Northern Virginia’s growth changed commonwealth
Frontier’s accelerated expansion was foreseen during a 1960 trip to Fairfax, Falls Church, Arlington and Alexandria
Once upon a time (or 60 years ago this past Wednesday), Virginia sponsored an official outing to the great unknown: Northern Virginia.
Gov. J. Lindsay Almond, Lt. Gov. A.E.S. Stephens and Attorney General Albertis Harrison, along with nearly100 legislators, all piled onto buses — took a plane ride, too — and spent the weekend touring Fairfax, Falls Church, Arlington and Alexandria.
I suppose they heard that something was going on up there near the Potomac River.
What they found in January 1960, according to Richmond Times-Dispatch reporter Jim Latimer, was “a burgeoning young suburban colossus, a sort of new frontier in the Old Dominion, pushing southward with a complex mixture of growing pains and political implications for the future.”
Turns out, we presently occupy that future.
It arrived in force this year, finally, after much anticipation.
We are surely witnessing the effects at this moment. There’s a lot of chest-clutching going on in Richmond, with so many changes being advanced at the General Assembly at once — largely a consequence of Northern Virginia’s strengthened political clout.
A word about Latimer. He was a newsroom reporter who, in the cause of perspective, would occasionally drift into gentle commentary on Virginia’s political progression. It was always worth reading because you learned stuff.
But it was not just the scribbling. It was a treat just to hear Jim talk. You heard no hacked off “g’s,” according to the Southern habit. Instead, those unnecessary consonants seemed to just gently slide away in Latimer’s throat.
But I digress.
That day in January1960, Latimer saw the future approaching and nailed it on his coverage of the Northern Virginia jaunt.
All this growth and it appeared to be accelerating. Fairfax County, Latimer wrote, “had somewhat the appearance of a vast construction camp entangled by traffic jams.”
Since1950, the four communities being toured (Fairfax, Falls Church, Arlington and Alexandria) had grown from nearly 320,000 to more than 503,000. My goodness, the projections showed, it could be around 730,000 by1970.
Today, roughly1.6 million people reside in those four jurisdictions.
“It doesn’t stop there,”
Latimer continued. “The spillover is moving both south and northwestward.”
Prince William County had grown from 22,612 to 50,000 between1950 and1960; today, Prince William is close to a half million people.
Loudon County? The forecast there, Latimer reported, was a population of 45,000 by1970. Today, there are 400,000 people living in Loudon.
Most interesting, these people in Northern Virginia, Latimer observed, “are inclined, on the whole, to be more liberal in their political views than the homegrown Virginian.”
A big caveat, however: “So far they have scrapped among themselves on local political issues,”
Latimer noted, “and have not mustered any considerable unified bloc to deliver in statewide elections.”
For that reason and others, Northern Virginia gained influence, to be sure, but never fully locked it in. Fairfax state Sen. Abe Brault won the majority leadership post in1976, only to be upended in1980 by Hampton Democrat Hunter B. Andrews.
Del. Dorothy McDiarmid chaired the House Appropriations Committee in the1980s. Sens. Joseph V. Gartlan, Clive DuVal and Omer L. Hirst, all of Fairfax, wielded considerable influence as well.
Sen. Andrews — a great power in his day — casually mentioned to me once that, “There have been things in Virginia we would not have been able to accomplish without Northern Virginia.”
No doubt, but we appear to be on the verge of something bigger still.
“Some of the vote-conscious visitors,” Latimer wrote about that 1960 trip to the northern frontier, “were inclined to wonder what might happen to the old stateside political order if the tremendous wave of new residents were to unite at the polls and strike some blows of enlightened self-interest.”
Now we’re finding out — and permit me a quick, but appropriate aside to this commentary on the prescient Latimer and the relative powers of Northern Virginia.
Because, on Thursday afternoon, as I finished this, I received word that William G. Thomas had died.
There are lobbyists in this world and there are lobbyists. Bill may have been — probably was — the most capable Virginia lobbyist of the past 40 years. He often carried the ball on Northern Virginia’s interests and did so with grace, good humor and great intelligence.
Virginia’s political fabric requires some crafty stitching sometimes — just to hold the darn thing together — and few could hold a candle to Bill’s abilities. In the best sense, Bill Thomas was a political artist.
After writing editorials for
The Daily Press and The Virginian-Pilot in the 1980s, Gordon C. Morse wrote speeches for Gov. Gerald L. Baliles, then spent nearly three decades working on behalf of corporate and philanthropic organizations, including PepsiCo, CSX, Tribune Co. and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and Dominion Energy. His email address is gordonmorse@msn.com.