page_title: Fort Runyon
section_title: Post-war use
hierarchical_section_title: Fort Runyon / Post-war use
caption_attribution_description: This is a crop of a 1932 photo of the Long Bridge (now the 14th Street Bridge) over the Potomac River, looking from Virginia towards the District of Columbia. And the bottom left of the photo is Hoover Field, a major airport serving the city of Washington, D.C. The road (bottom, curving right) is Military Road. At the bottom right is the northern end of Washington Airport, another major airport serving the city. The image is part of the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads Photographs collection from the National Archives, reproduced as part of the Historic American Engineering Record.
context_page_description: Fort Runyon was a timber and earthwork fort constructed by the Union Army following the occupation of northern Virginia in the American Civil War in order to defend the southern approaches to the Long Bridge as part of the defenses of Washington, D.C. during that war. The Columbia Turnpike and Alexandria and Loudon Railroad ran through the pentagonal structure, which controlled access to Washington via the Long Bridge. With a perimeter of almost 1,500 yards, and due to its unusual shape it was approximately the same size, shape, and in almost the same location as the Pentagon, built 80 years later.
  Runyon was built immediately after the entry of Union forces into Virginia on May 24, 1861, on the land of James Roach, a Washington building contractor. Fort Runyon was the largest fort in the ring of defenses that protected Washington during the Civil War and was named after Brigadier General Theodore Runyon, commander of the Fourth Division of the Army of Northeastern Virginia during the First Battle of Bull Run. Union soldiers garrisoned the fort until its dismantling following the end of the Civil War in 1865.
context_section_description: After the surrender of General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia on April 9, 1865, the primary reason for manned defenses protecting Washington ceased to exist. Initial recommendations by Colonel Barton S. Alexander, then-chief engineer of the Washington defenses, were to divide the defenses into three classes: those that should be kept active (first-class), those that should be mothballed and kept in a reserve state (second-class), and those that should be abandoned entirely (third-class). Due to its rear-area nature and the fact that the fort was unimportant to the overall defenses of Washington, Fort Runyon fell into the third-class category.
  With the two remaining guns removed to Fort Corcoran for storage and the garrison sent home, the fort was left abandoned. Due to its proximity to Washington and the large influx of freed blacks to the city that followed the end of the Civil War, the fort became residence to many squatters, most of whom were African-American.
  All the forts around or overlooking the city are dismantled, the guns taken out of them, the land resigned to its owners. Needy negro squatters, living around the forts, have built themselves shanties of the officers' quarters, pulled out the abatis for firewood, made cord wood or joists out of the log platforms for the guns, and sawed up the great flag-staffs into quilting poles or bedstead posts. ... The strolls out to these old forts are seedily picturesque. Freedmen, who exist by selling old horse-shoes and iron spikes, live with their squatter families where, of old, the army sutler kept the canteen; but the grass is drawing its parallels nearer and nearer the magazines. Some old clothes, a good deal of dirt, and forgotten graves, make now the local features of war."
  Though the wood and timber that made up the fort was undoubtedly burned by squatters or scavenged for building materials in the first few years after the war, the fort's embankments and trenches lasted quite a bit longer. A 1901 Rand McNally tour guide of Washington instructs tourists to look out of the windows of their train at the south end of the Long Bridge to catch a glimpse of the decaying fort. "At its further end there still stands, plainly seen at the left of the track as soon as the first high ground is reached, Fort Runyon, a strong earthwork erected in 1861 to guard the head of the bridge from raiders." A brickworks was also located nearby, sometimes utilizing the clay that formed the bastions of Fort Runyon as raw material for the bricks that would later go into the walls of Washington homes.
  Two years later, a new railroad bridge was constructed, replacing the old Long Bridge. In 1906, a highway bridge was constructed nearby. Together, these two projects destroyed what little remained of Fort Runyon. The approach routes to the bridges ran directly through the earthworks of the old fort, and these were leveled in order to provide smooth passage for trains and automobiles. By 1941, when ground was broken for work on the Pentagon, nothing remained of the fort. Today, Interstate 395 runs through the site of the fort, and Exit 9 from the interstate is at the approximate center of where Fort Runyon stood. A nearby historical marker erected by the Arlington Historical Society commemorates the fort's existence.
caption: By 1932, no trace of Fort Runyon was left on the approaches to the new 14th Street Bridge, built in 1906.
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