African-Americans
and Firefighting
in Arlington, Virginia
To understand the story of African-Americans and firefighting in Arlington, it’s important to first know the history of African-Americans in the County during the Reconstruction and Industrial eras. It begins as far as back as May 1862. This was eight months before President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863, when slaves in the District of Columbia were freed by an act of Congress. Fugitive slaves fleeing from the South soon flooded into Washington, DC, many of them moving into camps set up by the federal government. When smallpox swept through the overcrowded sites, however, Lt. Col. Elias M. Greene proposed that some of the freed men could farm nearby land, and recommended the “pure country air” south of the Potomac in Arlington County (then Alexandria County). With this recommendation, the government established Freedman’s Village (some say by an act of payback) on a tract of land seized by the Union on the estate of General Robert E. Lee’s Arlington House, where today Arlington National Cemetery is located.
The government promotion of Freedman’s Village caught the eye of real estate developers, and through the 1890s began touting land in what is now Arlington County, luring Washington residents with promises of “quiet and repose from the stir and bustle and noise” of the city. Amid mounting public pressure, in 1900, Congress offered the people of Freedman’s Village $75,000 (approximately $2.5 million in 2021). This financial settlement was divided among the residents, and the village was torn down. In the early 1900s, Arlington was approximately 38 percent Black compared to today's Black population of 8.5 percent. When the government disbanded the village, many of these 38 percent of residents formed Arlington’s four historically African-American neighborhoods, including Green Valley (also known as Nauck), Johnson’s Hill (now Arlington View), and Butler Holmes (now Penrose) in the areas around Columbia Pike, and High View Park-Hall’s Hill.