A radical plan to save a rural oasis: Don’t pave the roads
An unorthodox bid to preserve one of the last bastions of country life in the D.C. area is dividing residents. Some say protecting Loudoun’s gravel roads will ensure that its rustic soul and charm survive a suburban onslaught, but not everyone wants to go along for the ride.
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An unorthodox bid to preserve one of the last bastions of country life in the D.C. area is dividing residents.
Some say protecting Loudoun’s gravel roads will ensure that its rustic soul and charm survive a suburban onslaught. But not everyone wants to go along for the ride.
Allen Cochran shouts “Here we go!” and the sheep skitter from a weathered gray barn, bounding into golden afternoon light on a mile-long journey to pasture. Their beating hoofs sound like a sudden downpour on the centuries-old gravel road.
The tableau feels ripped from rural Ireland or even another century, but it is playing out not too far from a Chipotle. This is western Loudoun County, Va., where the superheated suburban development of the D.C. area runs headlong into a picturesque rural enclave that’s been defined by farms and horses for 300 years.
It has become the latest focus of an unlikely movement to preserve a slice of landscape often thought of as waiting its turn for improvement: unpaved roads.
While hamlets in Upstate New York and elsewhere have taken steps to protect unpaved roads, an ambitious and unorthodox plan being pushed in Loudoun goes beyond most others: put all of the roughly 250 miles of gravel roads that meander across the county on the National Register of Historic Places.
Loudoun’s system of unpaved roads is one of the largest in Virginia — surprising given that the network is less than 50 miles from the nation’s capital, and that the eastern part of the county is home to a major airport, a Metro line and a burgeoning tech hub that features tracts of data centers.
The county has been among the nation’s fastest-growing for decades — its population has shot up sevenfold since 1980 to more than 430,000 — and preservationists see the plan as a last-ditch effort to save the vanishing vestiges of rustic life from being swallowed by the burbs.
Supporters say the lanes evoke Loudoun’s rural soul, history and charm. Detractors see a quixotic quest to thwart the most basic of steps into modernity. They complain of rattling rides to work and Starbucks that sometimes feel like sitting in the seat of a tractor.
The battle has grown unusually fierce, so much so that Loudoun County Supervisor Caleb Kershner refers to it as the “road wars.” Similar fights have played out in other localities across the country as the movement to preserve unpaved roads has gained traction in recent decades.
“You have the old versus the new,” said Kershner, who grew up on a gravel road in Frederick County, Md. “Some people want that way of life. Some people don’t. … It kind of pits neighborhoods against each other.”
A living museum
A network of roads is an atypical pick for the National Park Service’s register, which includes Abraham Lincoln’s home and the Statue of Liberty. Supporters say Loudoun’s roads belong there because they span the sweep of American history.
They envision a one-of-a-kind “living museum” that unfolds around each bend, whether by foot, bike, horse or car. Some of the earliest roads — which predate the founding of the country — follow Native American trails. A young George Washington traversed others as a surveyor; enslaved people built the fieldstone walls that line some. Armies clashed on them during the Civil War.
Many roads still follow their original routes, worn deep into hillsides and hollows over the creeping years. They pass towering “witness trees,” old oaks and other species that have stood through much of the nation’s life. This bucolic oasis forms a kind of recreational trail system for residents and draws tourists and cyclists who are a boon to Loudoun’s economy.
A spot on the register would not bar paving outright, but it would add hurdles that would make it more difficult.
The plan, spearheaded by a group called America’s Routes, is also a bid to hold on to something intangible — a kind of life that has all but disappeared in the pressure cooker of the nation’s capital.
“It’s a way to slow things down a little bit,” Emily Houston, who is part of the group, said of the gravel roads. “You get to know your neighbors. The road is the center of your community in a way. Everybody is out walking their dog or riding their horses. One of your neighbors is driving by and you stop for a chat.”
But where some see character, others see a dirty track, as rutted as an old washboard, that grows less appealing with each flat tire and trip to the carwash. Many recent transplants are drawn by tidy subdivisions of new homes that have sprouted on former farmland and are more affordable than those in D.C.’s inner-ring suburbs. They say that the gravel roads can’t safely handle the increasing volume of traffic, and that preserving them could choke development.
The fight between these competing visions erupted at a Board of Supervisors meeting in September, where residents clashed for over an hour over paving a handful of roads — including just 300 feet of one. One road was ultimately taken off the list, and the decision on others was punted to this year.
Barbara Kauffman, who lives off an unpaved road named Old Wheatland, summed up objections to gravel roads succinctly, calling them relics of a “horse-and-buggy era.”
“They are neither quaint nor charming,” Kaufman told the supervisors. “They are bone-rattling, teeth-jarring, dangerous, dusty nuisances.”
A secret piece of history
The Toyota 4Runner bumped down gravel roads past cows and the azure pastels the Blue Ridge Mountains set against the sky near Philomont, Va., a village settled in the 19th century by Quakers where residents still go to the general store to send their mail.
Jane Covington asked the driver to pull over just past a wheelbarrow-red barn with vines creeping up the side and a faded American flag mounted over its gaping door.
Covington, a historic preservationist working with America’s Routes, popped out and swept her arm toward a muddy ford the color of chocolate milk that submerged Philomont Road. Cicadas thrummed in the surrounding trees.
“This is the way they went,” Covington said.
There is no plaque commemorating the spot, no visitor center or audio tour, but a pivotal — if little-known — moment in the Civil War played out here.
The forces of Confederate Gen. Jeb Stuart skirmished with Union troops across Beaverdam Ford on Nov. 1, 1862, part of a series of desperate attempts to stave off a bold plan hatched by Abraham Lincoln to decisively end the Civil War.
Lincoln saw an opportunity to capture the Confederate capital of Richmond, while Southern forces were out of position and beleaguered after the Battle of Antietam, so he ordered the U.S. Army to march south.
Confederate commander Robert E. Lee recognized the peril and had Stuart launch nettling attacks over a number of days. They held up the Union regiments long enough that Lee could maneuver his forces to block the union advance. Lincoln’s plan failed, he fired his top general in frustration, and the war raged on for two more years.
Beaverdam Ford remains largely unchanged since that day 161 years ago.
Covington, who is studying the twists and turns of Loudoun’s gravel roads, said that is the magic of these routes — to see history much as those who lived it would have seen it. But she says those chances are fading. Nearly half of Loudoun’s unpaved roads have been paved since the 1960s, according to Virginia Department of Transportation data.
In 2020, a group called Preservation Virginia placed Loudoun’s gravel roads on a list of the most endangered historic sites in the state.
“We’re coming to a tipping point countywide on development,” Covington said. “It’s a little bit at a time, a little, a little, and then there’s a point of no return.”
A bid for preservation
Native Americans blazed Loudoun’s first routes. Colonists laid others in the first half of the 18th century to connect the frontier to more populated areas of the colonies. Waves of Quakers, Germans and descendants of British colonists staked out more routes over the next 200 years.
The spiderweb of lanes demarcate grants by Lord Fairfax, whose family was given a vast tract of what is now Virginia by the British crown. They were also routes to get grain from mills that once dotted the countryside to then-new ports like Georgetown, Alexandria and Baltimore. Comparing today’s system with an 1853 map shows that many remain intact.
Preservation advocates cleared a hurdle in 2020 when the Virginia Department of Historic Resources declared Loudoun’s back roads potentially eligible for listing on the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places.
Covington has now embarked on the painstaking process of documenting the history and significance of the roads and will submit documents to state and then federal officials for review and a final decision on listing. She expects to finish those packages over the next year or so. Public hearings and a decision on whether to grant the designation would follow.
A spot on the register would have major implications for the protection of the roads and potentially Loudoun’s growth. If the roads are listed, any project to pave or alter them that involves federal money (and many do) would trigger a review.
The review would require federal officials to solicit input about a project from the public, local government and other interested parties. If the project is found to have an adverse impact on the road, officials would have to explore alternative plans or ways to mitigate the damage. Ultimately, they could opt to pave a road.
Currently, the process for deciding which gravel roads get paved is less formal, a complaint of many in the county.
In recent years, supervisors have often placed roads on a list for paving after lobbying by residents that live along them. In some cases, developers have offered money to help defray the cost of improving roads that connect to new neighborhoods, incentivizing paving.
Some see an unsustainable system
Many say preserving the whole system of gravel roads is incompatible with the emerging Loudoun.
Lacey Huber, vice president of Stone Tower Winery in Leesburg, said that she’d love to see many gravel roads preserved, but that the unpaved stretch of Hogback Mountain Road that leads to her tasting room is steep and prone to washing out. She’s had two flat tires driving into work, and it’s treacherous for visitors.
“We get complaints from customers,” Huber said. “A lot of people think we are in control of the road. They ask us: ‘Why haven’t you paved your road?’”
The Virginia Department of Transportation launched a pilot project about six years ago that put a layer of concrete beneath the gravel to stabilize the road — a sort of middle ground between paving and not paving.
Huber said that it has performed well and that extending it would be a happy medium to improve safety and keep some of the aesthetics of unpaved roads. But many preservationists aren’t convinced that’s the answer.
Supervisor Kershner, whose Catoctin District is home to many gravel roads, said that he would have to study the historic preservation plan more closely before taking a position on it, but that it’s likely the county will have to forge some compromise in the polarizing debate over whether to pave.
He said he’s looking at making the paving decision more objective by creating a scoring system that takes into account safety, traffic volume, historical value and other factors. He thinks that many gravel roads should be saved but that others will need to be modernized.
Back on the sheep drive, Cochran and his border collies pushed the flock off his farm and into an adjacent neighborhood of newer McMansions, where the sheep scampered across well-manicured lawns and driveways with basketball hoops.
A startled resident pulled out her cellphone and recorded the surreal juxtaposition of rustic and suburban that is contemporary Loudoun.
“Thanks for this afternoon’s entertainment!” the woman shouted and waved.
Eventually, the pavement gave way again outside the neighborhood. The sheep ambled around a bend on Foundry Road, and it was as if they had passed through a time portal.
On one side of the road, a stone house built around 1749 by Quakers Jacob and Hannah Janney still stood, now appropriately named “Time’s End.” The sheep scattered into the green pastures on the other side. Cochran looked across the old hollow.
“The landscape, the topography, the architecture looks exactly like it did then,” Cochran said. “If Jacob and Hannah were standing up on that hill, they would know whose house they were looking at.”
About this story
Story editing by Maria Glod. Photo editing by Mark Miller. Design and development by Agnes Lee. Additional editing by Tara McCarty, Tom LeGro, Christian Font and Anne Kenderdine.
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