Town Rich In History Grapples With Future

Once completed, the Huntfield development will quadruple the housing stock in tiny Charles Town on West Virginia's Panhandle. (Photos By Eugene L. Meyer For The Washington Post)

A country mile from the heart of Charles Town, W.Va., a community of 3,200 homes is rising on a former apple orchard. Through the magic of annexation, its 996 acres are inside the city limits of "historic Charles Town."

Huntfield, as it's called, is the largest of the new subdivisions to appear in the inexorable pincer movement of suburbia encircling Charles Town. When completed, it will quadruple the town's housing stock of 1,000 and cause its present population of 3,132 to soar.

Steeped in history, this West Virginia Panhandle city is groping its way into a future of growth that will dramatically transform the town where more than 70 members of George Washington's family are buried and where abolitionist John Brown was tried and hanged.

"It's very contentious. We don't want to be another Loudoun -- too much growth, too much too fast, too much traffic, taxes," said Randy Hilton, a Baltimorean who moved to Charles Town 29 years ago, commuted by train to Rockville for work for many years and served as the town's part-time mayor for nine years, until June 1.

But Hilton, who lives with his wife, Vicky, in an 1897 bank president's house in the older part of town, sees both sides. "Change is going to happen," he said. "These people [farmers] have property rights."

On a much smaller scale, Charles Town -- 65 miles and an hour's drive from Washington -- has been a metropolitan magnet for years, attracting city dwellers who, as did Hilton, continue to commute. The Jefferson County seat is also a gaming mecca, with more than 3,800 slot machines luring gamblers to the Charles Town Races & Slots just outside the city limits.

For many years, before the slots and the subdivisions that are increasingly changing the landscape, the town was largely a small Upper Shenandoah Valley community whose leading citizens were "orchardists."

That's all changed in a generation. Development pressures have only accelerated as neighboring Loudoun County in Virginia sought to impose building limits. Earlier this year, a judge lifted those restrictions in Loudoun, whose population has nearly tripled in a decade to 250,000. Jefferson County's population is 48,000 -- and growing.

"I just hate to see all the farms turned into housing developments," said Robin Huyett, part of an old-line Charles Town family. "I always thought the mountain would keep the development out, but obviously it hasn't."

"Charles Town and Jefferson County are booming," said Carol Kable, a native of the area and a real estate broker, "mainly because we're the next county over from Loudoun and the prices [there] have escalated, so they're moving over into our area."

In Charles Town, growth is cautiously welcomed as long as it is "controlled," just about everyone agrees. But that means different things to different people. With neighboring Ranson, Charles Town has agreed to annexation requests in the hope that increasing the tax base will help pay for the increased services that growth requires.

But Charles Town's overloaded sewer system forced the city into a building moratorium, soon to be lifted with a sewage plant expansion. Revenue bonds for the project are being guaranteed by Greenvest LC, the Vienna-based developer of Huntfield. Greenvest also developed Cameron Station in Alexandria, and it has proposed a 15,000-unit community in Loudoun near Dulles International Airport.