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A new 85-acre park just outside of Leesburg is one step closer to reality. NOVA Parks took formal ownership of the land at Edwards Ferry Road and Battlefield Parkway on Dec. 27.

The parks authority, which is funded by several Northern Virginia localities including Loudoun, plans to build a trail network, interpretive signs and a parking area on what will become Cattail Regional Park, named for the small stream that bisects the property.

It will be the 36th park in the NOVA Parks system and the 16th in Loudoun County. Red Rock Wilderness Overlook Regional Park, a 67-acre park with access to the Potomac River, is already established just down Edwards Ferry Road.

There is not yet a timeline to open the Cattail property to the public. “We just got it this week, the deed got signed yesterday,” NOVA Parks CEO Paul Gilbert said on Dec. 28. But, he said, opening the park is a priority since it is so close to major population centers.

“You want to put your park development efforts where they are going to have the most impact on the public and where people can use and enjoy [them],” he said. “… Where else, right in the Leesburg area, are you going to have 85 acres of beautiful open space with fields and forests and incredible natural beauty?”

The Cattail property includes mature forests, open fields and an upland bog, according to NOVA Parks.

The land was donated by the Harris family. It is part of what was a 193-acre farm owned by the family for four generations, according to a 2019 zoning application, and the family agreed to donate it to the park authority as part of a broader plan to build a residential subdivision and a church elsewhere on the property. The Board of Supervisors voted in 2020 to rezone 96 acres of the farm for up to 250 residential units. The housing, church and park “will be designed and integrated harmoniously,” the 2019 application said.

Henry Harris is the nephew of A.V. Symington, who in 1985 donated the land for Temple Hall Farm Regional Park north of Leesburg.

“There’s a family connection there, and he was thinking about what his aunt did with Temple Hall, and that’s part of what inspired him to donate this land for a park,” Gilbert said.

Another park is on track to open this spring in the Brambleton-Broadlands area, Gilbert said. Reservoir Park at Beaverdam will feature a range of facilities on the shores of the reservoir, including a crew/rowing facility, boat rentals and waterfront boardwalks.

“It’s really coming along. It’s really exciting,” Gilbert said.

The parks authority also owns a 228-acre property along the Potomac near the Point of Rocks bridge, but Gilbert said that will likely not be opened as a park for some time as the authority focuses on developing other assets.

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The new park was donated by the Harris family, who preserved the property for generations, and also donated Temple Hall Farm to the parks system about 30 years ago.

Courtesy of NOVA Parks

Loudoun County will soon have a new public park called Cattail Regional Park.

NOVA Parks (a conservation agency that manages 12,465 acres in the region) on Wednesday created the 36th park in its system when it received the deed to the 85 acres in Leesburg. It’s not yet clear when the park will open to the public, according to the Loudoun Times.

The property was donated by members of the Harris family, who have preserved it for generations and also donated Temple Hall Farm to the parks system about 30 years ago.

The new park is located at the corner of Edwards Ferry Road and Battlefield Parkway. It’s home to mature forests, open fields, and an upland bog. Eventually, the parks organization plans to add an entrance, parking, a trail network, and interpretive signs, according to a release.

The Cattail land has a long history. A building located there served as a bed-and-breakfast as far back as 1776, and the land also housed fortifications along Edwards Ferry Road during the Civil War, according to NOVA Parks officials. In the late 1960s, after the public pool in Leesburg was closed to suppress integration efforts, the owners of the Cattail property opened the property for local Black children to learn how to swim at the family pool, according to a press release.

“I would like to thank the Harris family for this remarkable gift. Their contributions to our community run very deep,” Loudoun County Board of Supervisors Chair Phyllis J. Randall said in a statement.

The future Cattail Regional Park comes as NOVA Parks continues adding new parkland throughout the region. The agency added the 44-acre Winkler Botanical Preserve in Alexandria in 2022 and it also plans to open Reservoir Park at Beaverdam, also in Loudoun County, with new facilities by mid-2024. Separately, Virginia also opened its newest state park, Sweet Run in Loudoun County, in Loudoun earlier this year.

A sprawling patch of forest and fields just outside Leesburg will be turned into Northern Virginia’s newest public park, preserving a centuries-old country landscape amid booming development that is making such views increasingly rare.

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The 85-acre plot of land — including a structure dating back to the Revolutionary War era — was donated Wednesday to the region’s parks authority by Henry Harris, a retired geologist whose family has owned and lived on wide tracts in the area for nearly a century.

“It’s a holiday present for the whole Northern Virginia community,” said Paul Gilbert, the executive director of NOVA Parks, which will open the land up to the public.

The property, which is located on the corner of Edwards Ferry Road and Battlefield Parkway, about 2½ miles from Leesburg’s town center, is a smaller part of about 200 acres the family has stewarded in Loudoun County for five generations.

But as suburban housing developments have encroached nearby, Harris, 75, said his family decided to donate the land to ensure it maintained the rural, historic character that he remembers from his childhood.

“It’s so different from the place where we grew up,” he said. “Our feeling was that it was too busy for us … but we know other people can enjoy it, and we hope they do enjoy it.”

Where Edwards Ferry Road was a dirt path when he was a kid, he said, thousands of cars now traverse down that major thoroughfare each day. His family, which had already given up major tracts of land to be transformed into parks, said they wanted to add to that legacy.

Loudoun County farms are leaving. There’s a fight over how to save them.

His aunt, A.V. Symington, several decades ago donated nearly 300 acres where she had farmed pigs, chickens and popping corn to create the nearby Temple Hall Farm Regional Park. (Leesburg’s aquatics center now bears her name.)

NOVA Parks, which manages sites across six jurisdictions in Northern Virginia, will be setting up parking and trails on the site as it opens up the property, which is protected by conservation easements.

Gilbert said Harris’s gift, which had been in the works for several years, will help NOVA Parks continue its long tradition of “getting land donations and making them beautiful places where the public can come be with nature.”

The Cattail site is a notable addition to the authority’s portfolio in part because of its history: A former inn located on the property may be one of the oldest structures in the county, Harris said.

The Englishman Nicholas Cresswell, a royalist who came to the colonies just as a Revolutionary War effort was heating up, described in his journal a stay at the Cattail Ordinary, a kind of 18th-century bed-and-breakfast. While that structure — adjacent to the house Harris grew up in — has seen additions over the years, the heart of the building is the same.

The property also played a small role in a key episode of the Civil War. Confederate troops dug fortifications along Edwards Ferry Road in anticipation of the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, which was fought mostly at a nearby park on the banks of the Potomac River with the same name.

Those “earthworks,” as they are known, can still be seen on the property, Gilbert said, along with an upland bog, a rare kind of wetland area located on top of a bluff.

Black men weren’t allowed guns in the early Civil War. He fired one anyway.

Adjacent to the future park, a developer is building an enclave of new single-family homes on land that was sold by the Harris clan. The family donated another 13-acre tract of land to be turned into a church.

Harris said his family never sought to become a major landowner in the Leesburg area when earlier generations arrived in the 1930s. But it happened largely because of “inertia.”

“We became rooted,” he said. “At that time, land was maybe a couple hundred dollars an acre and now it’s thousands of dollars an acre.” As they looked to preserve about half the landscape, turning it into a park was a no-brainer amid the area’s rapid change in recent years.

Gilbert said that the influx of new homes and people underscores why the transformation of land into a park is so important.

“We need to continue to expand our parkland because our population continues to grow,” he said. “Parks are a vital piece of the infrastructure of any great community. They’re like roads and schools and anything else: We need to grow the area of parkland that we have as our population grows.”

Likewise, Loudoun County Board of Supervisors Chair Phyllis J. Randall (D-At Large) said in a news release that the Harris family’s donation is a “remarkable gift” that “will serve the public for generations to come.”

Overview

This project will construct a new interchange at the Route 15 Bypass intersections of Edwards Ferry Road and Fort Evans Road, including new crosswalks and sidewalks along the Route 15 Bypass at Edwards Ferry Road and Fort Evans Road, and a new shared-use path along westbound Fort Evans Road.

The project area has experienced significant commercial growth over the past few decades. As a result, traffic volumes are beyond the capacity of the existing at-grade signalized intersections.

Currently, there is heavy congestion due to high traffic volumes on the Bypass during peak periods, as well as heavy turn movements to and from Edwards Ferry Road and Fort Evans Road. The existing road network lacks continuous sidewalks and existing conditions do not allow bicyclists and pedestrians to safely cross Route 15.

Estimated Costs Preliminary Engineering-$10.4 million Right of Way Acquisition and Utility Relocation-$13.9 million Construction: $157 million Total: $181.2 million

The project is funded through preliminary engineering and is financed with federal and Northern Virginia Transportation Authority funds.

Within the project limits, Route 15 averages about 52,000 vehicles a day, Edwards Ferry Road averages about 29,000 and Fort Evans Road averages 13,000.

Benefits

The project aims to relieve congestion and improve safety, operations and accessibility for drivers, bicyclists and pedestrians.

Major Milestones

Begin Preliminary Engineering - November 2015 First Public Information Meeting - March 2016 Second Public Information Meeting - March 2017 Design Public Hearing - May 2018 Design Approval - May 2019 Begin Right of Way Acquisition - To be determined as additional funding becomes available Begin Construction - To be determined as additional funding becomes available

Other Relevant Links

Categorical Exclusion - April 2018

Preliminary Noise Analysis - February 2018

Town of Leesburg Route 15 Bypass/Edwards Ferry Road Interchange Project Webpage

Design Public Hearing (Ad) - May 2018 Meeting Materials