Gallows Road

Gallows Road is the name for Virginia Route 650 from the Tysons Corner area of Vienna to Annandale, where it becomes Annandale Road.

It's been speculated that the road got its name from a gallows that supposedly was erected near the site of the county's first courthouse near what is now the site of the Toilet Bowl Building and the intersection of Leesburg Pike and Chain Bridge Road, but this is almost certainly wrong, since the name only starts appearing in records from the 1840s, nearly a century after the courthouse had moved to Alexandria.[1]

The much less prosaic but more likely explanation is that "Gallows" is a corruption of the name of a forgotten resident named Gallo.

References

  1. ↑ Herman, Elanor. "Courting Trouble: The Turbulent Times of Fairfax County's Colonial Courthouse." VivaTysons Magazine Nov.-Dec. 2013: 36-39. Viva Tysons. Calamity Media. Web. 19 Feb. 2017.