Ft. Ward and Seminary African American Descendants Society Testimony for Alexandria City Council Public Hearing on Ft. Ward Management Plan (Jan. 24, 2015)

Ft. Ward and Seminary African American Descendants Society

Testimony for Alexandria City Council Public Hearing on Ft. Ward Management Plan (Jan. 24, 2015)

Good Morning; thank you for this opportunity and for taking the time on this matter. I am Adrienne Terrell Washington, director of the Ft. Ward and Seminary African American Descendants Society (FWSAADS), and I will be giving an overview of our concerns that will be addressed individually by the speakers that follow. I speak on behalf of those descendants, some of whom you see today, who are the offspring a religious people who created a self-sufficient community that prospered for more than one hundred years on acres of land that was confiscated by developers and the City of Alexandria for what is now known as the historic Ft. Ward Park. Some of these Ft. Ward descendants were relocated down the hill to the Seminary Community where land was also confiscated for TC Williams High School which bears the same address as my grandparents’ home at 3330 King Street. We still live there today in a community which continues to face the threat of encroaching development issues -- the latest involving the implementation of lights on the school property which our forbearers were promised would never be erected.

To some, Ft. Ward is a place to stroll, or picnic, or walk a dog; or recollect Civil War battles; but to us, Ft. Ward is a place where Aunt Clara nursed Sunday School children; were Grandma Jesse tended her geranium garden; were Uncle Johnny tended his pigs, were the women, including Jennie Wanzer Ashby, brought out their fine china to host tea parties. To us, Ft. Ward is where we go to honor our dead at their known and unknown gravesites, where George Craven noted, “we were poor, so we buried our people in the yard.”

To us, the vast majority of Ft. Ward is sacred; it is has been, is, and will be “hallowed ground.” That is why it has been so important to us, to make sure that you, this 21^st Century Alexandria City Council, get it right this time to ensure that our ancestors’ graves, memories and contributions to this special spot, now a public park, will be honored going forward as it has not been in the past. Surely, the park’s history could be preserved, and enjoyed by park lovers, just like one of the “Hallowed Ground” projects of the National Park Service. Ours is a prime example of the civil war to civil rights story well-suited to the African American Heritage Trail enhancing Alexandria’s tourist attractions. 

However, what you have before you as the voluminous Ft. Ward Management Plan, which was voted on by the Ft. Ward Stakeholders Group, of which we were 3 members, albeit often disregarded and disrespected members, does not adequately address the three major concerns we had going into the project and still have several years later: finding graves, eliminating storm water runoff, and generating an accurate historic preservation plan. This is why we voted against this staff-driven plan being forwarded to this body. The flawed documentation and technological “concepts” on which the management plan is based, particularly the fundamental ground penetrating map, led to a laundry list of recommendations (which staff continue to change). We feel that there must be more strongly worded language in the plan, particularly with the ground disturbance memorandum, that will protect the African American graves, cemeteries and other historic physical structures in the park, with adequate and direct consultation and notification to the descendants going forward, as we stated in our attached “Minority Report.” As staff unknowingly responded to our minority report, we may still offer a separate clarification to correct the inaccurate statements it contains. 

Due to these continuing problems mentioned, we are now asking that you do not act on the Ft. Ward management plan as currently written until we can develop a more trustworthy and collaborative path going forward to remedy our concerns, or to go forward with stringent conditions, including a committee, headed by a council member, which will more equitably address our concerns before the staff is allowed to implement the management plan without additional council and community input and oversight.   

Our priorities are still about the undirected storm water flow that continues to erode the graves in the OBC cemetery and adjacent graveyard; locating as many unmarked graves as possible and honoring those with a memorial; and further researching and preserving the African American experience and physical structures built by our ancestors with a visible interpretive plan in the Ft. Ward Museum and in the park.  

Given the political climate of the late 1950s and early 1960s, many of our ancestors at Ft. Ward were misled and mistakes were made in taking their land that we, today, would have been working hard to avoid repeating today. That is why the representatives of the descendants society, the Seminary Civic Association and the Oakland Baptist Church have being volunteering countless hours to collaborate in good faith with city staff and other stakeholders to come up with a better management plan for Ft. Ward that would honor the historic mission of the park at the same time provide for passive recreation in the park that would maintain its serene nature given that our ancestors are still buried in this “hallowed ground.”