Qualla: Leesburg, Virginia

Leesburg, Virginia: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit General George Marshall, CC BY-SA 4.0. In late August 1814, with British troops marching on Washington, a clerk named Stephen Pleasonton stuffed the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and George Washington's correspondence into coarse linen bags, loaded them onto wagons, and drove them west. He kept driving until he reached Leesburg, Virginia, thirty-three miles from the burning capital. The papers spent the next three weeks locked in a brick house belonging to Reverend John Littlejohn while the Capitol smoldered. For the brief span between August 24 and September 17, the founding documents of the United States lived in a Loudoun County county seat. When the British left, Pleasonton drove them back. The house is gone. The town remembers.

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Image: General George Marshall | CC BY-SA 4.0

Leesburg, Virginia: Crossroads and Courthouse

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0. Nicholas Minor was a tavern keeper before he was a town founder. Around 1755 he acquired land where the Old Carolina Road - the long Native trail that ran north from the Catawba country in the Carolinas - crossed the Potomac Ridge Road, the path that eventually became Route 7. He...

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Image: Famartin | CC BY-SA 4.0

Leesburg, Virginia: Eight Times Over

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Acroterion, CC BY-SA 4.0. When the Civil War came, Leesburg sat on the front line between Union and Confederate territory and exchanged hands at least eight times. The town's sympathies were mostly Confederate, but the county's western half - settled by German and English Quakers around Waterford - was st...

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Image: Acroterion | CC BY-SA 4.0

Leesburg, Virginia: Dodona Manor

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Acroterion, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1941, with war already raging in Europe and the United States edging toward joining it, General George Catlett Marshall and his wife Katherine bought a Federal-style house at 217 Edwards Ferry Road. They named it Dodona Manor, after the ancient Greek oracle where sacred oaks g...

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Image: Acroterion | CC BY-SA 4.0

Leesburg, Virginia: Godfrey's Cow Pasture

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Strafrag, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the early 1950s the most popular man on American radio bought a 2,000-acre farm west of Leesburg. Arthur Godfrey ran a CBS variety show that drew 80 million weekly listeners at its peak - one in every two Americans alive. He kept horses, raised cattle, and built his own small ...

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Image: Strafrag | CC BY-SA 4.0

Leesburg, Virginia: Original Town Center

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown authorUnknown author or not provided, Public domain. Loudoun County is the wealthiest county in America by median household income, and most of its growth has come from data centers, biotech corridors, and the planned communities that ring Dulles Airport. Leesburg's downtown merchants now market themselves as Loudoun's Original Tow...

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Image: Unknown authorUnknown author or not provided | Public domain