The Trail Vote Closed Sunday Night. In Waynewood, the Real Prize Is What Didn't Change.

Somewhere along the stretch of the Mount Vernon Trail that runs behind Waynewood's river-side lots, someone walked a dog Sunday evening and pulled out a phone to vote for a hiking path. Not registering for anything, not signing a petition about zoning. Just tapping a link for a trail they use to get to work, or to the grocery store, or nowhere in particular.

That link closed at 11:59 p.m. Sunday, August 16. It was the deadline for the Rails to Trails Conservancy's 2026 Hall of Fame vote, and the Mount Vernon Trail was one of three finalists. The other two were an Ohio towpath that runs 92 miles from Cleveland to New Philadelphia and a 10-mile battlefield trail in Brownsville, Texas. Only one gets inducted. The conservancy hasn't announced a winner yet.

Whichever way that goes, the case for the Mount Vernon Trail was never really about scenery. It was about who kept showing up. And two miles inland, along Fort Hunt Road, the same instinct is why a hardware store that changed owners in 2021 still feels exactly like it did in 1979.

A National Vote About a Local Habit

The Mount Vernon Trail runs 18.5 miles along the Potomac, from Theodore Roosevelt Island in Arlington down to George Washington's Mount Vernon estate, cutting through Old Town on the way. Friends of the Mount Vernon Trail, the nonprofit that put the nomination forward, says the trail serves 1.4 million people a year. That is not a tourist number. That is a number built out of the same people crossing the same footbridge on the same commute, week after week.

The Rails to Trails Conservancy judges Hall of Fame nominees on scenic value, use, amenities, historical significance, accessibility, management, and community benefit. On paper, the Ohio towpath is longer and the Texas trail has a more dramatic historical footnote. What the Mount Vernon Trail has is an origin story that reads less like infrastructure and more like a neighborhood decision that never got reversed.

Judd Isbell, president of Friends of the Mount Vernon Trail, put it plainly when the nomination went public:

"The trail exists because Ellen Pickering and Barbara Lynch rallied community support and the volunteers that built the first segment of trail by hand in 1971."

Pickering and Lynch didn't wait for a agency to fund the first 4.5-mile stretch. Volunteers built it themselves, and the National Park Service backed the idea once it existed. Friends of the Mount Vernon Trail formed in 2018 to keep that same pattern going, and it has not been ceremonial. In January, the National Park Service installed 14 freeze-resistant water fountains along the route. In December, volunteers hauled roughly 500 pounds of debris out of the corridor during a cleanup event the group calls the Mega Trash Bash. In March, the trail picked up a Trail of the Year recognition for its renovation work, months before the Hall of Fame nomination even surfaced.

None of that is glamorous. It is also exactly why the trail is a finalist instead of an also-ran. The award isn't for the prettiest ribbon of asphalt on the Potomac. It's for the version of stewardship that shows up with trash bags in December and doesn't stop.

Two Miles Inland, the Same Bet

Hollin Hall Shopping Center sits on Fort Hunt Road, the commercial strip Waynewood residents actually use, as opposed to the one they photograph. It has a Safeway, a gas station, a barbershop, and a run of small storefronts that have outlasted several retail cycles without becoming a redevelopment story. The most telling one is Village Hardware.

Larry Gray opened Village Hardware in 1979 after working construction with his father. Over four decades, his wife Janet kept the books, all three sons and a daughter worked the counter, and the store became the kind of place where staff would fabricate a missing screw rather than tell a customer to try somewhere else. In 2021, after 42 years, the Grays retired and sold the business. That is usually where a neighborhood story like this turns into a strip-mall renovation and a new name. It didn't. The new general manager, Troy Richard, told Alexandria Living Magazine the changes would be minimal, and the store's basement Weber Room, the space packed with grills, smokers, cast iron, and enough barbecue rub to outfit every backyard on the block, stayed exactly where it was. Richard added a loyalty program on top of the existing service, not instead of it.

In May 2025, Village Hardware partnered with the Alexandria Rotary Club to donate tools and equipment for a new nonprofit program teaching construction skills to teenagers ages 12 to 17. A hardware store that could have simply become inventory under new ownership instead became the tool supplier for the next generation of tradespeople in its own neighborhood.

The rest of the center follows the same pattern:

• Hollin Hall Variety Store, more than five decades into selling toys, greeting cards, and the household items a Target aisle can't replace with the same clerk who remembers your kids' birthdays.
• River Bend Bistro, open since 2013 in the space that used to be Village Wharf, still run by the same couple who opened it.
• Hollin Hall Barbershop, whose longtime manager Art Blakey has described pulling regulars from as far as Del Ray and Springfield, not because the shop reinvented itself, but because it never had to.

What River Bend Bistro Proves by Still Being There

River Bend Bistro is worth a longer look because it is the newest thing in Hollin Hall and it is still 13 years old. Bill and Caroline Ross opened it in the fall of 2013, after Caroline, a chef who grew up in the area and had spent nine years managing Rick's Wine and Gourmet, worked her way through kitchens at La Bergerie in Old Town, Cafe Milano in Georgetown, and Stella's on Duke Street. The build-out took longer than she expected. Permits alone ran from November to the following April.

What she opened wasn't a trend restaurant chasing an Old Town crowd. It was a 74-seat bistro built for the people already living within walking distance, with crab cakes, rockfish, and a Cotswold mac and cheese that regulars still order on repeat. Bill Ross also runs a separate business, National River Tour Co., taking people out on the same river the trail runs alongside. Between the two of them, the Ross family's businesses touch both halves of this piece: the water people vote to protect and the shopping center where they eat afterward.

Alexandria Restaurant Week runs this year from August 14 through August 23, with full-service restaurants across the city offering prix-fixe dinners at $35, $45, or $55. It's a citywide promotion, and it pulls attention toward Old Town more than Fort Hunt. But River Bend Bistro doesn't need a ten-day event to justify a reservation. It has been doing the same thing, well, since before Restaurant Week existed in its current form.

The Vote Was Never Really About the Trail

Down at Sherwood Regional Library, the Friends of Sherwood group runs a book sale on the first Saturday of every month, rain or shine, the same way it has for years. Nobody covers that in a press release. It's just what happens on the first Saturday, the same way the Weber Room is just what's in the Village Hardware basement, and the trail cleanup crew is just who shows up in December.

That is the pattern this piece is actually about. The Hall of Fame vote was never a referendum on which trail has the best view of the Potomac. It was a referendum on which trail has the deepest bench of people willing to keep maintaining what already exists. Waynewood's answer to that question was already sitting two miles away on Fort Hunt Road, in a hardware store that a new owner deliberately chose not to improve.

The Seward Group has spent years working this stretch of Fort Hunt Road and the river it runs beside, and the pattern holds true every time we look closely at it: the places that last here aren't the ones that reinvented themselves. They're the ones that decided what mattered and refused to let it slide. If you're curious what else in this corner of Alexandria has stayed the same on purpose, or what's actually changed when it counts, The Seward Group is happy to walk through it over a cup of coffee, no pitch required.