AUGUST 5, 2021 LOUDOUNNOW.COM

Seymour Warns of Leesburg Land Crunch

BY KARA C. RODRIGUEZ

krodriguez@loudounnow.com

The Town of Leesburg has come a long way in the past decade when its commercial occupancy is concerned.

Economic Development Director Russell Seymour on July 26 offered an update to the Town Council on the town’s commercial vacancy rates.

The office market in Leesburg has picked up strongly. Seymour compared Seymour the second quarter of 2013 to the same time period of 2020, prior to COVID’s arrival. Office vacancy dropped from almost 30% in Q2 2013, to 10.5% in the second quarter of 2020. But, of course, the pandemic changed that situation over the year, with the second quarter of 2021 showing office vacancy almost doubling to 19%.

“When COVID hit one of the things we saw was a lot of one-office businesses found out now you could actually work from home, so you noticed the uptick,” Seymour said.

In all of Loudoun County, office vacancy stands at just below 30%, he added.

It’s been a different story for retail vacancy. In the second quarter of 2013, retail vacancy in town stood at 13.3%. It had jumped to 16.4% in the second quarter of 2020, and a year later, had grown to 23.7%.

The trend of growing retail vacancies started before COVID, Seymour emphasized, but the proliferation of the online retail marketplace, accelerated during the pandemic, has played a big role in that. Another big piece of that trend is that the retail market has become over-saturated, something he said in talks with his economic development peers that other localities are

LAND SHORTAGE continues on page 30

Photos by Douglas Graham 94-year-old farmer Russell Brown, of Waterford, during an interview about his days farming at Rouges Hollow Farm off of Old Waterford Road. Brown spent most of his life farming, using horses to plow fields, cut hay and plant crops.

The Making of Farmer Brown

BY DANIELLE NADLER

Americas Routes

“Most call me Farmer Brown,” he starts. His clean plaid shirt tucked into beat-up jeans. His gray facial hair freshly shaven. He pours steaming Folgers into a John Deere mug and, with a “hush now,” directed at his border collie, he takes you back there.

Back there. When Loudoun County’s cattle outnumbered its breweries and wineries. When the nation’s capital felt a world away, rather than a daily destination for half your neighbors. And when the gravel roads were main thoroughfares rather than the place for Sunday drives.

Russell Brown starts with the early years. The late 30s, early 40s, when he cut his teeth working on “Grandpap’s farm” near Lovettsville. As he begins, you can almost taste the fresh cream from handmilked cows, see the gold dust set free by cropped hay, and feel the rough terrain of Old Waterford Road beneath your feet.

“This county has changed some since then,” the old farmer says dryly, with a trouble-making smile.

With some prodding, he slows down and gives up more details.

He was born in 1927, in a little house in Wheatland. He wasn’t raised on a farm, but he knew early on that farming was what he wanted to do with his life. At 9 years old, he went to live on his grandparents’ farm, a property on Quarter Branch Road. He spent three years there and, as far as he can remember, he worked every minute of it. He got up before sunrise to milk seven cows by hand. Then, he hurried the jars of milk inside, before catching the bus to school. In the evenings, he picked up where he’d left off, mucking stalls, processing hogs, preparing the fields for planting—whatever needed to be done.

Grandpap wasn’t too keen on paying his grandson for his help on the farm, so Russell relied on trapping to make enough cash for occasional sodas and candy bars from the general store. He caught muskrats, racoons, and skunks—and anything else that found its way to one of his traps.

One morning before school, he hurried down to the creek to check his trap. Sure enough, a skunk was waiting for him. Before Russell could take the thing out, the skunk soaked him. The boy, clinching his nose, waded into the creek to try to rinse off the stench, before hoofing it to the bus stop.

“Well, I wasn’t at school two minutes before the teacher said, ‘Russell, go home. Come back when you’re smellin’ better.’ My Grandpap was just fine with that because then I could work for him. He expected a lot out of you and he never gave you nothin’.”

Russell went on to work odd jobs, sawing wood and bailing hay. At 15, he even took a job at a bowling alley just over the river in Brunswick, MD, where he’d set up pins for a penny a game. After high school, he served two years in the U.S. Army just as the nation was cleaning up from World War II.

He took jobs as they came, but he always found his way back to farming. ~~~

It was 1948 when he started working for Albert D. Lueters, on a property known as Rogues’ Hollow. The name sounded like something out of an adventure novel, but Russell thought it suited the place—more than 300 acres of rolling hills that seemed FARMER BROWN continues on page 31