Carrie Elizabeth Nokes used to see the mountains and "beautiful stars" from her kitchen window.
That was years ago when the village of Nokesville was on Loudoun maps, so named after the Nokes family that had been in the area since the early 1800s. Though she has never moved, Nokes’ mailing address and the view out her window have changed. The 89-year-old woman is the only one left of the Nokes family still living in what is now Sterling.
"I loved the country. It’s so different now," said Nokes. "I’m completely surrounded by Dulles Town Center and Dulles [Town] Crossing. You look out your window now, and all you see is cars and parking lots."
Nokes lives on Thayer Road in the last home still standing from the black neighborhood of Nokesville, she said. She owns 10 of the 19 acres her family bought in 1913 and sold part of in 1988, along with the other landowners and homeowners who sold their property to Realtors, who in turn sold the land for the mall’s development. The mall sits on what was New Yorker Albert Shaw’s 2,200-acre dairy farm, which Nokes’ father the late Clairence Lee Nokes worked on for 59 years.
"I picked blackberries in these fields. I’ve been all over these fields. You can’t get rid of me," said Nokes, who never married. She grew up with nine siblings and as the oldest girl in the family, helped her father raise them after her mother died when she was 12 years old. She worked for the federal government for 31 years from 1942 to 1973 for the Pentagon and the Veterans Administration, and did volunteer work after that, she said.
NOKESVILLE’S main buildings included Monroe Chapel United Methodist Church, Paige General Merchandise country store and years later Duddind Hardware Store, along with Nokes School, the only black school in the Sterling area.
"The first school we had was like a chantey building," Nokes said, comparing the school to a contracting company’s office set up at a construction site. The school at the corner of what is now Cascades Parkway and Nokes Boulevard burned down in the early 1920, so Nokes and her brothers could not go to school for two years. "The county said if you get the land, we will put the building on it," Nokes said.
Nokes’ father and two of her brothers purchased an acre of land from her oldest brother and deeded the land over to the school board. The school, which was named after the Nokes family, was the "most modern building," Nokes said, adding that even so, it did not have water and electricity. "The county furnished benches for the school, but they didn’t bring any furniture for the teacher. … My father built a desk and carried it over so she would have a desk to use."
The school served as a community center and a school but was closed during World War II when the number of students dwindled. Nokes and the remaining students had to take a train to Ashburn to attend a school there. Once Nokes was in the seventh grade, she had to take a train to Washington, D.C. to continue attending school.
"This was before integration. You had to be out on your own," Nokes said.
Besides the Nokes, Nokesville’s black neighborhood was home to the Jones family, two families with the name of Johnson and the Ellis family. Two other black families owned 200-acre farms, the Ewings where Home Depot now sits and the Edds in what is now Countryside on a dairy farm they called Pigeon Hill for the number of pigeons there.
"I miss all the farming. It was a quiet place, and … everything pertained to farming was here, lots of trees, beautiful big pastures … corn and wheat fields," she said. "It’s all gone."
Nokes Boulevard remains as a reminder. "The state gave us recognition by giving us a street that runs right through town center from Route 28 to Cascades, where the heart of Nokesville was," Nokes said.
NOKESVILLE is one of several villages that has been lost or is in the process of dying out in eastern Loudoun County.
"Right now people think eastern Loudoun doesn’t have any history," said Deborah Lee, contract historian and coordinator of the community history and mapping project for the Black History Committee of The Friends of the Thomas Balch Library. The committee formed in 2000 as a naming committee, then agreed to document the county’s black history through archival research, photography and oral histories and has since published two African-American biography collections called Essence of the People 1 and 2.
"The communities are dying out and development is encroaching, destroying what was once these communities," Lee said.
Historically, African-Americans comprised 20 to 30 percent of the county’s population, according to the committee. After the Civil War and Emancipation, African-Americans established communities, churches and mutual aid societies, which were "important in uniting and nurturing the communities," Lee said.
African-Americans acquired land and clustered their homes in hamlets, or small villages, and in neighborhoods in Leesburg and in western Loudoun towns. A few of the communities in eastern Loudoun included Willard, Oak Grove, Conklin and Gleedsville.
Willard was an African-American village once located where Washington Dulles International Airport now sits. The Second Shiloh Baptist Church was organized there in 1898 with the congregation staying on until the land was condemned in 1958. The church relocated to a donated plot of land and used the value of the condemned church to help fund construction of a new church.
"That was a pretty large community, but the federal government bought the people out for not very much money. It was something that was very common," Lee said.
To the north of Willard was another village called Oak Grove, which still has a remnant of the community remaining. Oak Grove Baptist Church was established in a log cabin in 1868, named for the grove of oak trees that shaded the land selected for the church site. The church was the first of four buildings on the site off of Old Ox Road that included Oak Grove School and Odd Fellows Autumnal Lodge.
CONKLIN VILLAGE was located in the area where Trafalgar developed South Riding in 1995, later purchased by Toll Brothers Inc. Leesburg resident Lou Etta Watkins remembers going to Conklin’s Prosperity Baptist Church 30 years ago on the two Sundays a month her pastor preached there. She grew up in Fauquier County and attended Mount Olive Baptist Church there on the other two Sundays.
"Conklin was like any rural village where the people all knew each other. A lot of them were relatives. The families had lived there for years and years," said Watkins, who now is 75. "They went to work in other places because there was no work in the community. Between work and home and church, that was their main interest."
In Gleedsville southeast of Leesburg, the church building still exists and a few of the residents remain, Lee said. John Gleed, the namesake of the village, was one of the founders of Mount Olive Methodist Episcopal Church, which was established in 1890. The church "held fast" for more than 100 years, but declining membership led to the church’s merger with Mount Zion, Lee said, adding that the church was later sold and now is home to a Unitarian congregation. Besides the church, the village of Gleedsville at one time included Mountain Gap School and Odd Fellows Mountain Gap Lodge.
"If we don’t get this down now as a record, we won’t have any history at all," Watkins said. "We have to record it now while we still can. … There’s a lot of history to be gained from talking to the people who lived in the area all of their lives."
Oral history can only be passed down for so many generations before it disappears, said Leesburg resident Gladys Burke, who owns a business there. "In this country for a very long, long time, our history was not recorded and documented and therefore not valued. When you wipe away a people’s history, it’s saying the people don’t exist," she said. "If the community at large doesn’t embrace it, we have to embrace it."
As Lee said, quoting from a saying, "When an old person dies, a library burns to the ground. If we get an oral history, we save a book or two from that library."