More than a decade ago, Prince William County leaders looked past the tall grass, grazing horses and abandoned barns on a large patch of farmland just west of Manassas and envisioned an office park filled with high-tech companies.
The project, now called Innovation at Prince William, has not worked out quite the way they imagined. More than a third of the park's 1,500 acres are still vacant. Flashy high-tech companies came and went with the dot-com bust. Some of the park's major businesses -- a cable company's call center, a promised plant to make insulin -- fall short of the "cutting-edge education and technologies" center that county consultants once described.
"The expectation of what would be there over time has changed," said County Executive Craig S. Gerhart.
Yet officials and local business leaders say Innovation at Prince William reached a turning point with the federal government's recent decision to move a major FBI facility and its 300 employees from Tysons Corner and other locations to a new building at the park.
"The FBI is going to kind of raise the bar," said John Schofield, marketing and research director for the county's economic development department. "That's the sure sign that Innovation has arrived."
Getting to this stage wasn't easy. The project has been buffeted and reshaped by a succession of regional and national economic forces. In 2001 alone, Prince William County officials said, they revamped their marketing strategy for the office park four times as the tech meltdown was followed by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Longtime Prince William County residents fondly remember their children playing on what was once "Granny Hersch's farm." The purple pumpkin painted on its silo was a local landmark until Mabel Hersch's descendants sold the land to a private owner. The county eventually bought the property.
More than 20 years ago, civic leaders saw the Hersch farm and neighboring property as a prime prospect for economic development because it was accessible to Interstate 66, bordered by a railroad line and close to a regional airport. They thought the area would become an industrial corridor with blue-collar jobs in a rural county that was becoming a bedroom community of subdivisions and strip shopping centers.
"Back then, that's how people thought of jobs," said Michael R. Vanderpool of Manassas law firm Vanderpool, Frostick & Nishanian PC.
By the mid-1990s, the county had white-collar jobs in mind.
In 1994, the county transferred 124 acres that had been donated to George Mason University for a Prince William campus that would specialize in information technology and biotechnology. County leaders hoped the campus would be a magnet for technology companies eager to hire its students and collaborate with the school's researchers.
Also that year, American Type Culture Collection, a nonprofit biological research organization, announced plans to move from Rockville to Prince William County because it needed more space.
