Drive out to the old Lorton Reformatory grounds this weekend and you'll find two signs pointing to what looks like the same property: one reads Ox Road, the other Workhouse Road. Race organizers who stage events on the property mention this split as a matter of logistics, noting there is one entrance to the arts center off of Ox Road (123) and another off of Workhouse Road. What that detail actually describes is something bigger: two almost entirely separate versions of Lorton's fall, running on the same historic acreage, that rarely cross paths.
One version shows up on Second Saturdays with a wine glass and walks through artist studios. The other shows up before sunrise in trail shoes and disappears into the woods. Both are using land the county bought for the same reason back in 2002, and most people who live here have only ever met one of them.
The Ground Both Crowds Are Standing On
Fairfax County bought the former D.C. Workhouse and Reformatory property in 2002, paying $4.2 million for 2,324 acres of what had been a working prison since 1910. Two years later, the Board of Supervisors carved out 55 of those acres and rezoned them into what's now the Workhouse Arts Center, an arts campus built around the original arcaded prison buildings. The stretch EX2 Adventures maps for its trail races today covers 1,600 acres of former prison grounds, now maintained separately as Laurel Hill Park by the Fairfax County Park Authority.
Same original purchase. Two operators, two mandates, two very different Saturdays.
The Art-Walk Saturday
On the arts campus, the calendar runs on studio hours and gallery openings. More than 100 professional and emerging visual artists rent space here, and the campus keeps regular hours of 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday. Second Saturdays are different: the building stays open until 9 p.m. instead of 6 so the monthly Second Saturday Art Walk can run its evening block, when visitors can drop into working studios, browse the galleries, and buy directly from local artists between 6 and 9 p.m. Bunnyman Brewing pours on site the same evening, and the Lucy Burns Museum, housed in a restored barracks building, tells the story of the suffragists imprisoned here in 1917 alongside 91 years of prison history.
Today happens to be one of these Saturdays. The Alexandria Plein Air Society has an exhibition and demo scheduled at the Workhouse this afternoon, and an "It's a Good Day" market follows on August 22. Neither event requires a trail map. Neither draws anyone in running shoes.
The Trail-Running Saturday
A few hundred yards away, on the same original acreage, Laurel Hill Park runs a completely different fall. The Giles Run Meadow Trail connects to the 41-mile Fairfax County Cross County Trail, and the mountain biking club MORE has built roughly 10 miles of singletrack that criss-cross the open fields and woods of the old facility, passing in sight of the original guard towers.
This corner of Lorton has its own event calendar, and it's dense heading into fall:
| Date (2026) | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Aug. 29 | South Asian Festival | Laurel Hill Park |
| Oct. 3 | Miles for Migraine DMV | Laurel Hill Park Central Green |
| Oct. 4 | Fall Backyard Burn, 5.4 or 10 miles | Workhouse Arts Center ball field |
| Oct. 17 | Harvest Hills 5K, 10K, and Half | Laurel Hill Park Central Green |
| Nov. 21 | Bunnyman Turkey Trot 5K/10K | Workhouse Arts Center |
The Fall Backyard Burn stages out of the ball field at the southern end of the Workhouse complex and uses that same Ox Road or Workhouse Road entrance the arts crowd drives past without noticing. Harvest Hills, three weeks later, runs entirely on the Laurel Hill side. Neither race description mentions the galleries. Neither gallery description mentions the trails.
A Corridor That's Filling In Around Both
While the reformatory grounds sort themselves into art walks and trail races, the retail edge of Lorton has kept filling in on its own timeline, mostly along Richmond Highway and Gunston Plaza rather than up on Ox Road near the Workhouse itself. Liberty Market, anchored by a Lidl grocery store, added a Hangry Joe's serving Nashville hot chicken in the fall of 2024. A few miles away at Gunston Plaza, Naz's Halal Food held its grand opening in September 2025, and Nash & Smashed, a Nashville-style sandwich and smashburger spot, has since landed on Yelp's list of Lorton's top new restaurants. When Hangry Joe's opened as the last tenant to fill Liberty Market, its general manager, who also runs a Tropical Smoothie location nearby, put it simply: "To see the community develop like this is amazing."
Closer to the Workhouse entrance on Ox Road itself, Fusebox serves Asian fusion out of a storefront just off the same road the trail runners use every October. And tonight, while Second Saturday visitors wander the galleries, Taco Rock is hosting a stop on its comedy tour at its Lorton location. Three different crowds, three different reasons to be out, spread across the same few miles on the same evening.
Sunday Belongs to a Parking Lot
Sunday mornings pull a fourth crowd to a fifth location: the Lorton Farmers Market sets up in the VRE commuter parking lot at 8990 Lorton Station Boulevard, running 8 a.m. to noon every Sunday from May 3 through November 22. It's one of ten markets the Fairfax County Park Authority operates, and like the others it's producer-only, meaning vendors can only sell what they raise on their own farms or make from scratch. For four hours a week, a lot built for commuters catching the train into D.C. does double duty as the one place in Lorton where the art-walk crowd, the trail-running crowd, and the Liberty Market regulars are actually likely to bump into each other.
What the Split Actually Means
None of this is really about scheduling. It's about what happens when a single piece of land gets repurposed twice, by two different institutions, for two audiences that never had to be reconciled. The Workhouse Arts Center answers to its own nonprofit board and books its calendar around gallery openings and theater productions. Laurel Hill Park answers to the county park system and books its calendar around race permits and trail maintenance. They share a fence line, a set of old guard towers, and, on paper, an entrance road. They don't share a visitor.
For a neighborhood that gets summarized in a sentence or two on most sites, that's worth sitting with. Lorton isn't one weekend destination. It's at least three running in parallel on the same ground, and the version you experience mostly depends on which entrance you happen to use.
If you're already living this split, you don't need us to tell you which side you gravitate toward. But if you're weighing whether Lorton's mix of arts programming, trail access, and a filling-in retail corridor fits how you actually want to spend a Saturday, that's exactly the kind of on-the-ground read Wasinger & Co Properties builds into every conversation about this market. Reach out anytime you want to talk through what a specific block or corridor of Lorton is really like to live in, day to day, not just on a map.
