Qualla: Loudoun County, Virginia

Loudoun County, Virginia: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit La Citta Vita, CC BY-SA 2.0. If you open a browser anywhere on Earth right now, your packets probably travel through a cornfield in Loudoun County. Inside the windowless boxes scattered along Route 28 in Ashburn, more than sixty data centers process what local boosters call Data Center Alley - some 25 million square feet of server capacity that handles, by one disputed estimate, 70 percent of daily global web traffic. The fields outside still grow corn and host horse trials. The cattle still graze near Middleburg. But the dominant export of this Virginia county is no longer wheat. It is bandwidth. The transition happened so quickly that the people who broke ground on Dulles Airport in 1958 - when Loudoun was still considered the breadbasket of Virginia - would not recognize the skyline of cooling towers and chain-link that has grown up around it.

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Image: La Citta Vita | CC BY-SA 2.0

Loudoun County, Virginia: Breadbasket of the Revolution

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Karen Nutini, CC BY-SA 3.0. Loudoun County was established in 1757 from the western half of Fairfax County. It took its name from John Campbell, Fourth Earl of Loudoun and governor general of Virginia from 1756 to 1759. By the time of the American Revolution it was the most populous county in Virginia, and ...

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Image: Karen Nutini | CC BY-SA 3.0

Loudoun County, Virginia: Mosby's Country

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit General George Marshall, CC BY-SA 4.0. Both Loudoun delegates voted against secession at the Virginia convention in April 1861. John Janney, a former Quaker and former slaveholder from Leesburg, presided over the convention itself. The voters of Loudoun then ratified secession anyway. By October the war had come to Ba...

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Image: General George Marshall | CC BY-SA 4.0

Loudoun County, Virginia: Dulles Changes Everything

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ser Amantio di Nicolao, CC0. On November 17, 1962, President Kennedy dedicated Dulles International Airport on a stretch of corn and pasture in southeastern Loudoun. Eero Saarinen had designed the terminal: a sweeping concrete shell that looked like nothing else in America. Saarinen did not live to see it op...

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Image: Ser Amantio di Nicolao | CC0

Loudoun County, Virginia: The Internet Capital

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DreadyEMT, CC BY-SA 3.0. In the late 1990s a regional internet exchange called MAE-East operated out of a Tysons Corner parking garage. When that exchange ran out of room, the engineers running it began looking for cheap real estate with cheap power, low seismic risk, and proximity to the federal governm...

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Image: DreadyEMT | CC BY-SA 3.0

Loudoun County, Virginia: Horse Country, Wine Country

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Karen Nutini, CC BY-SA 3.0. Drive west from Ashburn for thirty minutes and the data centers disappear. The Loudoun Valley opens up between the Catoctin and Bull Run mountains, with the Blue Ridge rising blue and gray on the far side. The equine industry generates around $78 million a year. The Morven Park I...

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Image: Karen Nutini | CC BY-SA 3.0