Historic & Scenic Landscapes

The Piedmont’s beautiful vistas also present some of America’s most historic terrain.

Unison Historic District Offers a Window to the Civil War

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.

Victory at Wilderness Battlefield

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.