I found an old tollhouse

When I was last out rambling with the bike, near Route 7 in Ashburn, I followed a road posted as a dead end. I rode past a cluttered property with a crude sign about police dogs and trespassing, slowed when the road became gravel and turned parallel to the elevated highway. On the right, as I start downhill, this sprawl of a yellow house, and then a half-hung gate and a stone wall with a little house up against it. Beyond that, the bridge that had spanned Broad Run was demolished and unnavigable, three huge heaps of stone. Above it, on the elevated highway, cars zipped east at 60 miles an hour, some peeling off on the Route 28 ramp just beyond Broad Run. I was completely invisible to them, and they to me; they existed as noise for me.

The little stone house attracted me, although it was quite run down and not very photogenic. Still, it had a certain...attitude. I peered in windows. I found a tiny square swimming pool tucked against its walls in back. I strolled around the property, spring green bottomland spotted with dandelions. The creek was deep and brown and fast. The back of the yellow hacienda I'd passed overlooked a little pond with a filtration island on which two Canada geese were perched. They paid me no attention.

I established that there was no means of crossing the creek. The water was deep, the run as broad as its name. Further, there was no way to pass under the Route 7 bridge to the northern side, where I thought I might find my way to Algonkian Parkway. Indeed, I had to return whence I came, although ironically I would cross the stream just the other side of the Route 7 bridge an hour later.

Photo: Muriel Spetzman, 1953

I was curious, so I looked up the property. It turned out to have been the Broad Run Tollhouse, which not only collected tolls [until 1924] but sold moonshine for $2 a pint and $8 to $9 a gallon during Prohibition. Bridges had been  built there and washed away since colonial times. In 1809, a $41,450 state appropriation to build the twenty mile Leesburg Turnpike from Leesburg to Dranesville included the bridge and tollhouse. This sum, incidentally, was the largest state road appropriation to date. The stone bridge was constructed around 1820 out of huge stones from quarries in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and was was destroyed in 1972 by floodwaters from Hurricane Agnes.

1. Crystal Owens, "Activists look to save historic tollhouse", Loudoun Times, May 26, 2009.

2. Eugene Scheel (Waterford historian), "Mountains Full of Moonshiners", The History of Loudoun County

3. "The Broad Run Bridge", Broad Run Farms History, 06 November 2005