page_title: Abingdon (plantation)
section_title: Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority
hierarchical_section_title: Abingdon (plantation) / History / Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority
caption_attribution_description: English: Aerial photo of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington County, Virginia, United States.
context_page_description: Abingdon was an 18th- and 19th-century plantation that the prominent Alexander, Custis, Stuart, and Hunter families owned. The plantation's site is now located in Arlington County in the U.S. state of Virginia.
  Abingdon is known as the birthplace of Eleanor "Nelly" Parke Custis Lewis, a granddaughter of Martha Washington and a step-granddaughter of United States President George Washington. Published accounts have credited Abingdon as being the home to the progenitor of all weeping willows living in the United States. Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, which occupies part of Abingdon's grounds, contains indoor and outdoor displays that commemorate the plantation's history.
context_section_description: The Federal Aviation Administration of the United States Department of Transportation and other federal agencies owned and operated Washington National Airport until 1987. In that year, the airport was transferred to the newly formed Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority under a 50-year lease that the Metropolitan Washington Airports Act of 1986 (Title VI of Public Laws 99-500 and 99-591) had authorized. As a result, the Airports Authority obtained control of Abingdon's property, while the Federal government held title to the airport's lease.
  Two years later, in 1989, the Airports Authority revealed that it was planning to replace the Abingdon ruins with a new parking garage. To comply with the provisions of Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the Authority commissioned a series of studies that described the history of Abingdon and the archaeological features of the Abingdon site and its surroundings. 
  
  The final report of the series, issued in 1991, summarized the studies and examined several alternative treatments of the site. The report stated:
   ... the Virginia Department of Historic Resources (State historic preservation office) concluded that there was insufficient evidence to link the existing "ruins" with any of the important historic individuals or families reported to have lived on the property.  At the present time, there is no concrete evidence on the construction date or history of occupation of the structure represented by the existing ruins.
  
  The 1991 report concluded with a recommendation from the Authority's engineering division that included:
  ..... the undertaking of an appropriate archaeological data recovery program at the site and the construction of a "museum quality" interpretive exhibit to be located within the terminal complex.  Once data recovery was performed, parking structure construction would follow.  The basis for this recommendation was the intention to avoid an adverse effect to the Abingdon Site (through comprehensive archaeological data recovery and public interpretation program) while at the same time providing the desired amount of parking in the near-terminal area.
  The Airports Authority's actions ignited a public preservation effort that culminated in 1992 with legislation that the Virginia General Assembly enacted and that Governor L. Douglas Wilder approved. The legislation required the Airports Authority to "take all steps necessary to insure the preservation in place, the study, and the interpretation to the public" of the Abingdon ruins during a one-year period that followed the law's enactment. During that period, James Wilding, the general manager of the Airports Authority, reported to the Authority's planning committee that multiple options had been identified that would provide adequate parking without having to excavate the Abingdon site.
  In 1994, the Airports Authority entered into a Memorandum of Agreement with Virginia and federal officials that assured, among other things, that the resources and historic setting of the site would be protected and that disturbance of the site's archaeological deposits would be avoided during the airport's redevelopment, which was then proceeding. The Authority also issued a March 1994 "Preservation Plan" that summarized the measures that the Authority would take to preserve, repair and protect significant features of the site, while removing other features that the Authority did not consider to be of historical significance.
  In 1998, an Airports Authority contractor conducted an archaeological investigation of the Abingdon site, preserved and repaired some of site's remnants and removed others.  The Authority relocated some of the artifacts that the contractor had found at the site to a display in a new exhibit hall that the Authority constructed in the airport's original 1941 terminal (Terminal A). A panel in the exhibit hall later reported that archaeologists had recovered over 37,000 artifacts from the Abingdon site since 1988.
  The contractor preserved parts of the brick foundations of the Abingdon ho
caption: United States Geological SurveyRonald Reagan Washington National Airport (2002)
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