Virginia

The call came in to the Arlington County Fire Department at 11:16am on July 2, 1959… The Pentagon was on fire.

ACFD units raced to the scene, soon to be joined by deployments from 34 other jurisdictions including Falls Church, Alexandria, Fort Myer, the District, Prince Georges County, Bethesda and the Inter-Agency Government Pool — over 300 firefighters in all.

When trucks reached the scene, black smoke hung over the building, so thick that they had to form a human chain in order to navigate. Firemen groped, clawed and cut their way to the blaze, which had erupted in the Air Force statistical services offices between rings C and D and corridors 1 and 10.

1940 was a big year for municiple services in northern Virginia. Sparked by the growing population in the region, Arlington created professional police and fire departments and Fairfax created a police department of its own. In celebration of the ACPD's 75th Anniversary, the department has put together a book featuring photos and stories about the history of law enforcement in the county.

Civil War blogger Ron Baumgarten discusses an often-forgotten aspect of Civil War history: contraband camps. After generations in bondage, thousands of African Americans from the South fled northward. Many came to the D.C. area and first experienced freedom on the abandoned lands of secessionists, which the U.S. government converted into camps during the war. 

Thousands of people drive on it everyday, but sometimes we forget that the George Washington Memorial Parkway is not just a commuter highway. It's a national park. And like our other national parks, the Parkway tells a story about our nation's past.

Elizabeth Keckley rose from slave to the Lincoln White House thanks to her supreme skill as a dressmaker. Her autobiography provides one of the most powerful accounts of the First Family's personal lives.

In 1964, Washington, D.C. was the site of the only known in-person meeting between Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., which was significant considering the two leaders' very public differences on approaches to the civil rights movement. The two staged a made-for-the-cameras meeting in the U.S. Capitol. But, as strange as the photo-op with King seemed at the time, Malcolm made headlines with an even more unlikely connection in Washington a few years earlier.

"You don’t have to look too far when you’re in Shenandoah to see the relics of human habitation. You don’t have to be a historian. You don’t have to be an archaeologist. You can stay on trail. You can’t help but find stone walls that were built by somebody, clearly. There’s old roads. There’s house foundations. These are things you can see from the trail. So, I just saw these things over many, many years and I kind of wondered for awhile what they were all about but I didn’t really look into it for quite some time, until I started going a little bit off trail and finding more things off trail. And my curiosity was really piqued and I wanted to know, who were these people? Why are they not here? Why did they leave? Where did they go? And, what is their story all about?"

It was the roaring '20s and radio was taking off. Americans were tuning-in in droves for news, opera, popular music and sports. No other medium offered the ability to reach so many people instantaneously. Advertisers took note. So, too, did the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, which was interested in its own sort of advertising: promoting a unique brand of “patriotism” founded upon white privilege and intolerance for blacks, Catholics, Jews and immigrants amongst others. 

Over the past several decades, Arlington's Columbia Pike corridor has grown into one of the most ethnically diverse communities in the nation. The neighborhood is literally home to the world, which makes it a fascinating subject for study. But how do you capture the essence of a community? It's a big question and one that Lloyd Wolf and his collaborators on the Columbia Pike Documentary Project have been trying to answer for almost 10 years.

Earl Lloyd was a rising basketball star at West Virginia State College, but little did he know how soon he would become an important part of sports history. Toward the end of Lloyd’s senior season he was heading to class with a classmate and she told him she heard his name on the radio that day. The Washington Capitols had drafted him. It would be a history-making homecoming.

By the time she was 23, Mulholland had participated in more than fifty sit-ins and protests. She was a Freedom Rider, a participant in the near riotous Jackson, Mississippi Woolworth Sit-in, and helped plan and organize the March on Washington in 1963. On a local level, she was part of the first Arlington sit-ins, which integrated lunch counters across northern Virginia, and helped to coordinate demonstrations at Glen Echo Park, Bethesda's Hiser Theater amongst other locations.

It's a foreign concept now but for many years, Arlington County did not have its own fire department. Instead, the county was served by a number of independent volunteer fire departments. These were organized locally, typically within neighborhoods where citizen leaders saw the need for some level of fire protection and established a resource right in their own neighborhood. When a fire broke out, the volunteers would leave their homes or businesses and go fight the flames. With the growth of the county, Arlington established a career fire service in July of 1940.