Windows on the Past of 'Black Middleburg'

Tina Robinson, who drives a school bus for Loudoun County, was the first person to move into a Habitat house in St. Louis, on Pennycress in 2004.

She shares the three-bedroom, 1 1/2 -bath house with her son, Marcus, who is in fifth grade at Banneker. "I love the peace and quiet here," Robinson said. "I love the nature. It's a family-oriented neighborhood. I'm really happy about life right now. I'm planning on staying forever."

Eugene Howard already has been in St. Louis forever, at least for all of his 71 years, and he agrees about the sense of neighborhood. "When I was growing up, I spent as much time next door as at home," he said.

Howard met his wife, Mary, when they were students at Banneker. They live in a house crowded with family pictures on a five-acre compound called Fox's Frolic, which includes a house for Howard's mother.

Howard said white people hardly figured in his St. Louis childhood of baseball, dodge ball and marbles. When he grew up, though, he became the first black man to work at Mellon's library in Upperville and subsequently spent 45 years taking care of the philanthropist's books and paintings.

Howard, whose children and grandchildren attended Banneker, was the first president of the PTA after integration in 1968. "We just got along," he said.

The only racially heated issue he remembers was when the county wanted to rename the school. The village successfully fought to keep the Banneker name, which honors Benjamin Banneker, the black astronomer and clockmaker who helped survey the District of Columbia.

Banneker, which draws students from the surrounding area, is only 8 percent African American now, and just seven students come from St. Louis. Principal Doug Martin said the school continues to be involved in the community, however, with one of its biggest assets being its "small, family feeling."

The school has been one of two mainstays in St. Louis. The other is Mt. Zion Baptist Church, where Howard is chairman of the board of deacons and where he and his wife recently reaffirmed their wedding vows on their 50th anniversary. Mt. Zion, founded in 1893, once was so central to village life that it was said that if you were black and a Methodist, you lived in nearby Willisville, but if you were a black Baptist, you lived in St. Louis.

But like Banneker, Mt. Zion has felt the changing times. The Rev. Elton Wilson said a central mission of his church still is "to bring value to the quality of life in St. Louis." On a recent Sunday, although the service was spirited, the pews were less than a third full, and many of the parishioners were seniors.

St. Louis is heavily populated by retirees now, and Bland estimated that only about 40 percent of the residents are black. Once upon a time, many villagers made their living working on nearby estates, such as Welbourne, where their ancestors might have been slaves. Now, most of those jobs have disappeared, and the grooms at the training track are almost all Hispanic.

"Young black families have moved out for better jobs," Howard said. Most of those who remain commute to jobs in the suburbs to the east.

Meanwhile, soaring land prices have made the village too expensive for many middle-class families. According to historian Eugene Scheel, in the late 1800s, former slaves paid a member of the local gentry $20 an acre for land; in 2008, Appleton Farm, a nine-lot development at the southern fringe of St. Louis, is asking $295,000 for a 2.4-acre building site.

Howard is philosophical about the changes. "We have quite a few new neighbors," he said, "and we don't see them as much. But we all get along fine."