Northern Virginia

Plantation houses of the Virginia counties nearest Washington, D.C., in the Virginia Tourism Corporation's own Northern Virginia region: Fairfax, Arlington, Loudoun and Prince William. Several of the houses gathered here, among them Gunston Hall and Oak Hill, were built by figures of the Revolutionary and early Republic generation on estates that once ran to the Potomac itself, long before the same land became the Washington suburbs it is known as today. The group distinguishes these estates from the Tidewater and Piedmont plantation houses gathered under this atlas's other Virginia regional groups by the distinct settlement history of the upper Potomac corridor, a mix of Fairfax family land grants, later Federal-era country seats and the eighteenth century tobacco economy that first brought large landholdings this far north in the colony.