The Piedmont View

Our quarterly membership newsletter. 

Highway Through Keswick?

Posted on by PEC

Can the local community come up with a better plan for Routes 22 and 231 than VDOT’s plan to make it a highway?

The main road through Keswick in Albemarle County—Rtes. 22 and 231—runs through a landscape that Thomas Jefferson described as “the Eden of the United States”.  Today, a traveler on this road can experience a landscape much like the one Jefferson and others of his generation saw—open farmland rising up to woodlands on the gentle slopes of the Southwest Mountains.  What will it be like to travel on this road in 20 years or 50 years or 100 years?  It’s an open question.

Unison Historic District Offers a Window to the Civil War

Posted on by PEC

The village of Unison in western Loudoun, as if charmed in some way to keep from changing, is a quiet hamlet of well-kept old buildings, with many farmhouses, barns and churches that measure their age in centuries.  They are settled into a landscape of farm fields and stone walls, where the curving hills and stands of trees give way, in their own rhythm, to views of the calm blue line of mountains on the western horizon. 

It’s the roads in Unison that historians get most excited about, says Mitch Diamond of the Unison Preservation Society, which is leading efforts to list this area as a historic district on the state and national registers of historic places.

Places29 — Ready for a Vote

Posted on by PEC

The Albemarle County Board of Supervisors appears poised to adopt the Places29 plan, after making some final changes at its Nov. 10 meeting. PEC has been a longstanding advocate for Places29 — a blueprint for strategic transportation investments and smart land use planning that will reduce traffic congestion and create better options for walking, biking and public transit. The current draft, which will go to a vote in January, is a positive outcome from a meeting at which there was real danger that the Board would fundamentally weaken the plan.

Victory at Wilderness Battlefield

Posted on by PEC

In a dramatic win for historic preservation, after three years of controversy, Walmart has dropped its plans to build a Supercenter at the edge of Wilderness Battlefield in Orange County. On the first day of a court case contesting Orange County’s decision to approve the big-box store, Walmart made a surprise announcement — that it had reversed its course, deciding not to build on the historic property but to preserve it.

Protecting the Cedar Run Watershed

Posted on by PEC

When Mike and Margrete Stevens first came to Fauquier County eighteen years ago, as the new owners of Bonny Brook Farm, near Warrenton, they made friends with their neighbors Julian and Sue Scheer and Hilary and Rich Gerhardt (the Scheers’ daughter and son-in-law). This friendship with a family of dedicated conservationists led the Stevens to start hosting a wildflower walk on their land each April, as a sky-colored carpet of Virginia Bluebells blossoms along Cedar Run.

Federal Court Strikes Down Transmission Line Corridors

Posted on by PEC

In 2007, the U.S. Department of Energy designated two National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors (NIETCs), where energy companies were granted unprecedented access to federal eminent domain authority for the fast track siting of transmission lines. These “corridors” spanned 100 million acres, and the larger of the two, in the eastern part of the country, extended from New York to Virginia and included six of PEC’s nine counties: Clarke, Culpeper, Fauquier, Loudoun, Madison and Rappahannock.

Giving Back

Posted on by Todd Lamonia

Jean Scott, 82, of Culpeper County placed her 118-acre tract of land on the Hazel River into a permanent conservation easement in 2010. Mrs. Scott’s donation will be an enduring legacy of conservation; a testament to the value of Virginia’s natural spaces. Yet, if you ask Mrs. Scott if she considers herself an environmentalist, she will chuckle and, almost bashfully, say, “Well, no. I don’t think so.”

Cows, Not Condos

Posted on by PEC

Bev McKay's family has been farming the land that he just protected in Clarke County for over 200 years. Mr. McKay raises dairy cattle on the property, as well as crops, such as corn and barley, to feed the cows.

The land is good for farming, with gently rolling fields and rich loam soils. Because of its value as productive farmland, the USDA and PEC worked together to purchase an easement on 103 acres, over half of which are prime agricultural soils.