Prince William

May 20, 2024

The first and second battles of Bull Run, in July 1861 and August 1862 respectively, both Confederate victories, sums up the important history of what is now Prince William County, Virginia. Two White men were lynched in Manassas in 1892, adding an unsavory note, and a departure from the epidemic of lynchings of Black men throughout the South.

From there on, Prince William puttered to late last century, when it earned its reputation as a practical place for working people to lay their heads, including thousands of active-duty military personnel. The county is bracketed with sites of respect, Manassas National Battlefield in the west and Quantico National Cemetery in the south.

To accommodate commuters, subdivisions spread like Levittowns in the 1950s to where the place is today. To carry them to work, I-95 went through decades of ugly renovation, the high-occupancy vehicle or HOV system was invented, the Virginia Railway Express line went in from the north to Manassas and Fredericksburg.

Now, at our old Prince William home and up and down the street, the dandelions and clover are blooming and spreading. The row of camellias we planted are engulfed by vines. The hostas are dwarfed by clusters of invasive greenery. The backyard lawn merges with a tangle of waist-high weeds.

The East Lake Ridge subdivision, on a bright May afternoon, shows the thick vernal growth of spring. Lawns are lush but slightly scruffy, thanks to last week’s heavy rain. Here and there landscaping crews ride their mowers or wave their gas-powered weedwhackers, creating an ungodly whine.

The county has an exhausted look to it. The main thoroughfares are clogged with commuters. A massive, multi-story healthcare facility has risen in Woodbridge, the vast parking lot already paved. It’s a workday, no pedestrians stroll the sidewalks. Some lucky folks work remotely, but moms now are commuting to offices or to retail or restaurant jobs, homes are mostly empty.

The grasping reach of the city has stretched, almost greedily, to 60, maybe 70 miles in every direction, and with it the gridlock and the commercial support system, all lit by neon at least a half-day. Columns of autos line up at every traffic signal, old restaurants now deal in fast food, established autocare centers have evolved as stop-and-go quick market/pump outlets.

We went to the old church, the few people we recognized looked just like us, weathered by the last three years. Maybe they wondered where we’ve been, what we’ve been doing.

Four years ago the place was changing in strange ways, more lawns overgrown, more unfamiliar autos lining the curbs, black mold showing through shingles on more roofs, more unfamiliar pedestrians. Longevity creates staleness, weariness, indifference. The neighborhood was long in the tooth, like us.

The ferocity of sprawl presses in on these half-dozen streets of fifty-year-old residences. The steady, steadfast tenor of suburban existence, maybe always a delusion, now teeters on the quiet chaos of neglect. Our former next-door neighbor, or maybe his successor, has erected a small house in the backyard hard against the property line to accommodate renters, once a zoning violation, now unnoticed by the county.

Vast economic and social pressures are descending on these places with brute force. Human life is flowing to the outlying and farther-outlying, once-rural environs, bulldozing forests to throw up more civilization, more subdivisions, more roads, malls, offices, schools. Transformation is relentless, at the pace of the financing and the availability of construction crews.

Thousands have escaped, others still are escaping down the congested interstates to southern places. Those who stay adapt to the six-lane avenues that once were two-lane roads. Old U.S. Route 1 south of Woodbridge, once a trail along Potomac River swamps, now passes miles of Macmansions and condos. On Old Bridge Road in Lake Ridge a historic marker, “Woodbridge Airport,” recognizes the airstrip built in 1961 and operated until 1987. The marker notes it closed because of “encroaching suburban development.”

The site is now a strip mall backing up to acres of townhomes. The strip mall is the usual: a Gold’s Gym, a supermarket, a Chinese restaurant, and so on.

The suburbs that encroached are being encroached upon, the term doesn’t fit what they have become, beehive-like midget cities that form webs, links to cities, Arlington, Alexandria, Springfield, where highrises have been piled for decades, and farther out to Fredericksburg, Luray, Strasburg.

The locals may be as shell-shocked as their visitors by the gridlock, the bulldozing, the metastasizing overnight retail, a half-dozen counties recreating themselves. But they bear up. This is home, reshaped by bleak economics, but still home. Rushed conversations, since everything is rushed, may touch on relocating somewhere quieter, but the work is here, the jobs are here.

Forty years ago the place was a frontier, the old-timers laugh when they talk about it. No traffic-choked Prince William Parkway, Woodbridge to I-66, no HOV lanes, no massive windowless data centers. Reagan was president, pushing for growth, fast growth, crazy growth here and everywhere. The place started exploding when the parents of today’s children were children themselves.

Still, the parklands are green, the churches mostly well-attended, the schools are considered pretty good. NOVA kids, most or many of them, go off to college. Some hang around for community college and local jobs. They and their parents are out there on I-95, inching forward, growing up, talking about getting away.