On This Date in Nativity History
13 June 1959
Aerial photographs show that the land Fr. Frank Ready bought for Nativity’s new church was occupied by a working farm until sometime in the early 1950s. Yet, by 1974 the land was abandoned and had not been used for farming for many years. What happened to the land in the interim?
After World War II, the Civil Aeronautics Administration appointed a commission to study possible sites for a second Washington-area airport, and the area around Burke was selected in 1951. The government then began to buy up land in the Burke area on which the airport would be built. The people of Burke lobbied against the choice, and in 1958 President Dwight Eisenhower recommended that the new airport, now known as Dulles International, be built near Chantilly. The defeat of the proposed Burke airport left untouched the land on which the parish would eventually be established. When the Federal government decided to shift the airport to the Chantilly area, it had to divest itself of the large tracts of land it had acquired—some in Burke would say “confiscated”—on which the Burke airport would have been built. About 900 acres of the land were given to the Fairfax County Park Authority and became Burke Lake Park. Another 600 acres were sold to a land developer and eventually ended up as Burke Centre. The remaining land was sold at auction in June 1959, including the specific parcel of land on which Nativity’s church and school would be built.
This flyer announcing the sale of government land at public auction on June 13, 1959, tells us what happened to the property. The map shows that the parcel that would someday be the site of Nativity Church and School (red arrow) was among those that had been bought by the government for the airport site, and would be auctioned off to private owners. The parcel may have passed through several more hands before 1974, but it was never used for farming again. Instead, it was simply held by land speculators awaiting the day when it could be sold for a higher price.
