Where We Live: Taylorstown's Still-Rural Radius

By M.J. McAteer

Friday, August 29, 2008

People who live in Taylorstown have made their choices: scenery over shopping, deer over drive-throughs.

The historic enclave, although not untouched by the building boom that exploded in Loudoun County before so dramatically going bust, remains largely rural, with all the benefits and inconveniences that entails.

"It's far from everything," Tara Linhardt, president of the Taylorstown Community Association, said with a smile. The bluegrass musician has lived in Taylorstown since she was a child in the 1970s. Clearly, she views its remoteness as an asset.

Taylorstown wasn't always out of the way. In the 19th century, it was one of the busiest and most heavily populated areas of Loudoun, thanks to milling, mining and agriculture. Its population dwindled, however, when mining and milling became history.

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The Taylorstown Store, which sits at the junction of Taylorstown and Loyalty roads (M.J. McAteer)

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Tami Carlow, from left, Anne Larson, Tara Linhardt and McKenna Carlow, 6, and Shea Carlow, 3, gather at the Taylorstown Store. (M.J. McAteer)

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Luda and John Eichelberger, here with their dog Casey, moved into a log house a five-minute walk from the Taylorstown Store late last year. (M.J. McAteer)

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Foxton Cottage is one of the oldest stone houses in Loudoun County. (M.J. McAteer)

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Taylorstown now is unincorporated, with the county divvying up its residents among the surrounding jurisdictions of Lovettsville, Waterford, Lucketts and Leesburg. Officialdom aside, the locals consider themselves residents of Taylorstown if they live within about a three-mile radius of an old store at the junction of Taylorstown and Loyalty roads.

The store, shuttered in 1998, is a passionate cause in Taylorstown. A nonprofit group with grass-roots backing is spearheading its reopening as a "very green" business and recently installed a new septic system. But the day that the store will again be able to sell popsicles, bread and local produce "won't come anytime soon," said Anne Larson, an artist and long-time Taylorstown resident.

It's a matter of money, of course, and the store's boosters are pursuing grants. Meanwhile, the store hosts occasional community gatherings, such as craft fairs and lectures on topics of area interest such as Lyme disease. Lyme disease, carried by deer ticks, is perhaps Taylorstown's No. 1 problem.

"Deer are so comfortable here," Linhardt said, "that most people have had it twice."

Richard Brown, a Quaker, founded Taylorstown in the 1730s when he built a mill on the banks of Catoctin Creek near where the store is now. Although Brown's mill is long gone, the surrounding area has been designated a historic district and has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1976. It is the site of two of the oldest stone houses in the county, Hunting Hill and Foxton Cottage, as well as a mill later built by town namesake Thomas Taylor.

The three-mile radius that extends from the store now encompasses about 1,500 households, said Tami Carlow, vice president of the Taylorstown Community Association. These households sit on land that is alternately rolling and open or steep and wooded.

A good number of the oldest structures got their start as "patent houses," explained historian and Taylorstown resident Rich Gillespie. In colonial times, construction of a 16-by-20-foot cabin was a requirement for obtaining a patent or land grant.

Taylorstown owes much of its bucolic beauty to its still-abundant farms. On a summer day along Loyalty Road -- named in honor of Taylorstown's Unionist sympathies during the Civil War -- fields are dense with green corn or punctuated by round bales of hay waiting to be collected. Placidly grazing cattle and horses are everywhere.

These days, Taylorstown's farms come in both the working and gentleman's varieties, and Ken Loewinger's 175-acre Glenwood is both. Loewinger runs a small horse-boarding operation, but he also works full time in Washington as a real estate lawyer.

"I couldn't afford to have this in Great Falls," Loewinger said, gesturing toward a rambling red barn, rolling pastures and a large stone house that grew out of a 1750s log cabin, possibly a patent house.

The D.C.-born Loewinger initially worried about whether the country would be a good fit. Loudoun County didn't even have a synagogue when he and his wife, Margaret Krol, moved to Taylorstown in 1991. They attended religious services in a bingo parlor. Now, the county has two synagogues, Loewinger said, and he has found the country to be "a richer environment than the city."

Luda and John Eichelberger would agree. The husband-and-wife volcanologists moved into a log house a five-minute walk from the Taylorstown Store late last year. Eichelberger, who works at the U.S. Geological Survey in Reston, met his Russian wife while doing fieldwork on the Kamchatka Peninsula.

A profession that involves close observation of remote mountains requires a love of the outdoors, and in Taylorstown the Eichelbergers indulge that love with running and biking. One of their favorite trails loops along Catoctin Creek, where deer browse nonchalantly beneath pawpaw trees and a great blue heron feels at home enough to stand on a boulder and do its dead-on impression of a statue.

Luda Eichelberger, who volunteers at the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History, said she has "never lived so close with animals." The frogs are her particular favorite. They "sing like birds," she said.

Five years ago, Leslie McElroy and Richard Jones relocated from a less-distant locale -- elsewhere in the Washington suburbs -- but they profess equal enthusiasm about life on their 10-acre Taylorstown farm. Like Eichelberger, McElroy works for the Geological Survey in Reston; Jones, an estimator for a commercial construction company, commutes 120 miles round trip to Prince George's County. The two have spent much of their free time during the past three years adding 1,600 square feet to their 800-square-foot house.

The project is about done -- "finally," McElroy said. With its completion, she and Jones, who own five horses, plan to make better use of the bridle trails that honeycomb their area. They also will have more time to harness Kallai, their 2,000-pound Percheron mare, to a cart and wheel along neighboring roads. That kind of outing isn't possible in many places that are within driving distance of the District.

"This is the last little bit of truly rural, affordable Loudoun County," McElroy said.

Affordable and rural also were the magic words for Grady O'Rear, a co-founder of EcoVillage, a 180-acre "green" development in Taylorstown. The first house in EcoVillage was finished in 2001; the 14th, built of straw bales, is going up now.

O'Rear explained that EcoVillage homes are individually designed and constructed but conform to the community's environmental standards. They have large south-facing windows to take advantage of passive solar energy, plus solar panels. Geothermal systems, made up of a network of underground pipes, are used for heating water.

The houses are clustered to preserve open space; landscaping consists of native species organically maintained. The village has its own recycling station.

Brian and Peggy Maslanka moved to EcoVillage at the beginning of the year. They have radiant-heated floors, a sleeping porch and an airlock at the front door. A profusion of monitors and dials on a utility room wall track their home's complex systems.

"We love feeling like we are doing something, if not good for the planet, not horrible," Peggy Maslanka said. "We love the community. We love the house. It is beautiful here."

That beauty is something upon which Taylorstown's environmentalists, lawyers, artists, farmers and volcanologists agree.

As Larson, the artist who has spent much of her life in Taylorstown, said, "You have to travel a long distance to find an area as beautiful as this."

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