Loudoun County, Virginia is moving to reconstruct one of the last surviving slave quarters in Northern Virginia, transforming a deteriorating mid-19th-century site into a public landmark honoring the people who were enslaved there.
The Arcola Quarters for the Enslaved sits on county-owned land near Dulles Airport in eastern Loudoun, an area now defined by data centers and residential development rather than the wheat, corn, and dairy plantations that once depended on enslaved labor. In 1860, enslaved people made up roughly a quarter of Loudoun County's population. Almost nothing built for them has survived the suburbs.
The county has posted a contractor solicitation on its bid portal to carry out the construction phase of the project. A previous stabilization effort kept the structure from collapsing; this phase is intended to make the site publicly accessible as an interpretive historic site.
The project is a decade in the making. The county's Heritage Commission and the Black History Committee of the Friends of the Thomas Balch Library pushed for years to preserve the quarters before development consumed the land around them. Their efforts gained momentum amid the 2017 Charlottesville rally and accelerated after 2020, when Loudoun also removed a Confederate soldier statue from its courthouse lawn following a contentious legal fight.
The county's willingness to spend public money on the site carries symbolic weight given where Loudoun stands today. It is the wealthiest county in the United States by median household income, home to the world's largest concentration of data centers. That prosperity has arrived so fast that farmland and historic parcels alike are regularly cleared for server halls and subdivisions. Preserving the Arcola quarters means holding ground against that pressure while also asking residents to reckon with what the land was built on.
The reconstruction fits a broader national pattern of historic sites centering the enslaved rather than the enslaver, from Monticello's Mulberry Row to Montpelier's interpretive galleries on enslaved life. Loudoun is now adding a site of its own to that list.
Contractor selection is underway following the Aug. 31 posting.
