Matt Chenet for Visit Alexandria
Christ Church in Alexandria
You do not need a guide, a ticket or a reservation to walk through two and a half centuries of Alexandria. You need comfortable shoes and about three hours — or ninety minutes if you skip the interiors and just walk.
This route runs roughly two miles as a loop, starting and ending near the river. Nothing here is more than a few blocks off King Street. Take it in order or pick it apart.
Start: Ramsay House, 221 King St.
The city's visitor center occupies the reconstructed home of William Ramsay, one of Alexandria's founding trustees. Start here for one practical reason: free restrooms, current hours for everything else on this list and staff who will tell you what is closed today before you walk eight blocks to find out.
Carlyle House, 121 N. Fairfax St.
Built in 1753 by Scottish merchant John Carlyle, and the oldest thing on this walk by a comfortable margin. In 1755 General Edward Braddock convened five colonial governors in this house to discuss funding the war against the French — a meeting that produced the tax proposals that curdled, over the next twenty years, into revolution. The garden behind it is open and pleasant even if you skip the tour.
Gadsby's Tavern Museum, 134 N. Royal St.
Two buildings, a 1785 tavern and a 1792 hotel. George Washington attended the Birthnight Ball here. So did Jefferson, Adams, Madison and Monroe. The ballroom upstairs is the reason to go in — it is the most convincing eighteenth-century room in the city.
Market Square, 301 King St.
It's under construction now, but you can take a peek. Alexandrians will tell you this is the oldest continuously operating market square in the country, and while that claim gets contested, the market has genuinely run here since the 1750s. Saturday mornings it still does, from 7 a.m. On any other day it is a plaza with a fountain and a good view up King Street.
Stabler-Leadbeater Apothecary Museum, 105–107 S. Fairfax St.
The single strangest survival in Old Town. The shop closed in 1933 and simply stopped — the shelves, the bottles, the ledgers, the mortars all left in place. Martha Washington's order for castor oil is in the records. It reopened as a museum with the original stock essentially untouched.
Captain's Row and Gentry Row
Walk the 100 block of Prince Street for Captain's Row — the cobblestones are original, laid by Hessian prisoners according to local tradition, and brutal in heels. The 200 block is Gentry Row, where the merchant class built when they were ready to be seen. Two blocks, no admission, arguably the most photographed stretch in the city.
Old Presbyterian Meeting House, 323 S. Fairfax St.
Congregation founded 1772. Washington's funeral sermons were preached here in December 1799. In the churchyard sits the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier of the American Revolution — a monument most visitors to Alexandria never learn exists.
Turn back north: Christ Church, 118 N. Washington St.
Completed 1773. Washington bought pew 60; Robert E. Lee worshipped here as a boy. The churchyard is the oldest in the city still in use.
Freedom House Museum, 1315 Duke St.
The hardest and most necessary stop on this walk. This building housed the offices of Franklin and Armfield, the largest domestic slave-trading firm in the United States, which moved thousands of enslaved people from Alexandria to the Deep South. The city now operates it as a museum. Any honest tour of Old Town goes here, and it is a short walk up Duke from the King Street corridor.
Alexandria Black History Museum, 902 Wythe St.
In the Parker-Gray neighborhood, housed in the 1940 Robert Robinson Library — built as a segregated library for Black Alexandrians after a 1939 sit-in at the whites-only Alexandria Library. The sit-in is one of the earliest documented in the country and most people have never heard of it.
Finish: Torpedo Factory Art Center, 105 N. Union St.
Built in 1918 to manufacture torpedo shells, converted to studios in 1974, and now home to working artists across three floors. The Alexandria Archaeology Museum is on the top floor. Walk out the river side and you are on the waterfront.
