In October 2002, the Arlington Historical Society published the following article in their monthly magazine.  

A Glimpse of an Arlington that Once Was

By Jim Matlack

The Wanderbirds Hiking Club was organized in the spring of 1934 by Robert Shosteck, a young man interested in nature and the outdoors, in cooperation with The Washington Post. The newspaper agreed to sponsor the club, and Mr. Shosteck would write articles on outdoor subjects, including one a week which would describe a hike to take place the following Sunday, giving the time and place of meeting.[i]

The first Wanderbirds hike took place on April 1, 1934, mainly in the Chain Bridge section of Arlington County, although it began and ended in the District of Columbia. Mr. Shosteck’s article on the hike describes a part of Arlington that was far different from the modern urban Arlington of today. It was a wooded area of wildflowers, wildlife, springs, remains of Civil War fortifications, giant anthills, and remnants of old estates. To me it is an idyllic description of a lost world. Although the hikers traversed only a small section of the county, it may have been representative of much of old rural Arlington.

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Mr. Shosteck’s article does contain some errors. He refers to the “valley of the upper Potomac.” Actually, the Potomac in the area about which he is writing is in a gorge that the river has cut into the Piedmont, a low undulating plateau. He writes that the hike is in the Coastal Plain. In reality, it was in the piedmont. The boundary between the two geologic regions is in the vicinity of Key Bridge. He misspells the Pimmit in Pimmit Run as “Pimmett”, and refers to Gulf Branch as Gulf “Run” despite claiming a great and long-time familiarity with the area in which it is located in a letter of February 1, 1959.[ii] Finally, he calls Glebe Road “Cherrydale road.” The latter name would be a more appropriate term for Military Road since it runs from Glebe Road to Cherrydale. Actually, the woods road he and his hikers took from Gulf Branch to “Cherrydale road” may have led to Military Road rather than Glebe Road. I have a June 1935 revision of the 1935 map of Arlington issued by the Arlington County Engineering Department. My older brother Albert Matlack, when a Boy Scout, penciled in the routes of woods roads and trails in the Palisades area on the map after we moved to Arlington in 1936. He shows a road running from Gulf Branch to Military Road near where the latter road ran into Glebe road. It could have been the “dirt road” shown on Mr. Shosteck’s map. The junction of Military and Glebe Roads has been considerably altered since then.

One problem with Mr. Shosteck’s map in the Post article is that north is toward the bottom of the map. It is in a sense upside down. It was no problem for me, however.

I made three visits to the locale of the first Wanderbirds hike: on June 8, 2001 and on April 2 and May 30, 2002. I was particularly interested in finding remnants of Civil War trenches. Robert Shosteck, in the 1973 revision of his Potomac Trail Book writes “one.... can see the remnants of old Civil War rifle pits, on the right side [of Gulf Branch], going upstream.”[iii] So maybe they might be still there, I thought.

In what was a wooded area in 1934, only two strips of wooded parkland remain: one along Gulf Branch and the other along the top of the Palisades. The latter is further split into two parts by the George Washington Memorial Parkway, which runs close to the Palisades. There is a trail between Military Road and the Potomac which follows Gulf Branch, used in part by fishermen, and another along the edge of the Palisades between Glebe Road and Gulf Branch. The latter trail forms part of the Potomac Heritage Trail, which parallels the Virginia shore of the Potomac from Roosevelt Island to the Beltway. Both trails are shown on the 1935 map of Arlington annotated by my brother.

I should add that the narrow strip of parkland along Gulf Branch is hemmed in on either side by residential development except for the short stretch on Parkway land. On the western or River Crest side, 36^th Road North comes very close to the stream. On the eastern or Bellevue Forest side, the streets do not come as close, but several are not far away. I think that most of the development near the stream took place after 1955. I have several revisions of the map originally issued by the Arlington County, Virginia Engineering Department in 1935. That of February 1955 shows no streets in what is now River Crest, and only one, North Monroe Street, near Gulf Branch in Bellevue Forest. The July 1965 revision shows streets in River Crest and Bellevue Forest pretty much as they are now.

On my June 8, 2001 trip to the area, I walked the Palisades Trail and found it pretty much where it had been in 1934 as described by Mr. Shosteck. The stretch of Glebe Road followed by him and his hikers probably has not changed much either. It is still only two lanes wide down to the bridge over Pimmit Run. But it would be dangerous to walk along now due to heavy traffic and a lack of shoulder space.

Until recently, the Palisades Trail started a short distance above the Glebe Road bridge over Pimmit Run, just as it did in 1934. However, by my May 30, 2002 trip, the trail had been moved a short distance so as to go under the bridge to avoid the dangerous pedestrian crossing of Glebe Road.[iv]

Another important change since 1934 has been the construction of the George Washington Memorial Parkway. It parallels the trail except for a very short distance where the trail is actually under the Parkway bridge over Glebe Road. The trail is sandwiched into a narrow strip of land between the Palisades and the Parkway. It is so close to the edge of the Palisades in a few places as to be somewhat frightening. That, the constant noise from the Parkway, and the poison ivy along the trail, make a walk along it less than enjoyable. However, there is one stretch of the trail from which you can see Chain Bridge through the trees, at least when they are bare. It is a scene etched in my memory since childhood. I must have been along that trail when I first walked to Chain Bridge with my older brother about 1938 or 1939. It was the first time I had seen the bridge built in 1938; it replaced an iron truss bridge built in 1874.[v]

As I was descending the Palisades Trail toward Gulf Branch, I noticed a path leading off to the right. I thought it might lead to the Civil War trench I sought. It led to a barren area under the Parkway bridge over Gulf Branch. I paused under the bridge and walked ahead a short distance. There before me in the woods was a remnant of an old trench, maybe a hundred feet long. My mind went back over sixty years; the scene reminded me of that part of Fort C.F. Smith in Arlington which had been destroyed by residential development about 1939. My home was near the fort, and I once tried to dig for artifacts there with a trowel. Being about eight years old, I was unsuccessful. Not having brought a trowel with me on this occasion, I proceeded on a short distance and found another, much shorter remnant of trench. Beyond it lay somebody’s yard, so I retraced my steps to the Palisades Trail, where on May 30, 2002, I found that the trail is actually in a remnant of the Civil War trench for a very short distance. An employee at the Gulf Branch Nature Center had told me that a portion of the trench had been destroyed during the construction of the Parkway bridge over Gulf Branch, and I found that a short portion of it north of the bridge remains. It is in alignment with the two remnants south of the bridge.

On my June 8, 2001 trip, after descending the Palisades Trail to Gulf Branch, I followed the trail along it upstream a short distance until I crossed a small rivulet on a wooden bridge. Just beyond it was a “trail going obliquely to the left uphill” as described in Mr. Shosteck’s article on his hike in the Post. It is a trail of some importance since steps have been constructed in the lower part of it. I ascended it, but it led neither to a camp site nor a fence as it did in 1934, but rather to the end of North Monroe Street and an area of expensive homes in Bellevue Forest. I then searched the hillside above Gulf Branch for a while looking for evidence of the Civil War trench shown on Mr. Shosteck’s map as being to the east of Gulf Branch, but without success. I returned to the east side of Gulf Branch on May 30, 2002 and searched for both the Civil War trench and the giant anthills mentioned by Mr. Shosteck. I came to the conclusion that both were on the high ground above Gulf Branch and have been destroyed by residential development.[vi]

I find it especially sad that the anthills are gone. I remember anthills such as Mr. Shosteck describes in what is now the Riverwood subdivision of Arlington before it was developed in the late 1940s. As far as I know, they were all destroyed. It was a shame for they were a wonder to behold. I have seen some since in various places while hiking. I have been told they are constructed by “Allegheny Ants.”

On my June 8, 2001 trip, I descended the trail from North Monroe Street and returned to the aforementioned rivulet and went up it to find the spring Mr. Shosteck wrote was drained by it. I ascended it to a point where I was blocked by a fence over it. But downhill from the fence, in a deeply eroded section of the streambed, water was coming out of the ground and flowing downhill, thought it didn’t reach Gulf Branch.

I thought that perhaps I had found the site of the spring I was seeking, but that the former spring opening had been destroyed by erosion. At any rate, there was no water running in the part of the streambed between there and the fence farther uphill.

I went up two other rivulets on the east side of Gulf Branch looking for springs. I did not find any and had to stop searching lest I trespass on someone’s backyard. In an article on the springs of Arlington, Eleanor Lee Templeman wrote “...all of our springs and streams are decreasing in volume, or drying up completely, due to the constant lowering of the ground-water level. Homes, buildings, paved streets and parking lots divert the rain water into storm sewers, preventing the water from seeping into the ground as nature intended.”[vii] Consequently, I doubt that it is a good idea to look for springs which existed before the areas in which they were located became developed.

On my April 2, 2002 trip, I found some of the same wildflowers mentioned by Mr. Shosteck, whose hike was on an April 1. I especially noticed spring beauty and bloodroot and was told by personnel at the Gulf Branch Nature Center that arbutus and hepatica had already bloomed. I also saw some periwinkle, which I have been told is not a wild flower, but is mentioned in Mr. Shosteck’s article. Mr. Shosteck also mentions ferns, which I found along the Palisades Trail and growing on the slopes of Gulf Branch valley, sometimes in great profusion, on my June 8, 2001 and May 30, 2002 trips.

There are other changes that have taken place since 1934 that should be mentioned. The dirt road which Mr. Shosteck’s hikers took from Gulf Branch to “Cherrydale road” has undoubtedly been destroyed by the development of River Crest. Gulf Branch has become heavily eroded in places, probably due to the clearing of land in its watershed and the consequent increase in rain runoff. And, as I have indicated earlier, there is a different Chain Bridge.

There are a few remnants of what was, according to Mr. Shosteck, in 1934 a “fertile wooded area”: two limited areas of woodland with their ferns and wildflowers, a few trails, three small sections of a Civil War trench, and a two lane stretch of Glebe Road.

However, far more has changed in this part of Arlington than has remained the same. Two modern, suburban subdivisions now cover, for the most part, an area that less than a lifetime ago was undeveloped with only a few houses. A noisy highway slices through one of the few remaining sections of woodland in that part of Arlington. One could not take the 1934 hike today due not only to residential development but also to the danger of walking along Glebe Road, and since January 3, 1960, one cannot take a streetcar out to the vicinity of Chain Bridge and walk across it into Arlington.[viii] Fortunately, a piece of the woodland that once existed near the Palisades in Arlington has been preserved not far away in Potomac Overlook Park, so all, at least, has not been lost.

I am sure that reading Mr. Shosteck’s 1934 article will create in many a feeling of nostalgia for a world which is gone forever from Arlington, a world in which people lived closer to nature and its peace and beauty.

As for the Wanderbirds, they returned to Arlington on March 28, 1935 to celebrate the first anniversary of their club’s founding. This they did at the Windsor Arms Tavern near Ballston with a dinner and dance, which cost $1.50.[ix]

Epilogue

Although the Washington Post stopped sponsoring the Wanderbirds in 1936, the club survived and is now doing quite well. Hikes are scheduled for every Sunday of the year. However, there has been a change in the locations of most of the hikes. In the early years of the club, most of the hikes were not far from Washington, but subsequent suburban development has left only a few local trails available for hiking. Consequently, the Wanderbirds now hike mostly in the mountains due to the availability of trails there. The club uses a chartered bus for most of its trips.

Jim Matlack is the Archivist of the Wanderbirds Hiking Club, and is a former Membership Chairman of the Arlington Historical Society. He invites readers to obtain further information on the Wanderbirds by visiting the club’s Web site at http://www.wanderbirds.org .

The Bellevue Forest Citizens' Association gratefully thanks the Arlington Historical Society for allowing us to re-print this article here.   Copies of the Arlington Historical Society Magazine can be obtained by writing to:  

The Arlington Historical Society, Inc.,  PO Box 402, Arlington, VA  22210.  

Membership in this Society is open to all persons having an interest in the history of Arlington County and the preservation of its past.  

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