Loudoun Village Was Founded on Freedom and Horses
By M.J. McAteer
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, March 8, 2008
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.
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."
View all comments that have been posted about this article.