The Lost City - Richmond, Virginia - American Steem

photo via Flickr

Growing up in one of the United States' oldest areas, about 35 minutes outside of Jamestown, Virginia, I experienced my fair share of haunted houses. Several old plantation homes are up and down the James River, and each has its own tales. As teenagers, we used to visit those places while looking for a cheap thrill on Halloween or maybe just in the middle of the night on a random weekday. Just kids being kids.

But the story I'm going to jump into today is about a place called "the Lost City," an area of land that was taken from farmers by the state of Virginia sometime in the 1940s during World War II and used to build a decoy airfield. The stories I heard as a child were all over the place, ranging from an Area 51-type situation for housing aliens to a place where they had the President of the United States in seclusion when it was thought his life was in danger. The real answer that I learned later in life was the government was using the local airport to move supplies in and around their military bases up and down the East Coast and worried about any sort of bombing situation. So they took the land and built a fake city there with roads, street lights, and a sewer system that were all still in place in the 1980s when I was growing up.

By the 1990s, hobos were living out there in the buildings. When we saw movement, I remember thinking they were some sort of alien being (which makes me laugh loudly now). The video below gives a small window inside a weird world where a Menlo Worldwide Logistics building sits vacant nowadays, and Facebook controls most of the property with a newly built data center on the way. The video highlights a story that gives some grim details about the area after the war when the story shifted in terms of how they planned on using the property.

The County of Henrico, the official owner of the property now, also put out a video on the topic some years later. That video is below. It should be noted that people of that time in that area did not want the development of the "Lost City" project. This was likely because of race-related issues stemming from a time now gone, a time filled with ignorance and issues. The county government has made a pretty penny off this property, considering they didn't pay a dime for it.