Flashback Monday: Reston: The Blank Slate

Set the controls of the Earth-Toned Wayback Machine to the early 1960s, and gaze upon this unspoiled landscape, this terra incognito, that would soon become everyone's favorite earth-toned community. No manmade lakes, no golf courses ripe for redevelopment as midrise condos just five decades later, just the W&OD railroad snaking along the bottom of the photo, years before tracks would be replaced by spandex-wearing cyclists, and Rt. 7 and what would become Baron Cameron Avenue near the top. The drunken village of Wiehle appears to be obscured by trees, and the homicidal nudist colony is somewhere to the south of this photo. The one sign of human habitation is this:


The Sunset Hills Farm, where, we dunno, sunsets were harvested? Actually, even after Reston grew up atop and around the farm, the property was still used to produce a low-grade liquor favored by students at a certain university, until its owners decamped to Fredericksburg in 1988, leaving us with a landscape that's very different from the one just two decades before, the end.