The village had been here long before the falls gave it its name. Colonial farm settlements emerged on this stretch of the Potomac Piedmont in the late 1700s, growing tobacco, then wheat, then dairy as the land tired of the earlier crops. The local crossroads was unofficially called Forestville for over a century, but the United States Postal Service already had a Forestville in Virginia, so the post office adopted the alternate name Great Falls in 1955. The vote happened at a community meeting. The new name simplified the mail and acknowledged the geographic reality. The falls themselves, the cataract where the Potomac drops seventy-six feet through Mather Gorge, are about a mile from the village center on the river side. Most of the community is on the Piedmont upland above and west of the falls.

Great Falls sits between Difficult Run on the south and the Potomac River on the north and east. The smaller tributaries that run through the community, Nichols Run, Clarks Branch, Captain Hickory Run, and Piney Run, drain east toward the Potomac through the forested estates that fill most of the modern landscape. The Piedmont here is rolling, not flat, with bluffs and ridges along the river side and gentler grades inland. Soil is shallow over bedrock, which is part of what made the original tobacco farming difficult and which now makes for picturesque rocky outcrops in horse pastures. The community has no formal municipal boundaries. It is a census-designated place, organized for statistical purposes but not for governance. Fairfax County provides the county services.

The post-war transformation of Great Falls into a wealthy bedroom community for Washington started with horses. The land was cheap by Washington standards in the 1950s and 1960s, the schools were excellent, the rural character was charming, and the proximity to the federal city was perfect. Successful Washingtonians built large houses on the old farms, then larger houses on the slightly smaller subdivisions of those farms, and so on. By the 1990s, Great Falls was one of the wealthiest zip codes in the United States, with a median income consistently among the top fifty nationally. The horse farms have largely persisted, sometimes as working stables, sometimes as boarding operations, sometimes as scenery for houses built on the periphery. The Great Falls Hunt still rides through the area in season. The community zoning preserves the rural character that drew the wealth in the first place.

The Village Green at the center of Great Falls hosts a Spring Festival with an Easter egg hunt, a Fourth of July parade, a Halloween costume event, a Thanksgiving gathering, and a Christmas tree lighting that draws families from across northern Virginia. Summer evenings, the green hosts free concerts. Riverbend County Park, on the Potomac just upstream of the falls, offers boat ramps, nature trails, and a less crowded alternative to the Great Falls Park itself. The Great Falls Library serves as both a county library branch and a small community center. Siena Academy, a Catholic Montessori school operated by the Diocese of Arlington, is the only private K-12 school in the community. Fairfax County Public Schools operates Great Falls Elementary, Forestville Elementary, Colvin Run Elementary, James Fenimore Cooper Middle School, and Langley High School, the latter of which serves much of the wealthy McLean and Great Falls area.

Great Falls voted Republican by comfortable margins through the 1990s and 2000s. The community has shifted over the past decade. In 2012 the precinct gave Mitt Romney 55 percent of its vote. In 2020 it gave Joe Biden 58 percent. The shift mirrors the broader transformation of Washington's wealthy outer suburbs, where college-educated professional families that had once voted Republican on tax and small-government grounds have moved Democratic in response to the Trump-era Republican Party. The community remains overwhelmingly affluent, professionally accomplished, and family-centered, but the political coloration has flipped. Demographically, Great Falls has also diversified: the Asian American share of the population grew from less than 1 percent in 1980 to nearly 20 percent in 2020, the largest growth in any racial category. The horse farms remain. The fire station and the village green remain. The community that sits a mile from the cataract continues to be one of the quietest, most prosperous corners of Washington's orbit.