Members of the Carter family acted together in 2009 to protect nearly 1,000 acres of land in Albemarle County that has been in their family since 1730. The Carters’ ancestors were neighbors to the Jeffersons, with a plantation about seven miles from Monticello, and the 1792 home, Redlands, suggests a Jeffersonian influence. The house was built by Martin Thacker, who also built Monticello, and its plan resembles Thomas Jefferson’s unbuilt design for the Virginia governor’s mansion.
Maps & Resources
Wolftown Farm with Historic Round Barn Protected
Joyce Gentry lives on the land where she lived as a child-a farm in Wolftown in Madison County, toward the foothills of the mountains, that has been in her family for generations. Mrs. Gentry, a retired math teacher, says, “I’ve lived on farms my whole life.” Her son and daughter-in-law Brad and Amy Gentry now raise beef cattle on the family farm-a 145 acre spread with a horizon full of mountain views.
Mrs. Gentry’s strong ties to the land motivated her to protect it with a conservation easement last year. “I’m trying to keep the countryside like it is,” she says.
New Park at Gilberts Corner
The land at Gilberts Corner in Loudoun County that PEC saved from development in 2009 is now part of a public park at a gateway to one of America’s most historic landscapes.
Saving the Farm
How conservation can help working farmers achieve their goals
David and Terry Ingram are father-son farmers who recently donated conservation easements on their farms in Brandy Station, in Culpeper County.
Brandy Station is a great place for farming, with rich soils and moderate slopes. In fact, a full two thirds of Culpeper County ranks as farmland of statewide importance.
Loudoun’s Billion Dollar Debt
What can we learn from Loudoun’s financial trouble?
Loudoun County, once the fastest growing county in the nation, is now $1 billion in debt—a direct consequence of growing too fast, too much, too scattered.
Highway Through Keswick?
Can the local community come up with a better plan for Routes 22 and 231 than VDOT’s plan to make it a highway?
The main road through Keswick in Albemarle County—Rtes. 22 and 231—runs through a landscape that Thomas Jefferson described as “the Eden of the United States”. Today, a traveler on this road can experience a landscape much like the one Jefferson and others of his generation saw—open farmland rising up to woodlands on the gentle slopes of the Southwest Mountains. What will it be like to travel on this road in 20 years or 50 years or 100 years? It’s an open question.
Unison Historic District Offers a Window to the Civil War
The village of Unison in western Loudoun, as if charmed in some way to keep from changing, is a quiet hamlet of well-kept old buildings, with many farmhouses, barns and churches that measure their age in centuries. They are settled into a landscape of farm fields and stone walls, where the curving hills and stands of trees give way, in their own rhythm, to views of the calm blue line of mountains on the western horizon.
It’s the roads in Unison that historians get most excited about, says Mitch Diamond of the Unison Preservation Society, which is leading efforts to list this area as a historic district on the state and national registers of historic places.
Transmission Lines: Why We Fight
This summer, an unwanted clear-cut tore through the edge of the woods at Rick and Virginia Dorkey’s cattle farm near Bealeton, in Fauquier County. Construction crews put up a line of gigantic metal towers on the farm, jutting far above the trees. It’s impossible not to see them. The massive structures dominate the views across hayfields and pastures.
Wildlife Friendly Farms and Fields
This June, PEC led our first Wildlife Friendly Farms and Fields Tour, bringing participants out to see spots where people are actively cultivating their land for the good of native plants and wildlife.
Places29 — Ready for a Vote
The Albemarle County Board of Supervisors appears poised to adopt the Places29 plan, after making some final changes at its Nov. 10 meeting. PEC has been a longstanding advocate for Places29 — a blueprint for strategic transportation investments and smart land use planning that will reduce traffic congestion and create better options for walking, biking and public transit. The current draft, which will go to a vote in January, is a positive outcome from a meeting at which there was real danger that the Board would fundamentally weaken the plan.