Grandma's Creek Watershed Improvements

• Spring 2024: Grant Awarded
• Spring 2024 - Present: Outreach and Engagement Activities
• Fall 2025: Gully Repair Construction Start

The Grandma's Creek Gully Repair will start construction in late fall 2025. The repair will stabilize the eroding channel with stone step pool structures, remove invasive bamboo, filter stormwater runoff with a sand/mulch soil mixture and replant densely with local ecotype native plants. 

Construction on the gully repair will begin late fall 2025 with site preparations and setup. It is expected to last approximately six months, including:

• Site preparations and setup: Construction fencing, erosion and sediment controls, tree protection
• Bamboo removal, clearing and creating construction path
• Creating step pools with large stone and grading
• Soil and site stabilization
• Spring planting followed by project wrap-up

If you have questions about the project, please contact Lily Whitesell at LWhitesell@arlingtonva.us or Anne Guillette at AGuillette@arlingtonva.us

Project Background

Grandma's Creek Watershed Improvements is a community-initiated project that aims to help protect Grandma’s Creek, a small stream in the Barcroft community that enters Four Mile Run at the W&OD trail. The project includes: 

• Green Street rain gardens to capture, filter and absorb stormwater runoff, 
• Gully repair that reduces erosion, captures runoff and safely conveys stormwater,
• Watershed educational activities for school students, families and the community, 
• Tree planting with the neighborhood, Tree Stewards and EcoAction Arlington, 
• Partnership with Barcroft Elementary School and outreach to historically underserved populations who live in the Barcroft and Columbia Pike area.

Grandma’s Creek got its name from hot summer days in the early 1900s, when the local Marye children and their grandmother would walk up the railroad tracks for picnics in the cool woods next to the stream. A century later Barcroft residents continue to call it Grandma's Creek.

Meeting Materials