Candlelight is one of the best ways of exploring a historic home, and staff at the Lee-Fendall House (614 Oronoco Street) are offering unique candlelight tours next month of the home’s Victorian-style holiday decorations.
On Friday, Dec. 15 and Saturday, Dec. 16, tours led by candlelight will explore Victorian-era decorations in the home.
While the Office of Historic Alexandria (OHA) is going into excruciating detail to restore the Freedom House museum‘s exterior to its pre-Civil War appearance, city leaders are unsure if a sign advertising the sale of slaves might take that too far.
Today, the Freedom House Museum is a city-owned museum dedicated to telling the stories of the Black men, women and children trafficked through the building between 1828 and 1861.
An annual holiday program kicking off next month at the Fort Ward Museum (4301 W. Braddock Road) will combine the fun and holiday spirit of the Christmas season with education about a conflict that left an estimated 1.5 million casualties.
Civil War Christmas in Camp is a popular annual program the Fort Ward Museum, featuring reenactors in a winter camp setting and period decorations. This year, the program is scheduled for Sunday, Dec. 9, from noon to 4 p.m.
The Lyceum (201 S. Washington Street) in Old Town will host a free magic show next month.
The show, put on by magicians from Ring 50, will also include a toy drive to benefit the Fund for Alexandria’s Children Holiday Sharing Program, which gets presents for children who might otherwise not get gifts during the holidays.
Freedom House Museum in Old Town is looking to replicate how its property looked in the mid-19th century, when it was the headquarters of the largest slave-trading operation in the United States.
The proposed project at 1315 Duke Street would restore portions of the museum building exterior to how it looked between 1828 and 1861. After being deferred over the summer, it goes back to the city’s Board of Architectural Review next Wednesday, Nov. 15.
While the city is making strides to honor the victims of two Alexandria lynchings, a member of the Alexandria Community Remembrance Project noted in a recent meeting that a third victim — the first recorded in the city — has been neglected in part due to a technicality.
Thanks in large part to the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a non-profit based out of Alabama working to commemorate victims of lynching, the city has started to do more work to commemorate the victims of lynchings in 1897 and 1899. In particular, however, the EJI focuses on lynchings between 1877 and 1950, while Alexandria’s first recorded lynching occurred over ten years before that period started.
If you’ve binge-watched The Fall of the House of Usher and are in the mood for some Edgar Allan Poe readings, the good news is an acclaimed Poe reenactor is making his annual return to Old Town for a reading on Halloween.
The bad news: it’s sold out. But there are still plenty of other options to get your spooky fix in Alexandria on Halloween.
Just after the full list of potential new street names was revealed, the City of Alexandria said six public streets could be renamed as the opening of a 15-year process.
The city plans an open public hearing on Nov. 30 at 6 p.m. in Alexandria City Hall (301 King Street) to discuss the proposed names or potential alternatives.
This weekend marks the 105th anniversary of the Alexandria Torpedo Factory’s ironic origins.
As told in the Office of Historic Alexandria’s This Week in Historic Alexandria newsletter, the contract for constructing the U.S. Naval Torpedo Station was awarded on Oct. 14, 1918. The United States was embroiled in the First World War, but work on the building wouldn’t begin until the day after the war ended.
The City of Alexandria is working on renaming streets honoring Confederate leaders, and now there’s a full list of new potential names to replace them.
The Historic Alexandria Resources Commission compiled a list of roughly 63 names that could replace streets honoring Confederates.
A set of dinners next month will help raise funding for local scholarships named after the victims of lynching in Alexandria.
The Alexandria Community Remembrance Project runs the scholarships in the names of Joseph McCoy and Benjamin Thomas, Black Alexandrians who were lynched in 1897 and 1899.
