In Lorton, the Brewery, the Disc Golf Course, and the Art Walk Are the Same Walk
On a Second Saturday evening, someone finishes browsing the open studios at Workhouse Arts Center around eight, walks a few hundred feet down a stone-dust path, and sits down for dinner at a brewery built inside what used to be a cell block. No one drove between stops. No one needed to.
That is the part most "things to do in Lorton" lists miss. They treat the art walk, the brewery, and the disc golf course as separate bullet points, the way you'd list attractions in a town where getting from one to the next means starting your car. In Lorton, they sit on the same 2,300-plus acres, tied together by one trail, because the whole property used to be a single fenced facility. The prison closed. The fence came down. The path between buildings stayed, and now it's the reason a Saturday here works differently than a Saturday almost anywhere else in Northern Virginia.
Fairfax County bought the former D.C. Workhouse and Reformatory complex, a little over 2,300 acres straddling the Occoquan River, for $4.2 million in 2002. Two years later, the Board of Supervisors rezoned 55 of those acres to become what is now the Workhouse Arts Center, an adaptive-reuse campus of former cell blocks turned into artist studios, galleries, and a theater. The rest of the land became Laurel Hill Park.
Because the county never subdivided the property for separate development, the internal roads and paths that once connected guard stations, dormitories, and work yards became the bones of a public trail system. The Laurel Hill Greenway now runs about 10 miles through the park, part paved and part stone dust, and it happens to serve as the southern terminus of the 42-mile Gerry Connolly Cross County Trail, the spine that laces together parkland across much of Fairfax County. You don't need to walk the whole 42 miles to feel the effect. Walk a few minutes from the trailhead and you're at a brewery patio instead.
Here's what actually sits within that connected footprint, in the order most residents encounter it on a weekend visit:
None of that list requires a car between stops. It requires a decent pair of shoes.
Workhouse Arts Center keeps standard hours of Wednesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday noon to 5 p.m. But on the second Saturday of every month, the campus stays open until 9 p.m., three hours later than usual, so visitors can move through the studios and still have time to eat. Bunnyman's Lorton taproom serves food into the evening every night of the week, with a kitchen turning out flatbreads, paninis, pretzels, and tater tots alongside its beer list.
That overlap isn't a coincidence of two businesses sharing a parking lot. It's the reason Second Saturday functions less like an isolated open house and more like a full evening out, gallery browsing that flows straight into dinner without a gap in between.
The brewery itself is a deliberate fit for the site. Bunnyman Brewing takes its name from the Bunny Man, the fictional escaped-asylum figure tied to reported sightings in the Kings Park West neighborhood decades ago, and its founders, two retired Fairfax County firefighters, chose the Workhouse specifically because the old-prison setting matched the legend. The taproom now anchors the north end of the same campus where the art walk happens.
If the loop were a one-time discovery, it wouldn't be worth writing about. It's not. The Workhouse and Laurel Hill calendar for this fall reads like the same pattern repeating on a schedule:
The It's a Good Day Market, a traveling small-business market, sets up at Workhouse Arts Center on August 22. The Fall Backyard Burn Trail Running Race uses the Laurel Hill trail network on October 4. A Fall Festival is scheduled at the Ox Road campus on October 10. Workhouse Arts Center and Potomac Music host their fifth annual Fall Fest on October 17. The Bunnyman Turkey Trot 5K and 10K closes out the season on November 21, starting and finishing at the same Workhouse grounds.
Five events, five different reasons to show up, all on the same acreage, all reachable on foot from the same trailhead. That's not a coincidence of park scheduling. It's what happens when an arts nonprofit, a county parks department, and a local brewery all operate on land that was never built to be separated in the first place.
Most Northern Virginia suburbs spread their good stuff out. The brewery is in one shopping center, the trail is in a different park district, and the gallery, if there is one, is downtown somewhere you'd need to find parking for. Lorton inverted that by accident. A single 2002 county purchase kept a couple thousand acres in one hand, and the reuse plan that followed kept the internal connections intact instead of cutting them up for separate parcels.
The practical effect for anyone living nearby is that a Saturday doesn't require a schedule of drive times. Disc golf in the morning, a walk over to Central Green for lunch under one of the picnic shelters, an afternoon at the Workhouse galleries, dinner at Bunnyman before dark. It's one trip, not four, and the only thing that changes month to month is which of the five fall events happens to land on that particular weekend.
That kind of built-in convenience tends to get taken for granted by the people who already live inside it. It's worth noticing anyway, because it's the rare case where a neighborhood's daily texture and its own real estate history are the same story: land that stayed whole is land that stayed walkable.
If you're weighing what a specific pocket of Lorton or the surrounding Fairfax County submarkets actually offers day to day, not just on a spec sheet, Hanna Abebe can walk you through it block by block. Let's Connect.
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