Project That Will Restore Slave Home Is Approved

Stone Building Will Be Centerpiece of Arcola

By Sandhya Somashekhar (Contact)

Sunday, December 9, 2007

About a decade ago, Arlean Hill joined a community group devoted to restoring a stone building about the size of a two-car garage that had once housed as many as 32 slaves.

Little did she know that the slave quarters in rural Loudoun County, crumbling and overgrown from years of neglect, would find its rebirth as part of a large development of shops, restaurants, offices and more than 1,000 houses in one of Loudoun’s fastest-growing corners.

Last week, the Board of Supervisors approved the Arcola Center project southwest of Dulles International Airport, the final piece of a 400-acre complex that the developer, Buchanan Partners, said will be built with the restored slave quarters as its centerpiece.

“This is part of Loudoun’s history that has been lost,” said Hill, president of Friends of the Slave Quarters, a volunteer group. “When you tell [history], you have to tell the good, the bad and the ugly about it to give people a true sense of what Loudoun was like.”

Slow-growth activists had opposed the development, saying it would increase the crush of traffic on Route 50. Some county officials worried about its proximity to the airport and the noise of airplanes overhead. County staff members also said it included too many residential units and not enough commercial space.

But it had the support of some business owners in the area and the majority of the Loudoun board, which voted Tuesday to rezone the property to make way for the mixed-use project.

Nicole Morrill, vice president of Buchanan Partners, said construction of Arcola Center’s commercial section is expected to begin in January, but building of the residential component won’t start for a few years.

“There’s nothing like this in the area that incorporates all of the uses,” she said. “By the time the residential comes online, there will be a strong market for it.”

The residential area will be made up of townhouses, condominiums and apartments, she said. Also included in the project are two hotels and a 21-acre park that will connect with the slave quarters.

Restoration of the slave quarters is expected to cost $3 million to $4 million, and it will be operated by the county, Hill said. Buchanan Partners has promised the county $500,000 for the project, and Hill said she expects to raise the balance from grants and private donors.

Buchanan has paid for some structural work on the stone building, which Hill said had been used as a storage for years. The building needs a lot more work, she said — not to mention restrooms, a parking lot and a road leading to it.

1998 Photo by Larry Kobelka for The Washington Post

A former slave quarters in Loudoun will be restored and made the centerpiece of the Arcola Center project.

The group hopes to fix up the interior to look as it would have before the Civil War, with two large fireplaces for cooking and laundry and spare furnishings that will include a plain wooden table and benches.

The slave quarters will be an educational resource for local schoolchildren, residents and visitors, offering a glimpse of how African Americans had historically lived in Loudoun, Hill said.

It’s a rare gem, she said, because most slave homes in the country were built of wood and did not stand the test of time. There are five publicly accessible stone slave quarters left in the nation, she said.

At one point, she said, the county was as much as one-third black.

“If you’ve got that many people and you leave them out of the history, guess what?” she said. “You’ve left a lot of the history out.”

Although Arcola Center has cleared its final hurdle with the county, another controversial project on last week’s agenda faces a new obstacle.

The board decided on Tuesday to postpone a vote on rezoning for the proposed Braddock Village development, a smaller project of about 500 houses south and west of Arcola, until its Dec. 18 meeting. On Friday, however, the county attorney advised the board not to vote on that date because of a problem with the signs the developer was required to post on the property.

The county’s rules require landowners seeking to rezone their property to post signs at least 21 days before a public hearing, attorney John R. “Jack” Roberts wrote in a memo to the board. Braddock Village’s developers posted their notice 19 days before the hearing last month, Roberts said.

“Due to the applicant’s failure to properly post the property, it is my advice that the Board must re-notice its public hearing on this application before it may take action,” he wrote.

John Farrell, the attorney for the developers, said Friday that his clients followed the 21-day rule but made a typo on their affidavit. Moreover, he said, the signs are not required under state law. He said his clients plan to go forward and seek approval for the project before the end of the year.

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