Map courtesy of Nikolas Schiller

Way back when the District was first created from land granted to the cause by Maryland and Virginia, the nation’s capital was a nice 100-mile square. But when in 1847 Virginia decided to take back Arlington County and Alexandria, the commonwealth took a bite out of the District that still remains — now we’re a lopsided 69-square-mile half-square of sorts. But now local statehood activist Nikolas Schiller has found that maybe, just maybe, we can get the Virginia land back.

As part of research Schiller has been doing of the historic archives of local newspapers, he found one article from 1910 laying out the case against the constitutionality of returning then Alexandria County (which encompassed today’s Arlington County and the City of Alexandria) to Virginia and another article from 1890 detailing a movement of Alexandria residents (90 percent of them, it claims) demanding that their land be returned to the District. “The reasons for going back to the District are practical ones and appeal to common sense and business interest,” said a petition on the matter. “If a vote was taken on the subject, nine-tenths of the people would vote to go back.”

While the residents of Arlington County and Alexandria may not be as excited today as they were then at the prospect of rejoining the District, there is something to be said about the constitutionality of having lost them in the first place. After all, the Supreme Court never ruled on whether the retrocession was actually constitutional or not. As a consequence, Maryland might have a case to make for getting its share of the District’s land back — it simply needs to vote on it.

It’s unlikely that any Virginians are going to petition the Supreme Court to settle a question that’s now over 150 years old, much less is Maryland simply going to reclaim the land it gave for the creation of the nation’s capital over 200 years ago. But the articles Schiller has found provide an interesting insight into what was and what could have been.