In late November and early December, 1864, smoke rolled across the Loudoun Valley of Virginia, as unchecked fires leapt from its barns, mills and haystacks. Union General Wesley Merritt crossed the Blue Ridge at Ashby Gap to conduct a brief operation referred to as the "burning raid." Its purpose was to deprive Confederate Colonel John S. Mosby of the livestock and foodstuffs to support his irregular troopers and their mounts.

Ida Powell Dulany, a resident living in northern Fauquier (which was also burned), recounted in her diary, "At night we could look out and see the whole country illuminated by immense fires." In just five days, Merritt's cavalry laid waste to some of the nation's most productive farmland.

As the hand-notched timbers of oak and chestnut were converted to smoke and ash, many of Loudoun County's men slipped away to avoid capture; orders were to detain men 50 and younger regardless of loyalties. According to family tradition, my great-grandfather and his twin brother, Edward and Edgar Dishman, waited out the raid on the slopes of the Blue Ridge. Others, including an elderly Quaker named William Burson (my great-great-grandfather), stayed behind to protect the fruits and foundation of their livelihood.

One-hundred-forty years later, a different conflagration is sweeping the Loudoun Valley and beyond. This landscape had steadfastly withstood the ravages of four wars in the century between 1754 and 1865. But the new threat is no less incessant nor profound in its consequences. To the contrary, the current crisis facing Loudoun's residents makes the "burning raid" something of a quaint historic footnote.

The soldiers that crossed William Burson's farm in 1864 did not stop to ask where his loyalty stood, but rather lit his chicken coop and moved on. The crippled Burson struggled out to the coop and extinguished the blaze, but the soldiers returned and relit it. Three times, so family lore recounts, this process was repeated, until a Union officer came upon the scene and ordered his men to spare this farm.

The structure stood for generations afterwards, off in the woods near "Poor House Lane," named after Loudoun's third "alms" or poor house, which Burson built in 1814. It is a tribute to someone who acted despite long odds, someone who did not follow the old Loudoun County motto, "I Byde My Time".

The amount of destruction incurred during the 1864 raid was not fully documented. One of the two brigade commanders did provide a detailed report, which cited 230 barns, 8 mills and 1 distillery destroyed. Taken together with the livestock slaughtered or driven off and the thousands of tons of hay and grain destroyed, damages reported from just half the operation were estimated at $411,620, worth roughly $4.5 million today.

Incredibly, the current threat to land and the quality of our lives will have more lasting consequences. According to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and based on current trends, 800,000 more acres of land in the greater Washington, D.C., region will be developed by 2030, representing an 80 percent increase. The vast majority of land consumed in that new development–more than 700,000 acres–would be farmland, forest, and wetlands. But the study also found that the same growth could be accommodated using two-thirds less land and preserving more than 550,000 acres of that same farmland, forest, and wetlands.

The most fundamental problem is not growth itself. Homes are not bad things. Rather the problem is that we are scattering ourselves across the landscape, consuming unprecedented quantities of a limited resource and paying for it in traffic, taxes, and other costs. Nowhere is the cost of rapid, unwise growth more apparent than in Loudoun.

It's hard to believe, but Loudoun's population stayed nearly constant for almost two centuries. At the time of the first U.S. Census in 1790, there were 18,962 souls in the county. By 1860, that number had grown to 21,774, and in 1960 stood at only 24,549. In 2003, the Census Bureau estimated the population at almost ten times that: 221,746. And that figure is up 30 percent from 2000.

The cost of the earlier conflagration was calculated for lost crops and buildings. This time, Loudoun's explosive growth costs us in soaring tax rates, oppressive traffic, disrupted classrooms, declining air and water quality, environmental decay. The hardest cost to quantify now, however, is wholesale destruction of one of the nation's most hallowed landscapes.

In Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, America has erected monuments for our greatest leaders and events, but in Loudoun we can explore the original landscapes that are intertwined with those monumental events and leaders. Loudouners all live in the midst of history and those who shaped it. It is difficult to wander down a Loudoun back road and not bump into a significant landmark, including ones these great leaders themselves erected.

Film Director Ron Maxwell captures best the significance of this aspect of Loudoun: "The land is the people and the people are the land. Over centuries, the love of the people has dripped its life force into the soil, into the very rocks and rivers. It is American land. It is our land."

To quote Maxwell again: "In some distant time, those who occupy this place will look back upon us the way we look back. Will they say of us that we protected the land, that we cherished it - that we defended it from greed and rapaciousness?"