Amid the luxury homes, townhouses and shopping centers that dominate western Prince William County, what’s left of The Settlement neighborhood — built by formerly enslaved African Americans in Virginia — is easy to miss.
Mount Pleasant Baptist Church, founded in 1877 on the site of a former plantation, is still there, next to a graveyard marked with tilting headstones. But the building that was a lasting center of community life has been unusable since an arsonist torched it in 2012.
Nearby on a busy stretch of Lee Highway, a rotting structure with a vine-choked roof marks where the Shady Inn Dance Hall once lit up the night from the 1940s to the ’60s — drawing the likes of James Brown to perform where Civil War battles occurred.
And along the surrounding leafy country roads, 50 miles west of Washington, some aging descendants of the original settlers live in their wood-paneled homes, nestled among 692 acres of pine forest and farmland that was once among the few places African Americans were allowed to live under Jim Crow laws.
That history is driving a fight over how much new development should be allowed in The Settlement — pitting those who want to preserve a legacy of the Reconstruction era in Prince William against officials pushing for more affordable housing in the steadily growing county of 470,000 residents.
Some Black property owners in the area say a proposal to dramatically scale down new development allowed there would deprive them of the generational wealth that has long eluded African Americans — an argument that has resonated with the Board of County Supervisors’ four Black members.
“I have three daughters, I have five grandkids and I want the best for them,” James A. Jackson, whose family has owned 15 acres in The Settlement for 101 years, recently told the board. “For the last 22 years or so, we’ve been trying to sell that property. We pay taxes on it, basically throwing away money because the land is just sitting there.”
Longtime tensions
Such tensions have long existed in this portion of Prince William County that White families once considered undesirable.
The Settlement started in 1887 with Sally Grayson, who became the area’s first known African American landowner after she bought seven acres in what is now Gainesville from the son of a former plantation owner, according to a history of land records and local family stories compiled by the county. Other Black settlers followed, forming an insular community that coexisted with Thoroughfare, another Reconstruction-era enclave now surrounded by new development.