Fort Marcy: Defending the Chain Bridge

My Sunday plans at Fort Marcy didn’t fare much better than Saturday, but it wasn’t my fault. According to the NPS calendar of events, an event had been scheduled for 1pm that afternoon. We arrived about 1:10, and here is what we saw:

Slow day at Fort Marcy

I was rather deflated. Fort Marcy is a nice park, but I almost never see any activity out there. It features a large open space ringed by earthworks, with a few picnic tables, a couple of cannons, and some interpretive signage. It seems like an ideal space for some “living history” activity. I can’t guess why it was cancelled.

The grounds of Fort Marcy

Fort Marcy is the only unit in the NPS Fort Circle Parks located on the Virginia side of the Potomac River. It is located in McLean, VA, accessible from the northbound side of the George Washington Memorial Parkway. Along with Fort Ethan Allen, Fort Marcy was an earthwork fort built to guard access to the Chain Bridge, one of the main access points into Washington from Virginia.

Fort Marcy during the Civil War,
courtesy of Wikipedia.

Fort Marcy was built on Prospect Hill, which overlooked the Leesburg Turnpike. Fort Ethan Allen overlooked Military Road. Both forts were built on property belonging to Gilbert Vanderwerken, and they were connected by an extensive line of rifle trenches that stretched to the Potomac.

One of the two guns in Fort Marcy.
By 1862, the fort  was armed with 17 guns and 3 mortars.

Originally the fort was called Fort Baldy Smith, after Brig. Gen. William F. Smith, whose men had originally occupied the hill and started work on the fort. General George McClellan officially named it Fort Marcy on September 30, 1861, in honor of Brig. Gen. Randolph B. Marcy, his chief of staff and father-in-law. After a long and complicated courtship, McClellan married Ellen Marcy on May 22, 1860, about a year before he was appointed commander of the Army of the Potomac.

The fort saw no action during the war, but the men stationed there spent much of the war on alert.