Alt-Dominion

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Virginia's Piedmont
Charming rural communities in Virginia's Piedmont region, roughly between Middleburg and Charlottesville, are filling up with formerly big city residents, with high-paying jobs, who can now work wherever they can stay connected.

But this combination is at the heart of the Santa Fe-ing of the Piedmont.

In Sperryville, Orlean, Paris, Millwood, Boyce, Berryville, Philomont, Aldie, Hamilton, Barboursville (Shakespeare at the Ruins), Madison, Washington, Hume, Amissville, Chester Gap, Flint Hill, Woodville, Waterford, Lincoln and so many other hamlets that have no declared populations at all, you can find combinations that include:

A computer technician named Gomer who agrees, as long as he's here, to behead with a sharp shovel the copperhead you've just shooed out of your kitchen; a company named Blast Away Hauling and Home Improvement; people who teach lost migration routes to geese, swans and cranes by training them to follow ultralight aircraft; two stages in a village of 183 -- the Theatre at Little Washington and the Ki Theatre, competing for entertainment dollars with demolition derbies; the possibility of borrowing a Havahart trap from a neighbor to capture the skunk eating your Araucana chickens' eggs so you can safely shoot the critter with the .22-caliber pistol you borrowed from the same neighbor; one bookstore in Berryville, two in Flint Hill and, in Warrenton, a Borders; mothers with hyperactive children driving long distances to buy illegal unpasteurized goat's milk; quilt shops with signs that read "Unattended children will be given an espresso and a free puppy."

Getaways for Good

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Who are all these people transforming the Piedmont?

There's no lack of them, according to James H. Wiley, who owns the office of Frank Hardy Inc. Realtors in Little Washington. His practice requires him to maintain an overview from Middleburg to Charlottesville. He sniffs at mere half-million-dollar homes on two acres for long-haul commuters who some locals maintain are "ruining" Culpeper.

A fox hunter who rides in Albemarle, Orange, Madison and Louisa counties, Wiley says his area of interest is larger plots, especially ones on which he can advise the new owners on the complexities of conservation easements that block conventional development.

In 2000, he reports, 50 acres of raw land -- with no road, water or sanitation, much less house or barn or proper fencing -- might have fetched $150,000 to $200,000. Even that was by no means rural pricing; a cattle farmer could not possibly pay that and hope to turn a profit.

Today, however, that land might go for $500,000 to $600,000 in Madison and similar "way out" locations; $750,000 in Rappahannock; close to a million in western Fauquier near Hume or Orlean; more than a million near The Plains, closer to D.C.; and in choice portions of western Loudoun and Albemarle, $1.5 to $1.75 million, with $2 million not out of the question.

His firm alone sold $225 million worth of property last year. He doesn't expect prices to continue their torrid advance, but he doubts he'll see them collapse. The people who buy the properties he sells are not interest-rate-sensitive, he says.

This is not suburbanization. Quite the opposite. A lack of development increases these property values. "The PEC is my friend," Wiley says.

The Piedmont Environmental Council is the preservationist juggernaut that legendary megadeveloper John T. "Til" Hazel Jr. once described as the best-organized political force in the state of Virginia.

It used to be unthinkable to hear a broker embrace the PEC. Developers cursed its steadfast resistance to the onslaughts of the 20th century, the cloverleaf interchanges and cul-de-sacs. Now, it turns out that in doing so, the PEC set the stage for the 21st century's new Piedmont, building the nest in which an entirely unexpected bird has hatched. Its tradition of preservation set the legal and philosophical groundwork, resulting in hundreds of thousands of acres in permanent conservation easement and 10-, 20- and 50-acre zoning per house not uncommon, that awaited the current technological transformation.