Maria Hegstad, The Examiner
2007-06-20 07:00:00.0
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Alexandria -

The latest plans for Alexandria’s new athletic fields between Duke Street and the railroad tracks include solar panels and other green technology for its restrooms and pavilions.

The designs presented last week are the most recent since the city purchased the narrow, nearly 14-acre strip of land bounded by Telegraph Road, Duke Street, Witter Drive and the railroad tracks last year for about $12 million.

The project, including two new soccer fields, a baseball field, parking lot, restrooms, pavilions and half-mile walking path, is funded by the city’s 1999 settlement with state and federal transportation departments over the Woodrow Wilson Bridge Project.

Design and construction is budgeted at about $11 million.

City staff hopes to begin construction by spring 2009, with the fields ready for use in 2010, city engineer Emily Baker said.

The fields have been designed so they won’t cover an 18th-century family cemetery at the eastern end of the property.

About 12 members of the Bloxham family are buried there, city preservation archaeologist Fran Bromberg said.

The cemetery’s boundaries were discovered after a contractor accidentally went through one of the graves with a backhoe in the 1980s, city archeologist Pam Cressey said.

Since then, the body of the grave’s occupant, William Whaley, has traveled to the Smithsonian, where skeletal study suggests he was a wagon or coach driver, Cressey said.

Nearby, archaeologists found prehistoric Native American materials, as well.

Those and the Bloxham graves will be marked in the new park.

They will be part of an open space between the fields where visitors can picnic, Cressey said.

mhegstad@dcexaminer.com