Dale City is a census-designated place (CDP) in Prince William County, Virginia, United States, located 25 miles south west of Washington, D.C. It is an annex of Woodbridge, Virginia. As of 2017, the total population was 73,384. The community is almost bounded by Hoadly Road to the northwest, Prince William Parkway to the north, Smoketown Road to the northeast, Gideon Drive to the east, and Cardinal Drive to the south.

Dale City was the idea of a genuine estate developer, Cecil Don Hylton, who chose the term because it aptly describes the “hills and dales” of the rolling Virginia Piedmont, where he developed the community. Hylton began his career as a “huckster”, a youngster man who sold farm goods and build at the farmers’ market in Washington, DC. He unconventional began a sod situation after several requests from his regular clients. He ran several dozen trucks and pioneered further technologies in the industry. After the post-war housing boom, he moved into homebuilding. Throughout his career, he constructed apartments, commercial shopping centers, and on culmination of 22,000 homes. Along the way, he began his own sewer company, Dale Service Company, as skillfully as the first cable television companies in Prince William County.^{[citation needed]}

His company, Hylton Enterprises, began Dale City in 1960 approximately 1 mile east of Interstate 95 and continued to construct west towards Hoadly Road (State Route 642). By 1969, the first six communities were completed. Many more were other in the 1970s and 1980s.

Several places in Dale City are named after Hylton, such as C.D. Hylton High School and the Hylton Memorial Chapel. More recently, the Hylton Foundation underwrote a major new addition to Potomac Hospital in handy Woodbridge. Hylton’s companies have branched into additional markets, especially real estate of existing houses. Hylton Realty now sells property in and close Dale City. Hylton Enterprises manages want ad properties nevertheless controlled by the Hylton family, including several shopping centers, as competently as several oddly-shaped parcels of unimproved land. These parcels were house that could not be built on or were proffered to the county; Andrew Leitch Park is one such parcel that has been fixed idea to the local Park Authority.