.
Why the hilltop passed
All ground-disturbing work at Fort Ward goes through a review under the park's memorandum of understanding and its sensitivity-area guidelines. Both candidate playground sites fell in low-sensitivity areas on the city's map. Because the park as a whole is culturally sensitive, especially to descendants, the city still commissioned a more rigorous preliminary archaeological assessment before choosing.
The 2023 Playground Relocation Concept Study set its goals plainly. The project had to protect cultural resources important to Fort community descendants, involve those descendants in choosing the site, and follow the park's management goals of limiting ground disturbance and coordinating with archaeologists.
For Option B, the assessment found no evidence of a dwelling or of concentrated Fort community activity. It attributed the land's undeveloped history to the same thing that makes it a good playground site today: steep slopes kept anyone from building there. Between the old and new sites, the ground rises roughly 25 to 30 feet.
Even with that finding, the assessment recommended archaeological monitoring wherever the playground ended up. The concept study states that any identified burials must stay undisturbed and be protected in place.
The city followed through. The tracker's January and March 2026 updates, covering demolition, stormwater installation and grading, both repeat the same line: all disturbed areas would be monitored by Alexandria Archaeology staff.
What's up the hill now
When the city announced its September 2025 pre-construction meeting, ALXnow published the city's description of the finished project:
The updated playground will feature play equipment suitable for children ages 2-12 years including accessible play components, and fabric canopies to provide shade. Other improvements include new ADA parking, an accessible ramp entrance, an accessible water fountain, benches, bike parking, and picnic tables.
The old site at the bottom of the hill didn't get paved over. The contractor restored the former play area and the lower hill with reforestation and restoration plantings.
The contractor is still finishing landscape punch-list items, and winterization begins in late fall. The city has said it will hold a community ribbon cutting.
The playground is the latest piece of a longer accessibility effort, and most of the earlier pieces went through the same archaeological review:
- Picnic shelter pathway: A permeable-paver path connects the picnic shelter to accessible parking in Area 2 and runs out to Van Dorn Street. It reopened in May 2023 after construction monitored by archaeologists from New South Associates.
- Forest conservation area: Native trees went in south of the picnic shelter in November 2024, including mockernut hickory, fringe tree, flowering dogwood, persimmon, post oak, blackhaw viburnum, river birch, black cherry and sweet crab apple. Alexandria Archaeology monitored the planting.
- Parking and museum access: Accessible parking at the front gravel lot was finished in May 2025, with no archaeological resources observed during the work. The amphitheater spaces were updated and the museum lot repaved in fall 2025, and the museum got an upgraded ramp with new handrails that winter.
Taken together, the playground, pathway, parking and museum ramp give accessible routes into each part of the park, and archaeologists monitored the digging on each project.
Two Saturdays on the park's winter calendar
The new playground sits a short walk from the Fort Ward Museum & Historic Site, which has two programs coming up on the city's calendar:
- Specialty Tour: Fort Ward & Civil War Music, Saturday, November 14, 10 to 11 a.m. The tour covers Civil War music, the "Buglers and Brass Bands" exhibit and the reconstructed Northwest Bastion. Tickets are $15, or $12 for Office of Historic Alexandria members. Event details.
- Christmas in Camp, Saturday, December 12, noon to 4 p.m. It's free, with a Civil War Santa, winter-camp reenactors and period decorations. Event details.
The museum is open Thursday and Friday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m. The park itself is open daily from 9 a.m. to sunset.
At The Patterson Group, we follow how Alexandria's parks and historic sites change, from Fort Ward's hilltop playground to the projects still in planning across the city. If you'd like to talk about how these places fit into your plans, we'd be glad to set up a complimentary home valuation and strategy consultation.
