Walk into the Virginia Hills Swim Club's own website today and you'll find the pool described as sitting in the shadow of Lee District Park. Pull up a current MLS listing for a house on Virginia Hills Avenue and the agent remarks will tell you the same thing: this home borders Lee District Park. Ask a longtime neighbor for directions to the splash pad and you'll get the same three words.
None of it is true anymore. Fairfax County renamed the park in December 2022. The sign came down that winter. And nearly four years later, half the internet, including some of the businesses sitting inside the neighborhood, hasn't caught up.
That gap between what the county calls the place and what everyone still calls it is worth understanding, because it's not a typo that fixed itself. It's the result of a renaming process that got tangled enough that the county had to rename a second park just to stop people from confusing the two.
The rename that needed a second rename
In 2020, in the wake of national reckoning over Confederate namesakes, Fairfax County's Board of Supervisors began a formal process to reconsider the Lee District name. Supervisor Rodney Lusk held community engagement sessions starting in March 2021, and by December 6, 2022, the board made it official: Lee District became Franconia District. County officials were careful to frame the choice as additive rather than corrective. The county noted that Franconia had been central to the district's identity for decades, and the new name was meant to celebrate a place rather than a person.
The name change didn't stop at the district line. Within days, the Fairfax County Park Authority Board approved renaming Lee District Park to Franconia Park and Lee District Rec Center to Franconia Rec Center. A separate facility, Lee High Park, became Lewis High Park. Crews spent the following weeks pulling "Lee" lettering off the rec center building and the entrance sign on Telegraph Road.
Then came the complication nobody planned for. Fairfax County already had a different park called Franconia District Park, several miles away. With the neighborhood's Lee District Park now also named Franconia Park, the county had two facilities with nearly identical names sitting in the same part of the county. In March 2023, the Park Authority Board approved renaming Franconia District Park a second time, to Grove Point Park, specifically to eliminate the overlap.
So if you've seen "Franconia District Park" on an old flyer and assumed it was the neighborhood park behind Telegraph Road, that's actually a different property entirely, one that spent about three months with a name confusing enough that the county undid it.
What's actually behind the fence on Telegraph Road
Set the naming history aside and Franconia Park itself is a 62-acre property that does more than most people give it credit for, largely because so much of what's there postdates the renaming.
The most distinctive feature is Chessie's Trail, a 2,160-foot accessible path built for children of all abilities. It runs past a sensory sound garden, spinning rock features, a boardwalk, and a nest-shaped seating area, with carved wildlife figures representing animals native to the Chesapeake Bay along the way. The trail connects to Chessie's Big Backyard, a fully accessible playground with padded rubber surfacing and ramps wide enough for wheelchair access, built so that kids with mobility differences aren't watching from the sidelines.
Next to it sits Our Special Harbor, a Chesapeake Bay-themed spray park with computerized water mazes, water buckets, and a spraying osprey nest sculpture, plus a quieter beach-style area for younger kids with soft bubblers and interactive water tables. It's first-come, first-served, and the county caps capacity at 247 people, so on a hot Saturday in July you may find yourself in a line that stretches toward the parking lot. A carousel runs nearby, along with three reservable picnic pavilions and an amphitheater named for Leonadus K. Plenty that hosts Franconia District Nights, one of ten local concert series under the county's 2026 Summer Entertainment Series, a program that spans 124 performances across 20 venues countywide this year.
None of that reads like a Confederate namesake's park. It reads like a park the county rebuilt around families, which is closer to what actually happened.
The pool next door runs on its own math
Bordering the park is the Virginia Hills Swim Club, and it operates on a model that's rarer than most people realize. It's member owned. When you join, you're buying a literal share in the club, not just a summer membership you renew or drop depending on the weather. The pool opened in the summer of 1955 and has been part of the Northern Virginia Swimming League ever since.
That league context matters more than it sounds. NVSL is enormous, 102 member teams in 2026, split into 17 divisions ranked by the prior year's results. The Virginia Hills Tidal Wave currently competes in Division 6, which puts the neighborhood's team solidly in the upper half of one of the largest recreational swim leagues in the country. Home meets, typically three A meets and three or four B meets each June and July, draw enough visiting families that the club actively recruits local business sponsors to reach the crowd.
None of this shows up if you're scanning a real estate listing that name-checks "community pool" as an amenity bullet point. It shows up if you've stood on that deck during a Saturday morning A meet and watched a Division 6 team defend its ranking against a rotating slate of rivals.
What's on the Franconia Rec Center calendar this fall
The rec center attached to the park, formerly Lee District Rec Center, has its fall calendar locked in, and the dates are close enough to matter right now.
- September 19: Family Skate and Dance Night with a Hispanic Heritage theme, 6 to 9 p.m., DJ, decorations, and skate rental included in admission.
- September 22: Back to School, Back to Franconia Rec Center Open House, 4:30 to 7:30 p.m., with free admission tied to signing up for a seven-day trial membership. The evening includes drop-in sessions with a personal trainer, a Zumba class, and a yoga class.
- October 24: Halloween Costume Party skate night, 5 to 9 p.m., with the same DJ and skate format as the September event.
These monthly skate nights run year-round for members, but the themed dates are the ones worth putting on a calendar if you haven't been inside since the rename. The rec center also runs a private skate night option for birthday parties and other group bookings, which is a detail that rarely comes up unless you've already tried to plan one.
Why the naming confusion is worth knowing, not just correcting
None of this is really about a park sign. It's about what happens when a neighborhood's daily reference points get updated by the county faster than they get updated by everyone else describing the neighborhood. If you're relying on a listing description, a neighborhood guide, or even a longtime resident's directions to understand what's actually available a five-minute walk from Virginia Hills Avenue, you may be working from a version of the area that's three or four years out of date. The park itself changed more in that window than the name did.
That's the pattern worth watching for anywhere in this pocket of Alexandria and Fairfax County. The amenities, the programming, the small institutions like a 70-year-old member-owned pool, these move faster than the secondhand descriptions of them do. Knowing the difference is part of actually living here versus just having an address here.
If you're weighing a move into Virginia Hills, thinking about what a renovation could do for a house near the park, or just want a second opinion grounded in what's happening on the ground right now rather than what a listing said two years ago, Derek Cole Properties is a good place to start. Schedule a free consultation and we'll talk through what's actually changed in your corner of the neighborhood.
