I live in Washington, D.C., and much like most of the parents in the area—the whole country, really—my wife and I have looked for mostly outdoor activities to do with our kids since the beginning of the pandemic. Washington, D.C., and its surrounding suburbs, are home to tons of museums and monuments; there’s always somewhere to go to look at some national something-or-other with some social distancing that’s pretty much a 30-minute drive from us all.
Which is exacly what I did a few weeks ago. On one of those days when my kids clearly needed to get outside, I put my kids in the car and we took a drive out into the city and realized that there was a location I’d never been before but I kept seeing pop up on my friends’ social media posts: Theodore Roosevelt Island.
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Here is how he National Park Service—the island is part of the National Park Service—describes Theodore Roosevelt Island:
In the 1930s, landscape architects transformed Mason’s Island from neglected, overgrown farmland into Theodore Roosevelt Island, a memorial to America’s 26th president. They conceived a “real forest” designed to mimic the natural forest that once covered the island. Today miles of trails through wooded uplands and swampy bottomlands honor the legacy of a great outdoorsman and conservationist.
The Mason that they’re referencing to is George Mason, one of America’s Founding Fathers and the namesake of Fairfax, Virginia’s, George Mason University, whose family owned the property and whose son, John, and his family, lived on the island from around 1800 to 1831. And that neglected, overgrown farmland was actually a functioning cotton and corn plantation (please click the link to see a rendering of the layout of the actual plantation) until the family was forced to leave in 1831 over some bad business dealings on the part of George’s son, John. For the record, the National Park Service website makes no mention of this anywhere on the site. I wouldn’t even have made this discovery if not for my son asking me to read every sign we passed. But we’ll get there.
