Hooff’s Run Bridge
Jamieson
There’s not much info on the Hooff family. Lawrence was a pallbearer at the funeral for George Washington.
The Office of Historic Alexandria has this write-up on the bridge.
The Orange and Alexandria Railroad Hooff's Run Bridge is a round-arch bridge constructed in 1856 across Hooff's Run at Wolfe Street extended. It is the oldest extant bridge in Alexandria and a major remnant of Alexandria's early railroad history. It was originally built by the Orange & Alexandria Railroad, the first railroad to serve Alexandria and Northern Virginia.
The O&ARR played a substantial role in enhancing Alexandria's significance as a port city in the mid-nineteenth century. The bridge carried a single track across Hooff's Run, the first of many waterways crossed by the Orange & Alexandria line as it stretched from Henry and Wolfe Streets in Alexandria, and west to Manassas Junction, Gordonsville, and eventually Lynchburg, Virginia.
The Hooff's Run bridge was active during the Civil War, when the O&ARR was taken over by the U.S. Military Railroads to provide rail access and a supply route west and south into the war zone. Except for the surviving Wilkes Street railroad tunnel, the bridge is the only relic remaining in Alexandria of the O&ARR.
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