Loudoun's Community-Owned News Source
One hundred high school students from 29 states and as far away as the Northern Mariana Islands in the western Pacific came to Loudoun County in late June to attend the first National History Academy, a five-week summer residential program where they will have the opportunity to learn by experiencing American history in the places it happened.
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Before Sterling Park there was Sterling (earlier, Guilford), a thriving farm town in eastern Loudoun in the 19thcentury. The heart of Sterling was its schoolhouse, a building that survives, but is in jeopardy. Here is a brief recounting of its history.
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Much of Loudoun County’s rich history of over 15,000 years of human activity is buried and therefore unknown. Archaeology provides a means to unearth material evidence that can help write the history of important places for which there are few written records. How can archaeology help determine which places are historically important and reveal the hidden history?
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“This is a Disneyland experience!” exclaims Douglas Kemmerer, describing how visitors to Loudoun County respond when he takes them driving in his four-in-hand horse-drawn carriage over our unpaved roads.
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Ah, the peaceful, quiet Quakers of Unison. What a genteel, highbrow legacy for Well…not so much. The founding Quakers of Unison were basically a rowdy bunch of troublemakers.
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Harry was in a terrible situation: it was 1828 and Harry was an enslaved man in Loudoun County, rented by his owner to Samuel Cox. Because Harry was chattel (personal property), he had no recognized surname, as was common among slaves in Loudoun before 1860. On learning that his owner, a “Miss Allison” of Stafford County, was planning to sell him to slave traders who would take him further south, Harry decided to escape.
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Once a year, Waterford holds its famous fair (this year Oct. 6-8), but year-round the village honors its African-American history.
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One hundred years ago, Loudoun was a predominantly agricultural county whose people lived in small towns and villages. In most of those locations, life revolved around their schools. In western Loudoun in 1916, a modern, and quite impressive, two-story, eight-room schoolhouse was built at the highest point on Bloomfield Road. It was situated about halfway between the villages of Unison and Bloomfield so that children from both places could walk to school.
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Loudoun County is one of the most popular places in the nation for bicycling on unpaved roads, a pastime known as “gravel grinding” or “gravel riding.” As depicted on gravelmap.com, a nationwide rider-created database of gravel roads, Loudoun’s unpaved road network dramatically stands out.
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A special experience for Loudoun’s residents and neighbors is provided by the ambiance of many historic villages and the physical beauty of the surrounding 250,000 wooded and rural acres—the large majority of the county’s land area. In recent University of Virginia surveys, Loudoun’s residents named our rural landscape as a thing they love most about our county, and residents said the same thing in recent Envision Loudoun community meetings.
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