Loudoun County is located in the northern part of the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States. Today, Loudoun County is a dynamic and growing county with more than 400,000 people. Loudoun is known for its beautiful landscapes, rich history, healthy diversity of expanding business opportunities, convenient neighborhoods, and high-quality public services. Loudoun County is located in the northwestern part of Virginia.
It is directly west of Fairfax County, along the Potomac River. South of Loudoun County are Fauquier and Prince William Counties. West of Loudoun County, across the Blue Ridge Mountains, are Clarke, Frederick and Winchester Counties. North of Loudoun County is the Potomac River, West Virginia and Maryland.
It's a diverse county with lots of big employers, easy access to the Washington metropolitan area, and some wonderful communities. A Loudoun County criminal lawyer is part of many of these communities and defends citizen rights. A few months ago, I was at a party where one of the attendees regretted not living in Northern Virginia and having to drive back home to Centreville. This led to a lively discussion about whether that city was part of NoVA and what constituted the region.
I began to wonder if it is possible to arrive at a unified definition to put an end to arguments once and for all. If one were for the majority rule, the Northern Virginia border would extend from Woodbridge to Manassas, along the Fairfax County border to Dulles Airport, and then northwest to Leesburg. There is a drop of more than 20 percentage points from those places to anywhere outside that limit. Overall, that would be quite a reasonable definition, with the exception of perhaps including South Riding to make the border look prettier.
The Northern Virginia Consensus Boundary. Author Image, Government Definition Really Doesn't Work That Well According to the Office of Management and Budget, the Washington Metropolitan Statistical Area contains Front Royal (10 percent of NoVA), Warrenton (11 percent), Fredericksburg (9.6 percent), and even Spotsylvania (2.6 percent). Less than one percent of respondents included all four places. While those cities may not seem like part of Northern Virginia, they still contribute to the region.
Residents of Fauquier, Spotsylvania and Stafford Counties have longer average travel times than Fairfax County, as people increasingly move away from DC. On the other hand, I've heard people claim that Northern Virginia only consists of land within the ring road. Despite that, the most frequently included location was the city of Fairfax, five miles away from the proposed demarcation. Reston, even further, was considered NoVa by more than 95 percent of respondents.
Based on survey results and population density data, one could argue in favor of a restrictive definition of the area containing McLean, Tyson's Corner, Vienna, Fairfax, Burke, Springfield and nearest points. Several other places came up against the topic of name recognition. Bailey's Crossroads, adjacent to Arlington and Alexandria and the densest location surveyed, was selected by only 73 percent of people. However, if we only consider those who live within the ring road, that number increases to 92 percent.
Woodbridge is 69 percent, while a couple of miles down the road, Dale City is just 40 percent. I suspect that number could be higher if I had asked about the latter's most defining characteristic, Potomac Mills. Unsurprisingly, people who were from the outer suburbs were significantly more generous with their definition of Northern Virginia than those who lived within Fairfax County. Those residing in Loudoun or Prince William Counties included, on average, four more locations than those within the ring road.
This is even more evident when we focus on the farthest cities. While those in Loudoun County are more willing to include themselves in Northern Virginia, they don't tend to extend the same courtesy to those in Prince William County (and vice versa). Gainesville, South Riding and Aldie are notable exceptions, as they are all closer to the county line than, for example, Purcellville or Woodbridge. Can a gas station solve this once and for all? Sheetz is a chain of service stations with locations ranging from North Carolina to Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Like Wawa, they pride themselves on serving “made-to-order” food, which makes them gain popularity during college students' road trips, having spoken from the experience. Nor do they have a single location within Fairfax County. In fact, the Sheetz locations closest to DC are a fairly precise border of Northern Virginia. The only exception to this rule is the Sheetz between Sterling (77 percent) and Dulles Airport (91 percent).
Oddly enough, when I zoomed in on that location, it didn't seem to exist. I'm just going to assume that there was an error in Google Earth and that the location was added by mistake. The Case of Lost Leaves Author's image. Disagreements will continue to exist over what defines the exact boundaries of Northern Virginia.
If we extrapolated our findings, we could say that more than 100,000 people in the area would include Fredericksburg, while another 100,000 would leave Springfield out (and 10,000 would do both, apparently). However, there is still a fairly reasonable compromise to be found and I hope that we can all agree on that and never have to deal with this argument again. Harry White has called Northern Virginia home for the past twenty years and is currently taking up residence in Fairfax. You're a software engineer when you're not too busy riding your bike on the W&OD trail or looking at maps.
Can you make a one-time or recurring contribution today to keep us going strong? GGWash has the support of our members, corporate collaborators and foundations. All texts and images marked as created by the author of the article are under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. Northern Virginia has several higher education institutions, including George Mason University; Virginia Tech — National Capital Region; Marymount University and Northern Virginia Community College. Northern Virginia makes up a significant portion of the population and number of jurisdictions that make up the Washington Metropolitan Council of Governments (MWCOG).
In the 21st century, Northern Virginia is becoming increasingly known for favoring Democratic Party candidates at both the state and national levels. Northern Virginia has world-class public school systems, as well as some of the best private schools in the country. There are also two branches of Inova's local hospital system, which is a large system throughout Northern Virginia, so there are a lot of field medical jobs. The county's official motto, I Byde My Time, is taken from the Earl of Loudoun's coat of arms.
One of the most prominent first mentions of Northern Virginia (without the word Neck) as a title was the name of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia during the American Civil War (1861-186. There is also a large part of the population living outside Loudoun County who work in the county). Considered largely exurban or undergoing suburban change, these counties include Clarke, Culpeper, Frederick, Madison, Rappahannock, Spotsylvania, Warren, and the independent city of Winchester. Both the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency are located in Northern Virginia, as is Dulles International Airport. The county is named after John Campbell, 4th Earl of Loudoun and Governor General of Virginia from 1756 to 1759. Northern Virginia and the Washington metropolitan area offer a wide variety of housing, locations, and prices.
The Smithsonian museums also serve as local cultural institutions, with easy proximity to Northern Virginia, and the Udvar-Hazy Center at the National Air and Space Museum in Chantilly is also popular. Northern Virginia (or NoVA, as the locals call it) is generally considered to include Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun, Stafford, and Prince William counties, as well as the independent cities of Alexandria, Falls Church, Fairfax, Manassas, and Manassas Park. . .
