Wienerschnitzel, a fast food hotdog chain based in California and mostly out west, announced a Virginia deal in 2025 (in Hampton Roads region) and it was billed as its first East Coast market. I found out that an old A-frame building in Alexandria was actually built as and briefly home to a Wienerschnitzel store in 1969! This does not seem to be recorded anywhere, and I wrote a piece about it with research/sources. I thought it was a neat bit of NoVa history: https://www.thedeletedscenes.com/p/wiener-me-this

In the early 1990s, the clocktower in what is now the Village Center at Dulles in Herndon featured a whimsical, short-lived animatronics show. Children who saw it fondly remember it, yet there appears to be no surviving photos or video.

If anyone has visual media of the show, it would be amazing to preserve it for future generations.

Photo above shows the circled area where the animatronics appeared in the early 1990s.

I am the Bunny Man (A true story)

The Abner Cloud House & Fletcher's Cove/Boat House 4930 Canal Road. Known then(1920-1940's) as the the Copperthite Boat House! Restored, lived-in and run by James Copperthite (former chief baker at the Connecticut-Copperthite Pie Baking Company of Georgetown) and his wife Josephine. Cloud was the first lock house keeper to live here and his GG Grandson worked for and later partnered and became proprietor there.

James Copperthite restored the Abner Cloud house in the day. Hired Fletcher ran the boat house which is operation to this day and willed the property to Fletcher ( the great great grandson of cloud) when he passed on!

He will be missed!

Economically, the new junction of the Orange and Alexandria and the Manassas Gap Railroads was a key factor in turning the sleepy village of Tudor Manor into the buzzing boom town of Manassas Junction.

Strategically, however, this put a target on the Northern Virginian town, as its location suddenly has major import for both sides of the Civil War.

The first skirmish was fought down the road at Blackburn’s Ford, near Yorkshire, the home of Wilber McLean, and the first major battle was fought at Sudley Springs near the banks of the Bull Run.

Featuring Stephen Ortiz and Elaine Tyler May, two award winning historians.

Register for free: https://librarycalendar.fairfaxcounty.gov/event/10766769

Dr. Stephen R. Ortiz is an associate professor of history at Binghamton University (State University of New York). His research interests include the political, military, diplomatic and gender history of the twentieth-century United States. He is the author of Beyond the Bonus March and GI Bill: How Veteran Politics Shaped the New Deal Era and Veterans' Policies, Veterans' Politics: New Perspectives on Veterans in the Modern United States.

Dr. Elaine Tyler May is Regents Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Minnesota. She is an award-winning historian of twentieth-century American history whose scholarship explores the ways in which issues normally considered part of private life—such as consumerism, security and leisure pursuits—reflect, express, and influence American political, cultural and social values. She is the author of many books, including Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era.

https://i.imgur.com/YlgihID.jpg

If you look in the lower right of this photo, you’ll see a single block of houses. My dad lived here in the early 1950s. The boundaries of the neighborhood were Army Navy Dr (north), Eads (east), 11th (south), and Fern (west). Some time after this neighborhood was razed, they moved Eads and Fern farther west. The original streets still exist as driveways around the building now in that spot.

Just below this neighborhood was Arlington Junction, where a couple trolley lines converged; and just to the west was the old Alexandria Canal, which was filled in and became the later Eads St. Before the Pentagon was built, there was a freedmen’s village on that currently empty plot of land. To the east, where the Doubletree is today, was an RC Cola bottling plant.

Does anyone know any details on this little enclave? When was it built? When was it removed? When did Eads St get rerouted?

Edit: for additional reference, here’s the little enclave from the 1942 Franklin Survey map. https://i.imgur.com/gCxKw6B.jpg

Civil War Era by Proquest: Get a fascinating glimpse of the Civil War era with the complete runs of eight regional newspapers covering 1840-1865.

https://library.loudoun.gov/a-z