Biohazard Cleanup Near Pine Heights Sandston, VA

Sandston is a census-designated place in Henrico County, Virginia, an unincorporated community about seven miles east of downtown Richmond along U.S. Route 60, the Williamsburg Road.

Sandston had a population of 7,779 at the 2020 census, up slightly from 7,571 in 2010, the first census in which it was listed as a census-designated place.

Census Bureau QuickFacts survey data for 2020–2024 counts about 3,111 households in Sandston averaging 2.38 people each.

Sandston began in 1918, when the United States Housing Corporation built 230 prefabricated kit houses — supplied by the Aladdin Company and designed by DuPont engineers — for workers at the DuPont-operated Seven Pines Loading Plant #3, a World War I munitions factory planned to house about 3,000 workers, three-quarters of them young single women.

So important were Sandston's women munitions workers that the Commonwealth organized a quasi-military Women's Munitions Reserve, which had 500 members by August 1918.

After the war, the federal government sold the village in 1921 to the Richmond-Fairfield Railway Company, whose president, Oliver J. Sands, turned it into a working-class commuter suburb — the community was renamed Sandston in his honor.

The Sandston Historic District, 226 acres of homes, churches and civic buildings dating from 1918 to 1966, was listed on the Virginia Landmarks Register in September 2021 and the National Register of Historic Places in December 2021 as a rare surviving example of federal World War I worker housing repurposed as a railway suburb.

The Battle of Seven Pines, one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War up to that time — second only to Shiloh in casualties — was fought near Sandston in 1862, and streets in the community were later named for generals who fought in it.

Richmond International Airport is located in Sandston, on ground that was part of the Seven Pines battlefield area.

Notable institutions inside the Sandston Historic District include Sandston Elementary School and three community churches.