The park includes the portion of Foundry Branch from Van Ness Street to Canal Road along the Potomac River.

The land that is today Glover Archbold Park included a portion of the right-of-way of the Washington and Great Falls Electric Railway Company, which began operating streetcar service from Georgetown along the north bank of the Potomac River in 1895.

[4] The trestle was acquired in 1997 by the WMATA transit agency,[5] whose efforts to obtain permission to demolish it have so far been thwarted by preservationists.

[10] In 1963, the conservationist and writer Rachel Carson, accompanied by several members of the Audubon Naturalist Society, visited Glover Archbold Park.

[citation needed] The park contains thousands of species in the life domains Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukarya.

Two native plant species that are evidently now extinct in the park are round-lobed hepatica and trailing arbutus.

The park has a significant invasion of nonnative plants, including Asiatic bittersweet, bamboo, common periwinkle, English ivy, garlic-mustard, gill-over-the-ground, Japanese honeysuckle, lesser celandine, wild-garlic, and wintercreeper.

Many things have and are degrading Glover Archbold Park, including air, fertilizer, soil, and water pollution.