Richmond Highway

Fort Belvoir is the U.S. Army’s flagship Washington-area installation, occupying ~8,656 acres along Richmond Highway in Fairfax County between Mt. Vernon and Lorton. The site has been in continuous U.S. Army use since 1917. ^[1] Source 1 Wikipedia — Fort Belvoir Website

Origins (1917–1935)

The Army acquired the southern Belvoir Neck parcel in 1915 and established Camp A.A. Humphreys in 1917 as a training camp for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during World War I — named for Andrew A. Humphreys, the Civil War-era Army engineer and chief of staff to Major General George Meade at Gettysburg. The training camp was renamed Fort Humphreys in 1922 as it transitioned from a wartime training camp into a permanent Engineer School installation.

In 1935 the installation was renamed Fort Belvoir, in explicit recognition of the belvoir-plantation Place belvoir-plantation The c. 1741 manor house of on the southern Northern Neck proprietary tract — social anchor of the colonial Fairfax–Washington circle, where young was mentored by William Fairfax … — the c. 1741 William Fairfax Person William Fairfax b. 1691 · d. 1757 Colonial-era owner and builder of (c. 1741); cousin and Virginia agent of Thomas Fairfax, 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron, the Proprietor of the Northern Neck. President of the … manor whose archaeological ruins survived on the southwest portion of the parcel. The Belvoir name was meant to root the modern military installation in the colonial-era Fairfax–Washington social geography of the southern Northern Neck.

Cold-War expansion (1935–1988)

Through the World War II, Korean-War, and Cold-War decades, Fort Belvoir functioned as the Army’s senior Engineer-School and research-and-development installation. The U.S. Army Engineer Center moved from Belvoir to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri in 1988, redirecting Belvoir toward the federal-intelligence mission set that defines the installation today.

Post-BRAC consolidation (1988–present)

The 1988 Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) round selected 4800 Duke Street Place 4800 Duke Street 164-acre former U.S. Army installation on Duke Street, active 1942–1995. Headquartered the Defense Logistics Agency, the Defense Mapping Agency, and elements of the U.S. Army … (the Duke Street installation in western Alexandria) for closure and relocation of its tenant commands. The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) relocated its headquarters from Cameron Station to Fort Belvoir as part of the 1995 closeout — a direct cross-reference between the two installations. The 2005 BRAC round further consolidated Washington-area Army headquarters operations onto Fort Belvoir, bringing thousands of additional federal workers to the parcel.

Today Fort Belvoir hosts:

• U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) HQ - Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) HQ (relocated from Cameron Station) - Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) - U.S. Army Medical Command (MEDCOM) elements - National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) at the Belvoir North Area campus (the relocated successor to the Defense Mapping Agency that had previously been a Cameron Station tenant)
• The National Museum of the U.S. Army, the first museum dedicated to the full sweep of U.S. Army history, opened on the parcel November 11, 2020 (Veterans Day)
• More than 170 tenant commands and approximately 13,000 federal civilian and military workers ^[2] Source 2 U.S. Army — Fort Belvoir official site Website

Fort Belvoir is among the largest single federal-employment nodes in Northern Virginia and the dominant federal land-use on the southern Richmond Highway corridor between Alexandria and the Mason Neck peninsula.