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marks Board on a contract to accept the easements and then on a sales contracts
The first may have been the more difficult.
The house on Janelia Farm was already listed on the national and state registers of historic places. “It’s on the register for architectural reasons, and because it’s the last place of its kind in Eastern Loud-, oun,” Mrs. Pickens noted. Gracious plantation homes still grace estates in the western end of the county; in Eastern Loudoun, however, “the age of subdivisions” has arrived, she added.
But an historic home doesn’t of itself guarantee an historic easement. Traditionally, conservation easements protect architecturally or historically significant “old town” properties threatened by urban renewal that seeks to replace them with modern buildings of concrete, steel and glass. Or, to thwart development, conservation easements go on farmland and open space and environmentally sensitive wetlands, flood plains and steep slopes.
“This was a little different,” Frank Reynolds explained. The farm, still unspoiled, sits in the middle of an area “about ready to balloon with development. But the easement wasn’t put on here to keep development from happening. That wasn’t possible here.”
Janelia Farm is “right now” still a farm, Mr. Reynolds Continued. But soon it’s going to be a “relatively dense commercial development, an office park.” The Landmarks Board, “used to coming into an area, taking an easement and having TOTAL say over what would happen,” had to recognize that. “First they wanted to control all the development on the entire farm. That just wasn’t realistic.” The board members eventually accepted that they couldn’t save the whole area but that Mrs. Pickens’
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