Oxon Cove Park

Two hundred and fifty years ago, the Potomac River was a highway. Roads were bumpy, narrow, winding routes, littered with stumps and fallen trees. They led from tobacco barns and small villages down to the real thoroughfare – the Potomac. When people and goods had to travel, they took to the water.

Many of the first roads on dry land were called “rolling roads.” Farmers, slaves, or teams of oxen used them to roll huge barrels of tobacco, called hogsheads, down the water’s edge. There the tobacco was loaded on ships, often for the long journey to England.

People used the Potomac River for local travel, too. More than sixty ferries connected points in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., along the Potomac by the mid-1800s. At the mouth of Oxon Creek, a ferry to the King Street wharf in Alexandria, Virginia, started in 1740 and ran for nearly 200 years.

This image shows the bustling waterfront of Alexandria in the 1860s, directly across the river from where you stand now.

Birds Eye View of Alexandria, Va. Courtesy of The Mariner’s Museum.

Marker is on Oxon Cove Trail near Bald Eagle Road.

Courtesy hmdb.org

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