Before Reston: Doeg Territory, the Fairfax Grant, and Six Thousand Acres of Northern Virginia Farm
Near Dc Northern Virginia, Virginia
In sixteen oh eight, English explorer John Smith paddled up the Potomac and noted a Doeg village called Tauxenent somewhere in the hills of what is now Fairfax County. The Doeg were Algonquian speakers who hunted, fished, and farmed the Northern Virginia woodlands for generations before English pressure pushed them north after sixteen seventy-five. Their land passed into the Northern Neck Proprietary, the vast royal grant held by Lord Thomas Fairfax, and remained in that family until eighteen fifty-two.
A developer named Carl Wiehle bought several thousand acres along the railroad line in the eighteen eighties and platted a speculative town called Wiehle that never took hold. The land reverted to farms and woods. In nineteen sixty-one, Robert E.
Simon used the proceeds from the sale of his family's Carnegie Hall in New York to buy six thousand seven hundred fifty acres of those fields, and named his new planned community after himself, R E S, Reston. It opened in nineteen sixty-four as one of the first American communities designed to mix housing, offices, and parkland from the start.
