Windows on the Past of 'Black Middleburg'

Loudoun Village Was Founded on Freedom and Horses

For more than 100 years, St. Louis, a village in western Loudoun County, was defined by race. It was settled by freed slaves in the late 19th century and, until recently, when Loudoun's growth brought an influx of whites and Hispanics, it remained a black enclave, with all the complicated and often painful history that status has involved in Virginia.

Albert Bland is known as the village's unofficial mayor, and in many ways he embodies the history and the spirit of St. Louis. Bland and his wife, Ann, live in a tidy ranch-style house just off St. Louis Road, a busy north-south route that connects Route 50 west of Middleburg with the Snickersville Turnpike. The majority of the mostly modest single-family houses in the 300-acre village are loosely strung for about a mile along both sides of this rural thoroughfare.

Bland, 77, was born in nearby Upperville, the great-grandson, he believes, of Robert E. Lee; a framed picture of his grandfather displayed in his living room shows a dapper, fair-skinned man.

Bland moved to St. Louis in the 1950s to work as an exercise rider and a jockey at a large horse facility, which became Paul Mellon's Middleburg Training Track. Almost all the grooms at the track were black then, he said. In fact, so many residents of St. Louis once made their living working with horses that the village was known as the "black Middleburg."

For a number of years, St. Louis even held the Colored Colt Show, its version of the tony Upperville Colt and Horse Show.

A riding accident led Bland to a job with the Rand Corp., but throughout his working life and into retirement he has labored at his second, unpaid job: advocate for his village. He has helped fight for paved roads and for safety measures for the children at Banneker Elementary, near the village center. And he was a major player in a defining battle for St. Louis, the struggle to get a sewer system.

About 40 years ago, a county survey of 13 unincorporated Loudoun villages singled out St. Louis as a health hazard. The children at Banneker couldn't even drink the water, because it was contaminated by village outhouses. No one in St. Louis had indoor plumbing: A perk of working at the track, Bland said, was access to a shower.

A county-commissioned study determined that St. Louis needed a sewage system, but a coalition of local landowners, fearing it would lead to more "huts" being built -- "their" word, Bland said -- fought the plan, mostly through zoning.

"It was a battle from Day 1. No question about it being racism," he said.

Bland still can chronicle the many meetings -- state, county and local, zoning, planning, supervisory and water -- that he attended until St. Louis finally prevailed and the sewage system was completed in 1982.

Although a building boom never ensued, the sewer system eventually did lead to a development unforeseen at that time: Habitat for Humanity houses.

Bud Green, president of Loudoun Habitat for Humanity, said the sewage system helped make it affordable for his nonprofit agency to build in St. Louis, first two houses on Saint Louis's Pennycress Lane, and most recently three houses on a 2 1/2 -acre tract on Bernard Lane near Banneker, with two more planned. Habitat's newest St. Louis homeowners are a single woman from the Leesburg area, a Salvadoran family of four and a family of six from Eritrea.