Saving the View, Not Just the Village: How Waterford, Virginia, Pioneered Landscape Preservation

In 1969, when W. Brown Morton III drew the boundary of the Waterford Historic District in Loudoun County, Virginia, he ignored property lines. Instead, he stood with his back to each building in the village and looked outward, asking how much of the surrounding view he could reasonably protect without overreaching. What made Waterford nationally significant, he believed, was the unspoiled viewshed as well as the village itself. The boundary he drew enclosed 1,420 acres of farmland, forest and hills.

Waterford from the air. NPS photo / University of Delaware, Center for Historic Architecture and Design, December 2019.

A village worth the effort

Waterford, in the Catoctin Valley, is among the best-preserved of the agricultural villages that grew up in the United States after the Revolution, and it keeps reminders of the market revolution that transformed the country in the half century that followed. Its twentieth-century rescue is a landmark in its own right.

Keeping the look and feel of a nineteenth-century farm village meant conserving the open land as well as the buildings — hard, as Washington, D.C.'s commuter belt spread outward in the late twentieth century.

The Waterford Mill, one of the buildings the Waterford Foundation was founded to save. NPS photo / University of Delaware, CHAD.

What the people who did it said

To update the landmark's documentation, the NPS and the University of Delaware's Center for Historic Architecture and Design interviewed people who carried out the preservation — state and county officials, people tied to the Waterford Foundation, and a 1990s consultant. In summary:

Easements did the heavy lifting. A preservation easement is a voluntary legal agreement, usually recorded in a deed, that permanently protects a historic property or open space. Informants named Waterford's building and land easements as the most important tool, and were struck by how many there were and how densely packed. Milton Herd, a former lead planner for Loudoun County, called easements the most powerful technical tool because they are so strong and permanent — though he stressed that the real engine was the whole effort of promotion and education by the Foundation, backed by the county, and that easements need constant upkeep. Calder Loth, a Virginia architectural historian and former state easement coordinator, thought Waterford likely had the largest concentration of easements in the state and knew of nothing comparable nationally.

Neighbors persuaded neighbors. Morton kept a map of the district and colored in each parcel as it was protected, aiming to cover the whole landmark; he got well along, though not all the way. John Chamberlin, whose grandfather was among the first restorers in the 1930s, recalled the Foundation putting façade easements on its own buildings and urging ordinary homeowners to follow. Some feared for their property values, but many joined — helped by a certain peer pressure.

Two firsts. Elizabeth Brabec, the landscape architect who advised Waterford in the 1990s, described the sweeping 1970s boundary as revolutionary and forward-thinking, and the effort to protect a whole vernacular landscape as a first in the country. She pointed to two innovations: "The Waterford Compact," a right of first refusal to buy development rights in a landmark's landscape, and a limited development strategy, never before applied to a cultural landscape — ways to conserve open space without stripping owners of their land's economic value.

Open space and farmland are part of the historic district. NPS photo / University of Delaware, CHAD.

What changed

Several informants said Waterford was more racially and economically diverse in the mid-twentieth century, and that a number of Black families lived there until late in the century. The preservation campaign may have contributed to the village's gradual gentrification, alongside wider forces: commuters to Washington flooding into Loudoun County, helped by better roads and more affordable cars by the 1930s; young and working people leaving for jobs as farming declined; and rising property values pushing out long-time residents, including African American families.

No former Black residents or their descendants answered the project's interview requests; the study says their perspective is essential and should be sought.

The lane from Main Street to Bond Street, past the John Wesley Church and the Samuel Means House. NPS photo / University of Delaware, CHAD.

Sources

Based on "It Takes a (Waterford) Village: Expanding the Bounds of National Historic Landmarks," National Park Service, from the series The Waterford, Virginia National Historic District, drawing on 2021 oral history interviews by the University of Delaware's Center for Historic Architecture and Design; a work of the United States government in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words.