By Peter Cary Piedmont Journalism Foundation May 3, 2022
Posters in support of preserving current rural area zoning displayed in Battlefield High School for the April 28 rural crescent town hall.
It was billed as a town hall, but was more like a 1960s-era teach-in. When 300 Prince William County residents gathered at Battlefield High School last week, they heard about development at its worst: Children losing their outdoor play spaces. Drinking water under threat of pollution and salinization. Cluster housing run amuck.
Some of the focus, not surprisingly, was on the proposed Prince William Digital Gateway, a plan to open 2,100 acres of land surrounding Pageland Lane to data centers. But the target was even wider. And the speakers ranged from elementary-school students to citizen-experts on water quality, transportation and noise pollution, all explaining why bad development harms them and their neighborhoods and their lives.
The tone was set by Thomas Keapproth, a fifth-grader at The Nokesville School, who opened the session with a plea to stop a potential re-planning of 1,700 acres bordering his Nokesville home into an industrial corridor. He said one of the things he likes best is his nature walks to see the “green lands in the summer and autumn leaves in the fall,” as well as local deer, beavers, turkeys, and turtles. If adults “make the decision to destroy the farms and trees and future generations will lose these forests and farms forever,” he said.
People look at posters displaying possible land-use changes for Prince William County’s rural area during an April 28 town hall meeting hosted by the Coalition to Save Prince William County. Peter Cary
But the bite was delivered by remarks from two African American residents, Deshundra Jefferson of Montclair and Frank Washington of Thoroughfare. Addressing issues such as proposed updates to the county’s comprehensive plan, the possible construction of the Bi-County Parkway, and deciding whether to approve the new digital corridor in the county’s rural north, Jefferson said: “The [county] board is making decisions that are going to affect our county for generations.” All of these matters, she said, may have destructive effects on residents in the eastern part of the county and people of color.
She said she was opposed to people “using race for their own gain,” a not-too-veiled reference to pro-development advocates who argue that preserving the rural crescent extends a racially exclusive way of life. She said that industrial development in the northern rural crescent will affect the water in the Occoquan Reservoir that she and her 14-year-old son drink. And she said the long-threatened Bi-County Parkway, which would incorporate a widened Va. 234, would bisect not only the county but local neighborhoods. “We have developer-driven growth,” she said.
Frank Washington, founder of the Coalition to Save Historic Thoroughfare, began by describing the desecration of the Scott Cemetery, a historic African American and Native American cemetery now owned by a local brewery, but then moved on to the dangers posed to Pageland Lane, an area rich in Black history, by a proposed 2,100-acre data center development along that road near the Manassas National Battlefield Park.
He said that a plantation that ran along Pageland was owned by the same family who owned a plantation in Thoroughfare, and that Jennie Dean was born a slave on the Pageland Lane-area plantation. After the war, she and her family built their home on the land where she was held captive. Dean went on to found the Manassas Industrial School, which for a time was the only secondary school for African American children in all of Northern Virginia. The school was located on land adjacent to a City of Manassas elementary school that bears Dean’s name.
Noting that the Pageland Lane area is dotted with historic African American cemeteries, churches, and schools, Washington said the area “tells a story of one of the most significant periods of American history: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the formation of African American communities that developed during the post-Civil War, developments that helped to then build Prince William County.”
Washington said he had seen only minimal acknowledgement of historic cemeteries or graves in the Pageland corridor data center proposal, and based on his experience in Thoroughfare, he said he does not trust Pageland developers to protect them. He called pending development “an onslaught, of greed, power and privilege that threatens our collective history, our environment as a whole, and in many ways, our entire way of life.”
Turning to overt racism, Washington said people who support the development of Pageland Lane are also saying that the Manassas Battlefield glorifies the Confederacy, thus arguing that those who would preserve the battlefield are racists: “They are calling the very people who have stood and walked beside me, in our fight for Thoroughfare, racist, because they simply support preserving Pageland and the Battlefield,” he said. “We cannot afford to allow them to use a race card to pit us against each other.”
“You see, division is truly our real enemy. If we allow them to divide us with the various rhetoric I hear being used to try and pit race against race, or the east side of the county against the west side, that division will be our downfall,” he said.
Washington received a standing ovation. Attending the meeting were school board members Adele Jackson of Brentsville and Jennifer Wall of Gainesville, as well as Brentsville District Supervisor Jeanine Lawson.
Illustrating the interconnection of the east and west of the county, Vida Carroll, who lives and farms in the Brentsville District, talked of the county’s proposal in its “Pathway to 2040” comprehensive plan update to expand 100 acres planned for industrial uses along the railroad tracks to 1,700 acres – not to mention a separate re-zoning application to turn a nearby 277-acre farm into a data center complex. The proposed revision to the comprehensive plan was unveiled in February but still has a long way to go before adoption.
Located between Nokesville and the Fauquier County line, the land included in the comprehensive plan change would be opened to data centers and hard industrial uses, she said.
“Industrial developments like data centers and cement plants are incompatible with rural and residential zoning.” Like development along Pageland Lane, she said this too could affect the county’s watershed.
Carroll also warned of cluster residential zoning that would spread housing development to rural areas. Current schools will be stressed, resulting in more new schools, pulling resources away from the eastern schools that need improvement while the western end keeps getting new schools, she warned.
“I want to live for a long time in Prince William County and raise my kids here,” she said. But, she added, “You don’t have to be an expert in this to understand how wrong and how damaging this land plan, if you can call it a plan, is going to be to the county.”