501
South Union Street

The rising ground at the south end of Old Town between South Union Street and the Potomac shoreline takes its name from the wind-driven grain mill that stood here in the late eighteenth century. Records associate the mill with the Alexandria merchant Robert Townshend Hooe and date its construction to about 1791; the mill served the wharves and warehouses of the south harbor district and was a prominent landmark visible from the river. The structure was gone by the early nineteenth century, but the name remained attached to the hill.

“Hayti” and the African American Civil War-era neighborhood

Through the antebellum decades and into the Civil War, the south end of the city — including the hill and the streets that fed it on Wolfe, Wilkes, and Gibbon — became one of the principal areas of free Black settlement in Alexandria, known locally as “Hayti” for the example set by the Haitian republic. Federal occupation of Alexandria from May 24, 1861 forward brought thousands of self-emancipated and recently freed people into and around the existing Hayti community; the African American Heritage Trail marker that stands at this corner today interprets that wartime concentration and its postwar afterlife 1001 South Washington Street Place 1001 South Washington Street Burial ground established in 1864 by the Union military government on the southern edge of Federally-occupied Alexandria for self-emancipated Black people — "contrabands" in … a few blocks south at 1001 South Washington was part of the same African American Civil War-era infrastructure of the city’s south end.

The park

The hill was opened as a public park in the twentieth century. The park today is an open landscape: a broad grass meadow sloping gently toward the Potomac; a playground, picnic facilities, and basketball and volleyball courts along the east side; an unfenced dog area; a walking trail through the wooded perimeter; and a waterfront edge that connects to the 1 Wilkes Street Place 1 Wilkes Street The 1843 stone tide lock at the southern terminus of the Alexandria Canal, which connected the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal at Georgetown with the Alexandria waterfront via a seven-mile … immediately to the north. The park is open dawn to dusk (sunrise to sunset) per the City of Alexandria’s parks office ^[1] Source 1 City of Alexandria, "Windmill Hill Park" parks page Government record .

Two Alexandria Heritage Trail markers stand at the west-side entrance on South Union Street — the Windmill Hill marker (city Heritage Trail series) and the African American Neighborhoods in the Civil War marker (African American Heritage Trail series).

The 2003 plan and the shoreline restoration

In 2003 the Alexandria City Council adopted a long-range Windmill Hill Park plan that, among other improvements, called for replacing the existing bulkhead along the Potomac with a natural shoreline. The bulkhead replacement — a “living shoreline” of graded slopes, stone sills, and tidal marsh plantings rather than the hardened vertical seawall it superseded — has been carried out in phases since, restoring a stretch of riverfront edge to a more ecologically functional condition ^[1] Source 1 City of Alexandria, "Windmill Hill Park" parks page Government record .