In a Quiet Va. Hamlet, The Battle Never Ends

Where We Live

By M.J. McAteer

Saturday, June 9, 2007

Unison, a picturesque hamlet in southwestern Loudoun County, looks much as it did in 1862, when its only church, Unison United Methodist, served as a field hospital for Union troops.

Photo: M.J. McAteer

"The pressure is on" to build on land in Unison, says Mayo Brown, who has a 69-acre farm outside the village.

Nineteenth-century houses still predominate in the village, where a new house hasn't been built in more than 50 years. Three of Unison's four principal roads remain horse-friendly gravel, and riders frequently trot through town on their way to the bridle trails that honeycomb the area. On a weekday afternoon, the village is so lightly traveled that a fox can pad along the main thoroughfare before ducking under a board fence into a cow pasture.

Quiet, rural, pretty, historic -- that's the Unison that most of its residents cherish. Any so-called progress that would bring traffic lights, convenience stores, housing developments or even another paved road is ardently opposed.

A couple of years ago, a developer found out just how ardently when he planned to build 28 houses on 98 acres just outside the village. With impressive determination, the locals mobilized to repel the invasion.

Although the village proper has only a score of houses and perhaps 50 residents, on a Sunday evening in September 2005, 165 people crowded the pews at United Methodist to draw up battle plans. They mustered a $25,000-plus war chest and stood in line to volunteer for duty. They vowed to give no ground.

This development fight soon was nicknamed the Second Battle of Unison. The first was a skirmish that could have been a turning point in the Civil War if the dawdling of Union Gen. George McClellan hadn't allowed Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia to hightail it south to protect Richmond despite a loss at Antietam.

More than 140 years later, the development foes made no such mistake. They besieged the proposed housing project by all legal means. After about a year, perhaps deciding that retreat might be the better part of valor, the builder sold the tract to an area resident. The new owner put the land under a conservation easement, a designation that allows only one house to be built on the acreage. The advance guard of suburbia had been turned back -- at least for the time being.

"I prefer to keep Unison rural, but the pressure is on," said Mayo Brown, who moved to a 69-acre farm just outside the village in 1962. The former manager of tobacco, horse and cattle farms admitted that the dirt road that runs past his property is "terrible" -- and that, he said with a grin, is just the way he likes it. "It keeps the tourists and joy riders away."

He said, "I don't want any improvements at all." It is hard to disagree with that while surrounded by postcard-perfect scenery of rolling green pastures inhabited by Black Angus cows and their winsome calves.

When Brown arrived in Unison, most of the inhabitants' families had lived there for generations. The old families mostly are gone now, he said, and their replacements have tended to be more well-to-do people who have relocated specifically in search of a country life.

Equestrian enthusiasts Chris and Laurie Ambrose moved to Unison from just east of Middleburg in 2002 because it is so horse-oriented. "We all ride here," Chris Ambrose said. "We all ride together." Some people drive too -- carriages are a common sight on the area's rural roads.

Chris Ambrose works in commercial real estate in Washington. It's a "crazy" commute, he admitted, "but Unison is a wonderful life to come back to. This is some of the most beautiful countryside in America."

Mary Ann Bell and her husband, David, moved to a mid-19th-century brick house in the village from Great Falls six years ago. He is the chief financial officer for a company in Chantilly. She works from home for a nongovernmental agency that helps abandoned and disabled Romanian children.

"We don't have a pool or a soccer field, and we are not close to shops," Mary Ann Bell said, ticking off the amenities of which Unison cannot boast. "All that is a plus for me."

The Crauns are among the few lifetime locals still left in town.

"I'd feel lost if I moved anywhere else," June Craun said.

She and her husband, Bob, live on 40 acres about a minute's drive from the village in a house that Craun built himself in the early 1970s. "I've worked hard all my life," Bob Craun said.

He remembers traveling by wagon from Unison to Purcellville as a teenager in the 1930s to have wheat ground at the mill that now houses Magnolias restaurant. In those days, not a single road between the towns was paved, and the 20-mile round trip took all day.

For many years, the Crauns ran Unison's general store, at the dogleg crossroad of Unison and Bloomfield roads, which marks the center of town. They sold milk, meat, lawnmowers and shoes. But when they gave up the business in the mid-1990s, the store seem fated to be torn down and replaced by a new house.

"That's progress; that's life," Bob Craun said with a shrug.

But other Unison residents were dismayed.

Paul Hodge, a former Washington Post editor and a 20-year resident of Unison, along with Brown, decided to try to save the store and to that end formed the nonprofit Unison Preservation Society. In 2001, the fledging group shepherded through a courthouse-steps sale of the 1880 Victorian structure to Coe Eldredge, a businessman who pledged to restore it.

The society, which now has more than 100 members, was instrumental in having Unison placed on the Virginia Landmarks Register in 2002 and on the National Register of Historic Places in 2003. The society also led the successful charge against the housing development. In a few months, Hodge said, Unison will become the National Park Service's newest Civil War battlefield site, an honorary designation that will be marked with signs.

Thanks to the research done to earn such recognition, Hodge has a written history of all the buildings in downtown Unison, including his house, Butterland, which he shares with his artist wife, Avis.

Quakers built the fieldstone house more than 200 years ago, when Unison sometimes was called Butterland, after the commodity with which local dairy farmers paid their taxes.

Unison, Hodge said, is one of five Loudoun villages founded by the Religious Society of Friends in the 1730s. (The others are Hillsboro, Lincoln, Taylorstown and Waterford.) Unison's Quaker meetinghouse is long gone, but the graveyard remains, a contemplative spot a mile or so from the crossroads, where stones incised with fingers pointing toward heaven share the long grass with tall trees.

In 1813, the village officially was named Union, but because Virginia already had a bigger Union in Monroe County, it was renamed Unison in 1829. In 1861, the people of Unison voted 150 to 0 to secede from the United States, but the village's Quaker residents abstained from that decision and were active in the Underground Railroad despite their neighbors' political sympathies.

As to the old general store, it has been thoroughly made over. Eldredge received tax breaks for restoring it to federal historic-preservation standards, and the building now houses his business, Old Dominion Design, which specializes in kitchens and baths, and an apartment upstairs.

Unison seems an out-of-the-way spot for a commercial enterprise, but store manager Kathy Barrett said it actually is central for many of her customers who live in Fauquier County and western Loudoun.

Besides, business is basically by appointment. "Obviously, we don't get a lot of walk-in traffic," she said before pausing to clarify that statement -- "other than neighborhood dogs that like to come and sit on the front porch."

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