U.S. 15: Highway through history
By Shannon Sollinger
Houses and shopping centers have for the most part replaced any vestige of the battles and farms of U.S. 15's past from Route 29 north through Prince William County. Loudoun County has thus far kept most of its 39 miles of U.S. 15 two-lane and somewhat rural. Farm stands, antiques shops, horse farms and hay fields still line the highway.
The past survives along the old Carolina Road in Loudoun County. Battlefields, presidential homes, farm houses, Reconstruction churches and antebellum estates beckon to visitors up and down the length of the highway.
“Growth is inevitable,” said Cate Magennis Wyatt, founder of the Journey Through Hallowed Ground. “But it does not have to devastate our heritage or our history.”
The Journey is working to harness the income potential of tourism to protect some of the past from development and suburbanization. A drive through history in Loudoun starts at the Point of Rocks bridge over the Potomac River from Maryland, and continues south to Oak Hill near Gilberts Corner and on to the Mount Zion Old School Baptist Church just east of U.S. 15 on U.S. 50.
“We work with the counties and towns through which the Journey passes,” Wyatt said. “We hope to bring alternative perspectives and/or solutions” as the jurisdictions rule on development and road improvements.
One approach, Wyatt said, is to develop a “parklike design standard” where the road must be widened – a divided highway with a raised, planted median. Prince William County adopted this approach to its widening of its 11.5 miles of the road.
The staff at the Journey is also working on a proposal for citizens from one end of the nation to the other to participate in a tree-planting campaign along U.S. 15 from Gettysburg to Monticello.
If it comes to pass, one tree will grow for each of the 650,000 soldiers who perished in the Civil War.