Laurel Grove Colored School and Church

Franconia is a census-designated place (CDP) in Fairfax County, Virginia, United States. The population was 18,245 at the 2010 census, down from 31,907 in 2000 due to the splitting off of part of it to form the Kingstowne CDP. Located just southwest of Alexandria, Franconia has existed as a community since the 1870s, when a station by that name opened on the RF&P Railroad; however, like most of the surrounding area, it only began to develop into its present, suburban form in the 1950s. The CDP extends south to just north of the border of Fort Belvoir, encompassing neighborhoods such as Manchester Lakes and Windsor Estates. Street addresses have Alexandria ZIP Codes 22310 and 22315. It is near the Springfield Mall shopping area and the Franconia–Springfield Washington Metro station.

Franconia–Springfield is a Washington Metro rapid transit station and Virginia Railway Express commuter rail station located in Springfield, Virginia, United States. The station is the southwestern terminus of the Metro Blue Line and an intermediate station on the VRE Fredericksburg Line. It is also a major bus terminal for Fairfax Connector buses, plus other local and intercity bus routes. The station has one island-platform serving the two Metro tracks, plus two side platforms serving the RF&P Subdivision on which the Fredericksburg Line runs. Located in a suburban area near I-95, the station is primarily used by commuters from more distant suburbs. Its parking garage is the largest on the Metro system, with 5,069 spaces. With 6,970 average daily riders by a May 2016 count, Franconia–Springfield was the 8th-most-used Metro station in Virginia.The VRE stop opened in 1995, followed by the Metro station on June 29, 1997. From 2003 to 2010, the station was also served by Amtrak Northeast Regional intercity rail trains.

Virginia's 8th congressional district is a United States congressional district in the Commonwealth of Virginia. It comprises all of Arlington County, portions of Fairfax County and all of the independent cities of Alexandria and Falls Church. The residents of the 8th district are currently represented by Democratic Congressman Don Beyer, elected in November 2014. With a Cook Partisan Voting Index of D+27, it is the most Democratic district in Virginia, and one of the most Democratic white-majority districts in the South. Being next to Washington D.C., the district is heavily dependent upon Federal government employment – for instance it has the highest Pentagon spending of any congressional district in the United States.

John R. Lewis High School is a public high school in Springfield, Virginia. It is a part of Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) and opened in 1958. The school was originally named Robert E. Lee High School (Lee High School) after Robert E. Lee, the American and Confederate general, but starting at the beginning of the 2020–2021 school year it was renamed John R. Lewis High School after John Lewis, the recently deceased politician and civil rights leader. The school name changes began shortly after the vote was announced. Lewis High School athletic teams are known as the Lancers.

Kingstowne is a census-designated place (CDP) in Fairfax County, Virginia, United States. It is a planned community amid the Washington, D.C. suburbs of Springfield, Alexandria, and Franconia, Virginia, and is centered on the intersection of South Van Dorn Street and Kingstowne Boulevard. The population as of the 2010 census was 15,556.Kingstowne has a town center containing office and retail businesses. The entire community comprises numerous subdivisions containing apartments, condominiums, single-family homes, and townhomes. It began construction in the 1980s through the Halle Companies and is still expanding today in the town center with commercial and office space and in the subdivisions with more single-family homes. Kingstowne has its own ZIP code, 22315, a substation of the Alexandria U.S. Post Office.

Springfield Town Center is an enclosed shopping center located in the Springfield census-designated place (CDP) of unincorporated Fairfax County, Virginia. It opened in 1973 as Springfield Mall, an enclosed shopping mall, which closed on June 30, 2012 as part of a multimillion-dollar redevelopment plan to turn it into a multifaceted "Town Center"-style shopping center with a main indoor area similar to the nearby Tysons Corner Center and Dulles Town Center, while transforming the exterior into a pedestrian friendly environment with restaurants with cafe style outdoor seating and entrances. It is located at the intersection of Interstate 95 and Franconia Road (Route 644), which is part of the Springfield Interchange, 1/4 mile north of Franconia-Springfield Parkway (State Route 289) and the Franconia-Springfield Metro station. The mall reopened on October 17, 2014 following its two-year renovation. Original anchors were Lansburgh's (later E.J. Korvette), Garfinckel's (later Sports Authority), J.C. Penney, and Montgomery Ward (later Target). Macy's was added in 1991. The mall was notable for having one of the top two performing locations of the Time Out chain of amusement arcades, which featured in its mall rat culture during the 1980s golden age of arcades.Prince Charles and Princess Diana visited the JCPenney store at the mall on November 11, 1985, during their famous American tour. However, the mall's fortunes declined in the 1990s and 2000s. Its DMV office was where Hani Hanjour and Khalid al-Mihdhar, two of the hijackers in the September 11 attacks, illegally obtained state identification. The mall also experienced two gang-related stabbings in 2005, two fatal shootings, one in December 2007 and one in June 2022 and a fatal carjacking in September 2008.One of the largest malls in Northern Virginia, it was owned and operated by Vornado Realty Trust. In 2005, Vornado purchased an option valued at $36 million to buy the mall from the previous owners Franconia Two LP. In early 2006, Vornado purchased the mall for an additional $80 million along with plans to redevelop.In March 2012, Vornado announced plans to close all but the three anchor stores starting on July 1, ahead of the two-year renovation and redevelopment, which is part of a decade-long plan intended to turn the Mall and its surrounding area into the new Springfield Town Center. Springfield Town Center re-opened on October 17, 2014.In March 2014, Vornado announced plans to sell Springfield Town Center to Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust (PREIT) for $465 million, with the deal slated to close in March 2015. In late 2015, Dave and Buster's, a popular family owned entertainment and sports bar opened. In February 2022, PREIT announced that the property would open a LEGO Discovery Center in 2023. The 32,000 square foot indoor attraction will be co-created by Merlin & the LEGO Group and will be located at the main entrance to the property.

Hayfield Secondary School is a secondary school (grades 7–12) in the Fairfax County Public Schools system of Virginia. It opened in 1968 and graduated its first senior class in 1971.

Hayfield is a census-designated place (CDP) in Fairfax County, Virginia, United States. The population as of the 2010 census was 3,909.It is located in southeastern Fairfax County, bordered by Kingstowne to the northwest, Rose Hill to the north, Groveton to the east, and Fort Belvoir to the south. The main road through Hayfield is Telegraph Road, which leads northeast 5 miles (8 km) into Alexandria and southwest 4 miles (6 km) to U.S. Route 1 at Pohick. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the Hayfield CDP has a total area of 1.4 square miles (3.6 km2), of which 1.3 square miles (3.3 km2) is land and 0.1 square miles (0.3 km2), or 8.14%, is water. About a fifth of the area (199.9 acres (0.3 sq mi; 0.8 km2)) is taken up by the United States Coast Guard Navigation Center.

The Geospatial Research Laboratory is a component of the Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), a US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) laboratory organization whose mission is to "Provide science, technology, and expertise in engineering and environmental sciences in support of our Armed Forces and the Nation to make the world safer and better." The laboratory is colocated with the Army Geospatial Center in the Humphreys Engineer Center adjacent to Fort Belvoir. The headquarters is located in Vicksburg, Mississippi, on the site of an antecedent organization, the Waterways Experiment Station. GRL conducts geospatial research, development, technology and evaluation of current and emerging geospatial technologies that will help characterize and measure phenomena within the physical (terrain) and social (cultural) environments encountered by the Army. GRL research areas and capabilities include terrain analysis and reasoning; passive and active spectral signature analysis; fluorescence; photogrammetry; terrain visualization; precision surveying and mapping; image analysis; data management; geographic information systems; data/image fusion; and spatio-temporal reasoning and numerical analysis.

Belvale is an historic house in present-day Fairfax County, Virginia built between 1763 and 1766 by George Johnston (1700-1766), member of the Virginia Assembly 1758-1766, friend of Patrick Henry, and legal advisor to George Washington, who was a frequent visitor to the home. The home's original lands, described as lying on "Doeg's Run", were first granted on July 6, 1698 to Richard Carpenter, who bequeathed them in 1750 to his wife Mary and daughter Ann, who sold the property to Johnston in 1763. Belvale is sometimes called "Belle Vale Manor" in historical records. Belvale was Johnston's country seat; his town home was in the city of Alexandria.The grounds of Belvale are reputed to harbor a ghost of a young man killed in a duel who was buried under a cedar tree, reputedly with Washington's assistance in digging the grave and planting the cedar tree. The Historic American Buildings Survey documentation of the house, which is a private residence, states that a cemetery which may have been a slave burial ground is on the property, though it is no longer extant.

Thomas Alva Edison High School is one of twenty-five high schools in Fairfax County, Virginia, United States. Thomas Edison is an International Baccalaureate school. Edison High School has traditionally been a relatively small public high school in terms of the size of its student population. It can has a culturally and ethnically diverse student body. Its student body and graduating classes in the mid- and late 1990s and early 2000s included students of Australia, Korean, Eritrean, Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai, Cambodian, Polish, Italian, Mexican, Colombian, Ghanaian, Cameroonian, and Pakistani ancestry or nationality. The diverse religious backgrounds of the students ranged from Christian and Mormon to Muslim, Jewish, and Buddhist. The school's diversity clearly reflected the massive influx of immigrants to the Northern Virginia region generally. In the 1990s, the school's debate and forensics teams gained widespread and even national recognition for their achievements in those fields. Its academic team has appeared on the local television quizbowl game show "It's Academic", which is broadcast by the local Washington, DC NBC affiliate station, WRC-TV. Edison's graduates have typically moved on to attend local and state colleges and universities, such as the University of Virginia, George Mason University, and Northern Virginia Community College. Prominent graduates of the school have included Jan Smith, a local television news reporter and wife of nationally renowned TV journalist Sam Donaldson, and Eric Barton, a professional American football player with the National Football League. In both 1996 and 1997 Edison's theater club won second place and then first place and the regional level of the VHSL one-act play festival. Edison's graduates have typically moved on to attend local and state colleges and universities, such as Virginia Tech, the University of Virginia, George Mason University, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Northern Virginia Community College.

The Henry G. Shirley Memorial Highway, often shortened to Shirley Highway, consists of a 17.3-mile (27.8 km) portion of Interstates 95 and 395 in the U.S. Commonwealth of Virginia. Shirley Highway was the first limited-access freeway in Virginia. Begun in 1941, the road was completed from U.S. Route 1 in Colchester, Virginia, just north of Woodbridge, to the 14th Street Bridge over the Potomac River between Virginia and Washington, D.C. in 1952.