Great Falls Park is celebrating its 60th anniversary as a national park this year, but its history stretches back much further. Long before the waterfalls made it a picturesque hiking, picnicking, and fishing destination, it was an amusement park and a proving ground for commerce in a brand-new United States.
River of Change
Great Falls, where the Potomac River spills over jagged rocks and through the narrow Mather Gorge, has been a gathering place for centuries. Paleo-Indians lived in the area as early as 10,500 BC. Later, it was a trading place for indigenous tribes, particularly the Piscataway and Powhatan, according to the National Park Service (NPS).
In the mid-1600s, England’s King Charles II claimed the land between the Rappahannock and Potomac rivers. Thomas Lord Fairfax inherited it decades later, and in 1759, he gifted some of it to his cousin Bryan Lord Fairfax, a friend of George Washington.
Fresh off winning the Revolutionary War, Washington wanted to encourage trade by building a canal around the turbulent falls. In 1785, he chartered the Patowmack Canal Company to do just that.
“What you’re dealing with in American history at this period of time … is 13 independent states that aren’t really working very well together,” says Susan Finta, a NPS ranger from Arlington. She says Washington believed that “the Potomac River will bind the people from the interior of the nation to the Eastern Seaboard, and one of the things they have to do is get past obstacles like the Great Falls.”
Out of the effort grew the town of Matildaville. Chartered in 1790, it was the company’s headquarters and home to hundreds of workers, including enslaved people and indentured servants. It had a store, inn, grist mill, and a spring house for fresh water. “You didn’t want to fill your barrels with drinking water directly out of the Potomac,” Finta says. “They wouldn’t have done that even back then.”
The company went bankrupt in 1828 and turned its assets over to the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company, which had incorporated four years earlier to build a canal on the Maryland side of Great Falls. (It had better luck, thanks to advancements in construction.)
Some consider the Patowmack Canal Company a failure because it wasn’t profitable, but Finta disagrees. The deal Virginia and Maryland had to forge to build the canal exposed the weakness of the Articles of Confederation in managing interstate commerce. That helped lead to the Constitutional Convention in 1787, where the Constitution was written and Washington was elected president.
“What it did for American history, what it did for uniting the nation … I don’t consider it a failure,” Finta says of the company.
Nurturing Nature
Another business venture arrived in 1833, when three men established the Great Falls Manufacturing Co. with the intent to power a textile mill with water.
“The problem is one of the same problems that plagued the Patowmack Canal Company: The Potomac River is rather undependable with current,” Finta says. “Sometimes you have low water. Sometimes you have no water. Sometimes you have too much water and it floods. So, the manufacturing company also couldn’t really do something economically viable at the spot.”
Tourism blossomed in the early 1900s. An amusement park opened in 1906 with an observation tower, movie house, dance hall, and Dentzel carousel (which a flood destroyed in 1936).
Fairfax County acquired some of the land in 1952 for its first county park. The county brought in another carousel and built a playground. Those, too, fell victim to flooding, this time from Hurricane Agnes in 1972.
NPS had acquired Great Falls in 1966 and was operating it as part of the George Washington Memorial Parkway. “The National Park Service isn’t really an agency that would rebuild a playground,” Finta says. “That’s a community park experience.”
Instead, NPS now focuses on conservation and public safety within the 800-acre public park. It hosts scouting activites, daily ranger-led talks, and weekly volunteer-led bird walks. It also maintains picnic areas and a visitors center. About 800,000 people visit the park each year, according to Finta.
NPS gets help with park conservation from groups including the Potomac Conservancy, a clean water advocacy organization. It hosts park cleanups — a recent one removed 800 pounds of trash — and monitors the river water.
“[Great Falls] is really a time capsule of what happens with the river,” says Alexis Dickerson, director of community conservation at the conservancy. “We’ve seen things like increases in the salt that’s coming into the river and over Great Falls, or we’ve seen trend patterns where nitrates went up at a period of time and then came back down. It’s really a unique site.”
A report by the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin found that water temperatures and several pollutants have increased since 1940, driven largely by development near the river.
“Going to these sites is a big part of what we encourage people to do to make an affective connection,” Dickerson says. “It really is the first step in starting to notice what things are changing, what things are going well, what things need a little bit more love and attention.”
Dranesville Supervisor James Bierman grew up five minutes from the park in McLean. “My parents took me there all the time as a kid,” Bierman says. He still visits today. “I love to go check out the falls and walk along Old Carriage Road Trail,” a 1.6-mile, flat, wooded trail that used to access Matildaville, he says. “You’re just in the middle of the woods enjoying yourself. … It is just an incredible amenity and opportunity to have a park of that caliber right in the middle of our neighborhood.”
Great Falls is also a thrill-seeker’s haven. Visitors can bring their own gear to rock climb at the gorge. Ten hiking and biking trails range in difficulty from “easy stroll” to “mountain goat–inspired,” according to the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin. Plus, there are bridle paths for horseback riding (bring your own horse). Along the way, glimpses of the park’s past are visible, including remnants of Matildaville structures and stone walls hand-built by enslaved people.
For water-based adventure, bring a DC, Maryland, or Virginia fishing license to fish from the park’s shore, or launch your own whitewater-rated kayak (helmet and life vest required) to ride the Class II to Class V rapids. One prohibited activity is swimming.
“The Potomac River is very, very treacherous,” Finta says. Three people drowned at Great Falls this past summer. But with the proper precautions, the park is an “oasis,” she says.
“Come out and enjoy the views, walk through the woods — just get a release from all of our busy days and step back in time, step back in nature, and chill for a little bit,” she says. “It’s really an amazing experience.”
This story originally ran in our October 2026 issue. For more stories like this, subscribe to Northern Virginia Magazine.
