Latest Bid For Secession Not the First

A group of residents in largely rural western Loudoun County wants to secede and form a new county in response to the Virginia Supreme Court ruling throwing out Loudoun's strict growth limits. Such a move would require approval by the General Assembly.

Five attempts to split the county have been presented to the Virginia House of Delegates in the past. The first originated in eastern Loudoun and reached the legislature in 1781-82, just 24 years after the county was formed.

Loudoun County was then made up of two Anglican parishes, with Goose Creek as their main dividing line. Cameron Parish east of the creek and Shelburne Parish to the west levied taxes to pay for such things as church construction, the parson's salary and caring for the ill and indigent.

Parish taxation rates were not always the same; some Loudoun residents were taxed at a higher rate. The petitioners hoped to correct this by establishing a new county with the same borders as Cameron Parish. The truncated Loudoun County would have the same area as Shelburne Parish.

But then proponents of the new county decided that their jurisdiction should be the same size and have the same population as Loudoun County, which would have been larger and more populous than the county initially proposed. The petitioners added several thousand acres in northeastern Fauquier County and northern Prince William County.

The western boundary of the new county would have been Goose Creek, a formidable stream that often flooded. The eastern boundary would have been the boundary between Loudoun and Fairfax counties, which at that time ran south along Difficult Run, a sometimes surging Potomac River tributary, to its head spring. South of the spring, the boundary would have extended in a straight line to the mouth of Little Rocky Run at Bull Run. The Loudoun-Fairfax line was moved six to seven miles west in 1798.

The new county's proposed courthouse town is not identified on documents, but a logical choice would have been Gum Spring, today's Arcola. It had an Anglican church, was at the intersection of three roads and would have been close to the county's geographic center. The location would have meant residents would no longer have had to worry about crossing troubled waters to reach their courthouse town. There were few reliable bridges in the 1700s.

To show where the boundaries would be, a map accompanied the petition. But the unidentified mapmaker made a mistake. South of Goose Creek he placed the new county's western boundary four miles west of the true boundary, that line separating Cameron and Shelburne parishes. Thus, thousands of acres of Shelburne Parish were added to the proposed county, controverting the intent of the petition -- to make the county areas the same as the parish areas.

Another reason for the secession petition was distance. The vast size of Loudoun County made it difficult for people to reach the courthouse in Leesburg, where they traded, shopped, paid taxes and attended to court matters. Some areas of eastern Loudoun were 25 miles from Leesburg. There were few wagons or carts in Loudoun during the 1780s. People on horseback traveled three to four miles an hour.

Petitioners also contended that because the American Revolution was still being fought against the British -- although fighting in Virginia had ended with the Battle of Yorktown in August 1781 -- attendance at militia musters in Leesburg was an important civic duty. The petitioners said that long distances from Leesburg, compounded by bad weather and swollen streams, prevented regular attendance.

The petition was submitted to the House of Delegates in December 1781. A second petition with the same wording but more signatures was submitted in November 1782.

A counterpetition opposing the new county was submitted in August 1782. That petition argued that it was not much of an inconvenience to travel 25 miles to the courthouse in Leesburg and noted that a new county would entail the building of a courthouse, clerk's office and jail.

"Erecting the Necessary Publick Buildings . . . at a time when the unavoidable Burdens which are already laid upon the People to support a just & necessary War" would be an "impropriety," the counterpetition said.

The General Assembly agreed. The debate was not recorded. Perhaps a sharp-eyed legislator recognized that part of the western boundary of the proposed county on the map accompanying the petition did not agree with the boundary stated in the text of the petition.

Eugene Scheel is a Waterford historian and mapmaker.