Efforts behind the renaming of Arlington’s 5.2-mile swath of U.S. Route 29 have been commemorated for posterity.
Using a county-government mini-grant, the Langston Boulevard Alliance worked with researcher Bennett King, a graduate student at Goucher College, on an oral-history project focused on the name change from Lee Highway to Langston Boulevard.
Eight individuals were interviewed, resulting in seven hours of video and a 50-page historical record. The result is available on the alliance’s Website and has been donated to the Arlington library system’s Center for Local History.
Using authority from Richmond bestowed during the brief window of Democratic legislative monopoly of state government, Arlington County Board members in July 2021 voted to rename the highway. Their action removed Gen. Robert E. Lee and replaced him with John M. Langston, a Republican who represented downstate Virginia in Congress in the post-Civil-War period.
Arlington’s stretch of U.S. Route 29 represents a slice of the highway’s 248-mile journey in Virginia from the Key Bridge south to Danville. The Virginia portion, in turn, is part of the 1,043-mile span running from Ellicott City, Md., to Pensacola, Fla.
The process in Arlington of replacing Lee with Langston, though not always smooth, proved less contentious than the effort over recent years to “reimagine” the Langston Boulevard corridor as a more urban environment. That planning effort formally was unveiled in mid-2023. (All information, including dates of events and the plan in its entirety, can be found at bit.ly/3PHHmxl.)
Today, more than 70 percent of the snake-like study area in Arlington consists of low-intensity residential development. How much of that will remain, and in what form, remain open questions as the pace of redevelopment begins to intensify.