Author: Dan Johnson

tl;dr–Patterns of indigenous use etched a profoundly influential template on the landscape of the Difficult Run Basin.

Narrative Event Horizons

Roads are patterns. Habitual human behavior carves itself into the earth. We barely notice. It’s a monumental paradox. 

“An axis is perhaps the first human manifestation; it is the means of every human act,” writes Le Corbusier in his Towards a New Architecture.¹ Mighty important as axial roads are, they are essential to the point of invisibility. It’s a phenomenon ethnographer Susan Leigh Star studied in depth. Vital infrastructure is typically invisible until the point of breakdown.

In the case of all critical components of civic engineering—sewage flows, power corridors, and especially roads—Star hints that any study requires “looking for these traces left behind by coders, designers, and users of systems.”_²

Fairfax and Loudoun Counties preserve a wealth of records regarding the formation of modern roads whose roots and traces stretch back as far as the colonial era. Unfortunately, to excavate the work of the original “coders, designers, and users” of Fairfax County roads, we need to punch through a bias boundary.

In the preface to the 1986 edition of his historic monograph on the Potomac River, Frederick Guttheim promises coverage of “the entire river basin, with its three hundred and fifty years of human history.”³ If that phrase ever made sense in 1949, it’s an especially bad look now. 

The blank slate fallacy is a tired borrow from the earliest rhetoric attached to European colonization. In the publicity drive calculated to heighten participation in the pyramid scheme of near-slave labor required to make the early colonies viable, English boosters promulgated a bunk and conniving narrative of virgin wilderness yearning to enrich hard-working yeomen.⁴

The mythos of unifocal European creationism endures. It slants histories of design and development in Northern Virginia. Pervasive bias couples with a want of indigenous records to create an event horizon at European contact. What transpired before was formative and yet unknowable. 

Still, its crucial to acknowledge that European civilization—especially in Northern Virginia was not a first build. It was a graft. Archaeological evidence in the Upper Difficult Run Basin alone suggests that as many as eight thousand years of human prehistory shaped the land. 

Indigenous migrations, site selection practices, and resource acquisition patterns established the original parameters for European settlements. This largely glossed-over and wide-spanning chapter in spatial history exerted an inordinate influence on what transpired after. 

In Fairfax County, “history” begins in June 1608 when John Smith undertook an expedition up the Potomac River in search of precious metals.⁵ Smith spent a season exploring the Potomac. When considered against the rich body of archaeological records denoting thousands of years of lived time, Smith’s moment along the Potomac was an interval of time equivalent to a single frame of film in Lawrence of Arabia. The distortion is obvious, but nonetheless, the adventurer’s account became the definitive account of the indigenous world along the Potomac.

Smith was diligent in capturing a sense of the riverine world on which Algonquian-speaking people of future Fairfax County built their society. In this far corner of the Powhatan world—known to its inhabitants as Chicacoan—Smith recalls a society built to integrate with the great Potomac River and the many creeks that fed it.⁶

River People

Shellfish and lowland agriculture fed villages set just off the river on hillsides that overlooked broad creeks that flowed into the Potomac. These hydrological features were critical. In the age of the canoe, waterways were highways. This partially-true hypothesis makes sense to a transcontinental explorer like John Smith who privileged travel by boat in his own worldview. Especially given his membership in a world cut from a fabric woven together from diplomacy and wealth. 

Chicacoan was nominally allied to the Powhatan Confederacy. Still, its distance from the werowance, or chieftain, afforded this district a unique set of opportunities and challenges. “Potomac” is apparently an Algonquian word for “something brought.”⁷ The people that John Smith encountered across the Potomac River for the future site of Washington, D.C. specialized in trade. They belonged to a confluence culture, facilitated by a marriage of river access and proximity to the fall line where Iroquois-speaking people, including the Susquehannock, similarly trafficked in specialized resources.⁸

This reality presents a more nuanced idea of place-use in Algonquian culture than that presented by John Smith. They did utilize the rivers for transportation, defense, sustenance, and trade. This watery-road network offered invaluable access to the south, but was hindered immediately to the northwest by the fall line. 

In order to facilitate trade, the Doge and Patwomekes inhabiting present day Fairfax County would necessarily have enjoyed a built interface with the interior that was independent of river access.⁹

Smith himself teased a “beyond” that connected river-adjacent primary villages with resource camps in the distant hinterlands. Having communicated his thirst for rare earth, natives led Captain Smith to the site of a prominent ore quarry some seven or eight miles from the river.¹⁰

An existing network of paths and roads was apparently already cut into the landscape by the time natives utilized one to bring Captain Smith to an established resource extraction site. It is this infrastructural system on which much of the colonial English world in Fairfax County was transposed.

Land Orientation

Its most important vestigial trace could be found well into the 19th century with the common usage of the term “ridge road.” 

Historian Donald Sweig—one of the much beloved narrativists who collaborated with Nan Netherton to authoritatively document the County’s past—charted Colonial-era infrastructural growth along basic criteria.

“As the roads developed,” Sweig wrote, “they frequently followed old Indian or animal trails or the line of least resistance along the top of natural ridges.”¹¹

Precise, but tautological to the max, Sweig’s formulation neglects to mention that Indian trails, animal paths, and “ridge roads” were often one in the same. Elsewhere in the historical record, in fact, the term “ridge road” is used almost synonymously with Indian path. We are meant to understand that indigenous people and their animal predecessors cut the first crest line paths trails that English colonists used to inject themselves into the countryside. 

In 1952, Katherine Snyder Shands assembled the theory from abundant folk knowledge and oral history for a piece in the Historical Society of Fairfax County’s Yearbook.

Shands offers the interspecies theory of road origin as follows, “The inland roads began as the trails of the buffaloes going from their pasture lands along the river, over the Blue Ridge, and into the Valley. Over these trails went the Indians, and after them the earliest explorers and fur traders. As men and animals instinctively seek the course of least resistance, the trails followed the ridges of the hills by the easiest grades, and later the roads followed over them. These roads were used by the new settlers, who, finding no room along the rivers, went to the Piedmont and over the mountains; and it is these same roads which carry over Fairfax County the swift traffic of today.”¹²

Later sources more oriented to the immediate confines of Difficult Run are more explicit in conflating native paths with geographic opportunism. 

D’Anne Evans’ history of the hamlet of Vale—a mostly forgotten post office-designated community in the heart of the Upper Difficult Run Basin—treats both Hunter Mill Road and Chain Bridge Road as “two Indian ridge trails.”¹³

Patricia Strat, Evans’ successor and an eminently qualified and prolific historian in her own right, identifies Ox Road (today’s West Ox Road) as an Indian trail and ridge road in the appendices to her monograph on the community of Navy.¹⁴

The Hopkins Map of 1879 depicts a section of today’s Reston Parkway that unites with the once and former Ox Road as a “Ridge Road.” This thoroughfare bridges the gap from the northwest edge of the Difficult Run watershed through Dranesville all the way to the Potomac.¹⁵

We’re left with an understanding that the area surrounding Difficult Run was bounded by high ridges which were already established as transportation corridors before the arrival of European colonists. Curiously, all three of these Indian ridge roads—West Ox with its later northern Ridge Road corollary, Hunter Mill, and Chain Bridge—connect known stone quarries with the Potomac River. 

Lithic Determinism

In 1728, Robert “King” Carter patented land at a site known as “Frying Pan” in the western reaches of Fairfax County. It sat on a plain accessible by both forks of the known Ridge Roads that ran along present West Ox Road. In fact, the designation “Ox Road,” by which this avenue came to achieve colonial prominence, denoted the path as the axis of outflow for the Carter’s mining operation at Frying Pan.¹⁶

Originally thought to be a rich vein of copper ore, the rock discovered at Frying Pan was assayed in London as little more than green sandstone. A worthless asset in the alchemy of trans-Atlantic mercantilism, but part of a rich complex of triassic sandstones whose use bridges prehistoric Virginia with colonial extraction and contemporary Washington, D.C.

Local natives utilized that category of stone in carvings.¹⁷ Colonists attempted to mine and monetize it. Modern architects privileged its use in monumental building for structures in the nation’s capitol.¹⁸ The particular seam of viridescent stone at Frying Pan was largely a bust, but one that is not coincidentally connected via established pathways to a trans-Potomac world build on the trade of rare or alluring resources.

More intriguing still is the case of modern Chain Bridge and Hunter Mill Roads, both of which follow courses from known fords over the Potomac to an intersection point half a mile from an important deposit of stone that native people prized for its use in tools and points. 

What came first? Knowledge of the discovery of strong vein of white quartz near modern Marbury Road in Oakton, Virginia, or the ridge roads that led there? By the time English settlers arrived, the pocket of valuable igneous stone was well known. To the point that the town of Oakton first assumed the name “Flint Hill,” a name it carried through the Civil War, because Europeans mistook the already well-quarried stone for valuable flint.¹⁹

They were mistaken and disappointed. What’s critical here goes beyond the disappointment of metallurgically-aware Europeans. A complex of indigenous people whose archaeological record is strewn with white quartz tools built two separate axes connecting trade routes with a quarry site rich in white quartz.²⁰²¹

Prehistoric records are very difficult to document and much more challenging to speculate about accurately. Nonetheless, the high ground surrounding Upper Difficult Run presents an interesting theory about indigenous lithic determinism and the roots of place development. 

Valley Roads

This world of high roads and heavy stone and its predominance over road creation theory in Fairfax County has flaws. Chiefly, it owes much to the original John Smith theory of riverine people. Their world and our imagination of it privileges high ground on which trade parties could perhaps snatch valuable rocks to trade across the river. 

It’s only half of the story. 

Before we find ourselves fully seduced by the oysters and spear points view of Potomac pre-history, we do well to soak in the mysteries of a duality-rich world until the skin on our fingers prunes. 

From this tepid bath, an important question bubbles up from the drain: doesn’t the term “ridge road” imply the existence of non-ridge roads?  Is it safe to assume there were also valley roads? Or were the first residents of modern Fairfax County too prim and proper to muddy their feet in the marshy bottoms?

The answer is complicated—chiefly because archaeological resources in Fairfax County and Virginia at large are treated as protected assets. Their is no publicly-available database of sites within Difficult Run that can be indexed, mapped, and analyzed. 

We’re left to eat around the edges, so to speak, on a table set by former Fairfax County Park Authority archaeologist, Michael F. Johnson. An enthusiastic student of pre-history, Johnson festooned the public record with important breadcrumbs highlighting the indigenous past along the upper reaches of Difficult Run. 

Among Johnson’s clues are tantalizing hints about an abundance of chips and flakes found throughout the Fox Mill communities, which augment sites discovered near Franklin Farms, Pender, and the triangle between Jermantown Road, Waples Mill, and Route 50. 

There are also accounts of a three-quarter greenstone axe dating from the period between 2000 BC and 1600 AD discovered near Quay Road above Stuart Mill and a hunter/gatherer site from 4000 to 6000 BC found “in the vicinity of Fox Mill and Hunt Roads.”²²

Johnson and others devoted an immense amount of time and effort into the study of upland “procurement sites” and “temporary camps.”²³ The work is an important step in adding dimension to the “oysters and canoes” impression of indigenous life along the Potomac.

The Karell and Dead Run sites—cherished laboratories for Johnson’s work—provide an interesting case study of inland valley life. Debitage excavations reveal little in the way of riverine food stuff. Both sites are also rich in quartz points. More intriguing still, the location of each is nestled along upland hollows just off of or proximal to alluvial fans or headwater floodplains.²⁴

This position is significant in two ways.

First, it either duplicates or anticipates the same site selection pattern documented by John Smith and his colleagues as early as 1608. To quote Strachey, a fellow explorer of Smith, regarding the location of Algonquian sites on the Potomac, “theire habitations or Townes, are for the most part by the Rivers; or not far distant from fresh springs commonly upon the rise of a hill, that they made overlook the river and take every small thing into view which sturrs upon the same.”²⁵ 

Fresh water was likely not a position determinant for inland procurement sites, but strategic high ground feels significant. The sites Johnson alludes to in Difficult Run—those between Route 50 and Waples Mill, on Quay Road, and in the triangle of modern Vale, Fox Mill, and Hunt Roads—all sit on high ground where present hardwood forests overlook either Difficult Run or Little Difficult Run while still maintaining a less-than-visible posture from the creek valleys below. 

By nature, temporary camps beyond semi-permanent villages balanced essential opportunity with common hazard. In an area known as a contested liminal space between sometimes rival indigenous groups, rich forests overlooking fertile floodplains would have been prized possessions.

This illuminates the second crucial hint. Sites that potentially span nearly eight thousand years of human history in the Difficult Run area also bridge two separate resource paradigms: hunting/gathering and early agriculture. Not coincidentally, the site selection practices of Algonquian people in Difficult Run situates their procurement camps at the exact interface where collection zones intersect with cultivation zones. 

People Gotta Eat

Assuring caloric competency requires procurement strategies that are necessarily flexible. Rigidity in practice does not seem to be something indigenous people of the eastern United States could afford. Instead, an agile mentality woven from experimentation and innovation seems to be the norm. 

Earliest sites, like the hunter/gatherer camp that Mike Johnson explored near Fox Mill and Hunt Roads, benchmark the beginning of a cultural-culinary survival complex, one that responds to broad and sweeping climactic change. 

Cooler weather patterns with long, oppressive winters phased out in favor of warming periods that invoked a groundswell of change in the biome.²⁶ A sample study conducted at the Cliff Palace Pond site in Kentucky is illustrative of larger trends in mid-latitude North American Forests. Spruce and northern white cedar trees that were dominant in the Early-Holocene some eight thousand years ago declined in favor of hemlock, which in turn gave way to eastern red cedar some five thousand years ago. Beginning around the time to which Johnson’s dates the greenstone axe found on Quay Road, mixed oak-chestnut and pine forests became dominant.²⁷

The oak/chestnut/hickory complex is a vital hint. These trees are more fire-tolerant to their predecessors and their preeminence in forests of a certain time suggests the emergence of anthropocentric fire regimes that groomed the landscape with intention. Motivation for any would-be fire starters of the mid-Holocene is clear: oak, chestnut, and hickory trees produce mast, or nuts.²⁸

This forage-able resource was an essential component of early indigenous diet. A hickory grove of an area 1.2 kilometers in diameter could feed a family of ten for a year.²⁹ Beyond direct impact, mast was also an indirect boon to these people. Wild hogs and other sources of huntable meat fattened on fallen acorns and chestnuts. 

In his memoir, Country Boy Gone Soldiering, George Henry Waple, III, who grew up around his family’s mill on Difficult Run in the 1920s and 1930s remembers an abundance of mast. He recalls collecting nuts from the many chestnut trees that lined the valley and hills around his home and also details a bounty of nuts harvested from “bushes” that he referred to as “chinkapins.” Castanea Pumila, the Allegheny Chinquapin, was itself an important contributor to pre-historic foraging diets.³⁰

The same fire clearance strategies that thinned upland forests of unproductive tree guilds in favor of mast-producing hardwoods also facilitated hunting and eventually came to be a known pillar of Algonquian cultivation strategies. John Smith provided accounts of tree stumps deliberately set ablaze in order to both clear and fertilize eventual maize production.³¹

In the bottoms below these fertile forests, prehistoric indigenous groups of the eastern United States learned to lean heavily on the chaotic confluence where fire, water, and earth achieved fecund symbiosis.

Long before the gradual trial-and-error invasion of maize from meso-America, long processes of experimentation brought the floodplain to preeminence in Native resource strategies. Known alternately as the “mudflat hypothesis” or the “floodplain weed theory,” Bruce Smith’s ideas about archaeobotany center around mid-Holocene patterns of alluvial deposit. Gone were far-spaced episodes of flooding. Instead, more consistent geographic and chronological patterns of “aggradation and stabilization” created consistent river and tributary valleys.³²

Routine flooding churned creek-adjacent lands and flooded them with rich silt that encouraged the production of edible weeds like squash, sunflower, marsh elder, and chenopod.³³ More than fire-cleared hillside meadows, bottom lands that had been swept of vegetation and reseeded by edible weed-friendly happenstance emerged between critical foraging districts.

Where mast-bearing trees of an area 1.2km in diameter could feed a family of ten for a year, 16,000 square meters of floodplain chenopod would provide the same sustenance.³⁴ Eventually, these patterns of foraging took on a deliberate, programatic nature, with seed selection, culling, and intentional cultivation replacing happenstance.

This is quite literally academic. On a very practical level, however, a place such as modern day Oakton, Virginia, which is named after its wealth of mast-producing trees, is also quietly littered with indigenous sites that sit astride two important patterns of life-sustaining resources. Natives spanning thousands of years set up temporary camps on wooded hillsides overlooking creeks. 

With deliberate site selection, indigenous people both overwatched and integrated diversified caloric landscapes, while simultaneously maintaining a strategic eye on the main axes of travel. 

Foot paths—the first roads and the essential predecessors to the “bridle-paths” of the 1860s—united resource geographies by tracing longitudinal lines along forager-friendly creeks and bisected these water ways on axes that utilized natural clefts in the landscape. The most advantageous of these routes connected native peoples to ridge roads and still more essential lithic deposits where cultivation and processing tools like quartz were readily available.

Glimmers of Proof

In Difficult Run, the earliest document of such paths arrived woefully late with the 1937 aerial survey. By this point two centuries of European influence had contaminated the purity of any original paths that may have forked from the ridge roads down into the valley. Still, interesting patterns remain.

Just west of Marbury Road where “Flint Hill” drops into the valley behind Fox’s Lower Mill, white fractures in the landscape attest to patterned footfall. Paths partner and travel along the creek at near intervals and in parallel near the edge of the existing woods—an interface where deer and other prey are known to favor. These paths fork at opportune moments. They rarely, if ever, dart up a hill at its most drastic and impregnable height.

Instead, the cross axes travel through drainage draws and cuts past and beyond nearby hillside sites that early foragers would have found suitable. In this way, fingers of opportunity dating to a mysterious past, dart across the woods and fields in ways that were and will never be rendered on maps, except in their truest form—as creeks and local minima. 

The key to John Mosby’s successful navigation of this basin is found in the meanderings of pre-history. For millennia, people have come to this place to sustain themselves. They have traveled in a way that marries convenient opportunities of landform with the abundant necessity of bridging high forests and low floodplains. 

These patterns repeat ad nauseam and predict other spatial requirements negotiated by Confederate guerrillas thousands of years later. Where forested heights intersect long, sprawling creeks, we find spatial opportunities that transcend any one time period.

Notes

1.  Le Corbusier. Towards a New Architecture. New York City: Prayer Publishers, 1960. P. 173. 

2.  Star, Susan Leigh. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no 3. (377-391). https://doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326

3.  Gutheim, Frederick. The Potomac. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1949. p. ix. 

4.  Isenberg, Nancy. White Trash. New York City: Viking, 2016. p. 3. 

5.  Potter, Stephen R. Commoners, Tribute, and Chiefs: The Development of Algonquian Culture in the Potomac Valley. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993. p. 8.

6.  ibid 1.

7.  Gutheim, Frederick. The Potomac. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1949. p. 28.

8.  Potter, Stephen R. Commoners, Tribute, and Chiefs: The Development of Algonquian Culture in the Potomac Valley. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993. p. 150-151

9. ibid 179.

10.  Gutheim, Frederick. The Potomac. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1949. p. 24

11.  Netherton, Nan, Donald Sweig, Janice Artemel, Patricia Hicks, and Patrick Reed. Fairfax County, Virginia: A History. Fairfax: Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, 1978. p. 20. 

12.  Shands, Katherine Snyder. “Fairfax County Before the American Revolution.” HFSC Yearbook 2 (1952-53): 3-17. https://archive.org/details/hfssc-yearbook-volume-2/

13.  Evans, D’anne A. The Story of Oakton, Virginia: 1758-1990. Oakton: The Optimist Club of Oakton, 1991. p. 103.

14.  Strat, Patricia. “People and Places of the Navy Community Fairfax County, Virginia, 1887-1984.” Fairfax County History Commission, February 22, 2019. https://fairfaxcounty.gov/history-commission/sites/history-commission/files/assets/documents/resources/navy-community-fairfax-county.pdf#page=1 

15.  Hopkins, Griffith M. Atlas of Fifteen Miles Around Washington Including the Counties of Fairfax and Alexandria, Virginia (1879). Scale not given. In: Stephenson, Richard W. The Cartography of Northern Virginia: Facsimile Reproductions of Maps Dating From 1608 to 1915. Fairfax: Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, 1981, page 85.

16.  Netherton, Nan, Donald Sweig, Janice Artemel, Patricia Hicks, and Patrick Reed. Fairfax County, Virginia: A History. Fairfax: Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, 1978. p. 22-25

17.  “The Whitehurst Freeway Sites.” The National Park Service/Rock Creek Park. https://nps.gov/articles/whitehurst-freeway-sites-at-rock-creek.htm 

18.  Withington, Charles F. Building Stones of our Nation’s Capitol. Washington, D.C.: United States Geological Survey, 1975.

19.  Evans, D’anne A. The Story of Oakton, Virginia: 1758-1990. Oakton: The Optimist Club of Oakton, 1991. p. 11.

20.  Johnson, Michael. “Mockley Distribution in the Interior: An Exception to Oyster Determinism.” Middle Atlantic Archaeological Conference, 1989. https://maacmidatlanticarchaeology.org/MAAC%20Program%201989.pdf p. 76, 92

21.  Potter, Stephen R. Commoners, Tribute, and Chiefs: The Development of Algonquian Culture in the Potomac Valley. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993. p. 200, 204.

22.  Joy S. Starr Collection on Vale History. Collection 06-18. Virginia Room. Fairfax County Library. Box 1, Folder 3. “Vale History: From Money’s Corner Through Difficult.”

23.  Potter, Stephen R. Commoners, Tribute, and Chiefs: The Development of Algonquian Culture in the Potomac Valley. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993. p. 77.

24.  Johnson, Michael. “Mockley Distribution in the Interior: An Exception to Oyster Determinism.” Middle Atlantic Archaeological Conference, 1989. https://maacmidatlanticarchaeology.org/MAAC%20Program%201989.pdf p. 68-92

25.  Potter, Stephen R. Commoners, Tribute, and Chiefs: The Development of Algonquian Culture in the Potomac Valley. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993. p. 28-29

26.  Pettitt, Dr. Alisa. “Virginia Indian History at Riverbend Park.” Fairfax County Park Authority. Https://fairfaxcounty.gov/parks/sites/parks/files/assets/documents/naturalcultural/archaeology/archaeology-first-virginians-riverbend-park.pdf

27.  Delcourt, Paul A., Hazel R. Delcourt, Cecil R. Ison, William E. Sharp, and Kristen J. Gremillion. “Prehistoric Human Use of Fire, the Eastern Agricultural Complex, and Appalachian Oak-Chestnut Forests: Paleoecology of Cliff Palace Pond, Kentucky.” American Antiquity 63, no. 2 (1998): 263-86. https://doi.org/10.2307/2694697 

28. Zeanah, David W. “Foraging Models, Niche Construction, and the Eastern Agricultural Complex.” American Antiquity 82, no. 1 (2017): 3-24. https://jstor.org/stable/26337953

29.  ibid. p. 7

30. Waple, George Henry, III. Country Boy Gone Soldiering. George Waple, III, publisher. 2004. pg. 37.

31.  Potter, Stephen R. Commoners, Tribute, and Chiefs: The Development of Algonquian Culture in the Potomac Valley. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993. p. 32-33.

32.  Price, T. Douglas. “Ancient Farming in Eastern North America.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 106, no. 16 (2009): 6427-28. https://jstor.org/stable/40482110 p. 476.

33.  Zeanah, David W. “Foraging Models, Niche Construction, and the Eastern Agricultural Complex.” American Antiquity 82, no. 1 (2017): 3-24. https://jstor.org/stable/26337953

34.  ibid.

What did it mean to be from the Upper Difficult Run Basin? 

What does it mean to be from any place? What nurture effects can a space exert on a person’s identity and how do we chart this spiritual terroir? 

A PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY PRIMER

We find ourselves in the realm of “psychogeography,” a term largely credited to Guy Debord who offered the neologism as “a study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” Not content to frame his idea with such exacting and scientific trim, Debord immediately hedged his description by offering that psychogeography was subject to “a rather pleasing vagueness.”¹

So it is that “psychogeography” is both a concept rich in possibilities and steeped in ambiguity. Many have attempted to fill the paradoxical fold between these two truths. No one has succeed as efficiently as geographers who slotted in behind the broad-stroked whimsy of the Situationalists to offer more concrete descriptions of the links between mind and place. 

“Space is socially produced,” offers landscape theorist Christopher Tilley. His work fleshes out the idea that places are interfaces where people and the places they occupy conspire to create identity. 

He goes on, “A centre and meaningful space involves specific sets of linkages between the physical space of the non-humanly created world, somatic states of the body, the mental space of cognition and representation and the space of movement, encounter and interaction between persons and between persons and the human and non-human environment.” 

In short, Tilley offers, “What space is depends on who is experiencing it and how.”² 

Anne Whiston Spirn, a scholar of space, axes, and self, hones in on culture as a framework for containing this productive “experiencing.” In the viral mores, codes, and customs that define self, Spirn excavates an essential link to the places in which these practices prevail.

“Culture is a fabric, the deep context of the natural landscape, the warp against which the weft of human intervention and elaboration weaves a pattern,” says Spirn. 

“Landscape context is complex and dynamic, woven of many strands, in multiple dimensions. In landscape, speaking in context demands more than using local materials and imitating forms common to the regional landscape. To speak in context is to distinguish deep and lasting contexts from those that are superficial and fleeting; it is to respond to the rhythms and histories of each and to project those contexts into the future. To guide such contextual expression is the function of the grammar of landscape.”³

Beyond the threshold of Spirn’s cultural context creation, ideas and abstractions become things and actions in a world that archaeologist and place-specialist James Deetz chronicled with his epic In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life.

“Culture is socially transmitted rules for behavior, ways of thinking about and doing things,” Deetz begins with a touch of familiarity. “We inherit our culture from the teachings and examples of our elders and our peers rather than from genes, whether it is the language we speak, the religious beliefs that we subscribe to, or the laws that govern our society. All such behavior is reflected and in subtle and important ways in the manner in which we shape our physical world. Material culture is usually considered to be roughly synonymous with artifacts, the vast universe of objects used by humankind to cope with the physical world. To facilitate social intercourse, and to benefit our state of mind. A somewhat broader definition of material culture is useful in emphasizing how profoundly our world is the product of our thoughts, as that sector of our physical environment that we modify through culturally determined behavior.”⁴

Deetz’s skilful utilization of the coping concept delaminates the relationship between culture and landform from utopian delusions of a nurturing Gaia producing happy humans. Maybe psychogeography is more a catalog of horrors than a museum of achievements. Either way, mentality and materiality seem to anchor a two-way conduit of formation. 

Annie Dillard, whose non-fiction magnum opus Pilgrim at Tinker Creek netted her a Pulitzer Prize for its hyper-local depiction of the topography where humans meet their environment in rural southwest Virginia, would seem to agree with Deetz. Culture writ large on a landscape rich in learned experience is perhaps an elaborate defense mechanism for the things we have endured thanks to the places we occupy.

She has this to say on the topic, “I have to look at the landscape of the blue-green world again. Just think: in all the clean beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death. I have to acknowledge that the sea is a cup of death and the land is a stained altar stone. We the living are survivors huddled on flotsam, living on jetsam. We are escapees. We wake in terror, eat in hunger, sleep with a mouthful of blood.”⁵

The stained altar stone and the mouthful of blood evoke a psychogeography cast around trauma first and foremost. These lush laments translate across disciplines. Utilizing the more stoic verbiage of the academic geography, Doreen Massey suggests a similar paradigm in a concept of places steeped in processes of “penetrability and vulnerability.” 

“What gives a place its specificity is not some long-internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of relations, articulated together at a particular locus. If one moves in from the satellite toward the globe, holding all those networks of social relations and movements and communications in one’s head, then each place can be seen as a particular, unique point of their intersection. The uniqueness of a place, or a locality, in other words is constructed out of particular interactions and mutual articulations of social relations, social processes, experiences and understandings, in a situation of co-presence, but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are actually constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether that be a street, a region, or even a continent. Instead then, of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relationships and understandings. And this in turn allows a sense of place which is extraverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local.”⁶

Translation: the battlefield upon which the struggle for existence and the hard-won medals of culture and identity are won and lost is at once hyper-local and staggeringly broad. This suggests that any psychogeographical study of how one came to see themselves as a product of their landscape must be conducted with the rigor and methodology of a forensic survey of a massive crime scene. There is a springing forth of inductive ideas and customs from the ground beneath our feet and a hail of ballistic influences fired into the landscape from beyond. 

To borrow from Tilley, “the experience of space is always shot through with temporalities, as spaces are always created, reproduced and transformed in relation to previously constructed spaces provided and established from the past. Spaces are intimately related to the formation of biographies and social relationships?”⁷

Yes, but whose biographies and whose relationships? From where and when? 

There’s a truism here. One as applicable in the local scale of the Upper Difficult Run Basin as the continent at large. Supposedly simple landscapes—be they geographical or psychological—are not so simple. 

BOTTOM LINE: IT’S COMPLEX

Places are complex adaptive systems—dynamics that self-organize around local conditions—achieving a temporary equilibrium only be to be punctuated by bouts of sheer chaos. Bolts emerge from the blue. Whether they’re viral ideas or tangible technologies, these invaders infiltrate and collide existing systems and new places are built from the wreckage of these collisions. 

Something fresh emerges. Something most typically human. Adaptive machines capable of thought and deed are empowered to alter their physical world and be altered in turn. These survivors carry innate knowledge and walk, as Emerson said, “as prophecies of the coming age.” 

Psychogeography is tricky, because the coping mechanisms with which people narrativize and execute their survival strategies—their behaviors, their identities, their aspirations, and their fears—are never uniform. No two people respond exactly the same way to phenomenon or place. Instead, the fleshy mediation machines caught in a material world that holds inordinate sway over their lives make their way through the world in a spiritual biography that doubles as a spatial codex. 

Asking what it means to be from a place is better phrased with still more questions. What forces act upon us? What foundations are available to ground and shelter us? What existing strategies for endurance are at our disposal and what new paths can we adopt to adapt. 

To achieve the best marriage of Debord’s “precise laws and specific effects” while accounting for the pleasing vagueness of ever-so-many externalities, our best strategy for reconstructing the psychogeography of the Upper Difficult Run Basin begins beneath our feet. 

A LONG, TUMULTUOUS HISTORY

Millions of years of destructive creation encapsulated in numerous Wilson Cycles of supercontinent formation and fracture are the colossal set pieces that frame the soil of Difficult Run. Igneous and metamorphic traces of catastrophic collisions, rifting, and orogeny knit together at the creek’s headwaters where Northern Piedmont Triassic Lowlands (64a) butt up against Piedmont Carolina Slate Belt (45c).⁸

The Virginia Site and Soil Evaluation Curriculum emphasizes that the Carolina Slate Belt soils forming the underlayment for the Difficult Run hydrology basin are “somewhat less resistant to erosion…and physiography reflects these differences.”⁹ However minute these differences in erosion-susceptibility may have been initially, two hundred and fifteen million years of precipitation was enough time to extrapolate and exploit this variable into a prominent depression 57.7 square miles in size.¹⁰

Today, the soils along the upper reaches of Difficult Run are predominantly loam of the Codorus, Meadowville, Wheaton and Glenelg varieties. The last of which is known for its high susceptibility to erosion. All are prone to flooding.¹¹

Soupy and irresolute, the soils that hosted the roads in northern and western Fairfax County were some of the worst encountered by soldiers during the Civil War. Pvt. Dick Simpson of the 3rd South Carolina occupied the area around Jermantown in early summer of 1861. On July 1, he described the roads as “muddy and slick” and his campsite as a “mud hole.”¹²

Simpson was not the first to make this observation. Accounts of early highways in the area are invariably tarnished by their overwhelmingly poor and muddy condition.¹³ The well-established tradition of dismal roads inspired Federal cartographers to give Old Bad Road its name. 

In fact, a preliminary Federal reconnaissance map of the area around modern Oakton made by Major W.R. Palmer in October of 1861 reports that “between Vienna and Flint Hill, the road is hilly, uneven, sunk at places from 6 to 8 feet below the adjoining ground, and badly drained.”¹⁴

Beginning in colonial times, Difficult Run was established as something of a local backwater—an inaccessible and poorly known mystery space where rough access to markets made for diminished prospects. Socially and geographically, the sunken area was lower than the rest of the county. 

Great plantations like Sully and Chantilly sit just above and beyond the belt of depressed micaceous schist from which the valley was ground. Beginning in the mid-18th century, Difficult Run was settled by people who were middling at best. The area was affordable, because it was ill-suited for agriculture.

Nominally, the sandy loam that lined the flood plains of Difficult Run and its tributaries was perfect for the cultivation of tobacco. The cash crop was literally that—a form of currency in which debts, taxes, and commerce were transacted in the dried leaf. Rich harvests made for rich men. 

Tobacco was grown here.¹⁵ Tenant farmers in Fairfax County were obligated to build “well framed tobacco barns” and rents on properties like those owned by George Mason stipulated payment of 630 pound of “good marketable tobacco.”¹⁶ Unfortunately, tobacco quickly depleted the soil of vital nitrogen and potash. In ideal conditions, an ambitious farmer could expect prime tobacco crimes for three to four years. Then the soil would be sour and unproductive.¹⁷

Conditions along Difficult Run accelerated soil exhaustion. High heat and humidity augmented soil nitrification and oxidization so that top soil failed to form in fall to prevent critical nutrient erosion in spring.¹⁸ More importantly, the soils most susceptible to devastating erosion were found in freshly deforested areas perched on hillsides subject to mass wasting.¹⁹ It is no wonder that the Potomac is estimated to carry four hundred pounds of material away from every acre in its watershed each year.²⁰

A late 18th century lifelease executed by John Adams for one hundred and forty acres on Vale Road west of Hunter Mill is instructive. The initial per annum terms were 1000 pounds of tobacco to be paid to the land owner. In the 1840s, the tobacco requirement was struck in favor of thirty two dollars.²¹

People in Difficult Run worked hard to clear their hilly, heavily forested land, and their struggle was handsomely rewarded for four years at best. After which, the sunken place in which they had chosen to live eroded still deeper, the finest nutrients were tapped from the soil, and all that was left were diminished prospects and hill-shadowed acreage that made for an uneven growing season. 

By the 1840s, large swaths of Fairfax County lay abandoned by settlers whose initial frontier mentality had overworked the land and forced them to emigrate westwards.²² The psychology of this moment was grim. If conditions were such that it was easier to undertake the herculean move to Kentucky rather than salvage one’s farm, the situation must have been dire. In Difficult Run, the pre-existing sense of isolation and second class status would have heightened as the land emptied out, crops floundered, and property values plummeted. 

The social landscape was exacerbated by the ambient murkiness of the place. Atmospheric conditions along Difficult Run have not changed substantially since pre-history. The area is still to this day prone to dense inversion layers. The forested creek bottoms hold thick fog that follows passing storms or dwells inexplicably for a day at a time while the higher ground on the plateaus near Fairfax and Chantilly remains clear. It is no wonder that few meaningful thoroughfares were cut through the Difficult Run bottoms. Abundant thickets, heavy oaks, and dense air still give the place a feeling reminiscent of a Washington Irving story. 

Here spookiness and social standing colluded. Site selection was something of an obsession with Virginia gentry. Locating one’s plantation was a complicated and agonizing process, by which the wealthy were forced to balance certain prerogatives of class and practicality. 

As attested to in George William Bagby’s satirical story “The Old Virginia Gentleman,” a true patrician of the Old Dominion would set his manor home a good distance from the main road. An elegant lane lined with woods separated the road—where tramps and commoners were frequent travelers—from a lavish home placed amidst trees.²³ 

Certain compromises were made. The home would necessarily be high-sited to afford a cooling breeze on the veranda and through the windows. So too, the treachery of the road would be kept at a not-too-distant distance. Otherwise, the master of the home could not easily travel to the court house, state capitol, or the all-important commercial hub where his financial interests dovetailed into his social status. 

Residents of the Difficult Run basin were not so burdened by these particular psychogeographic negotiations. No one who lived in the watershed had the luxury of these mental gymnastics. Instead, they were subject to site selection decisions made by their well-to-neighbors atop the hills that looked down—literally and figuratively—into dark and misty forests. 

This want of agency expressed itself spatially. First and foremost in 1757 when Loudoun County was carved out of Fairfax County. At this initial partition, Difficult Run marked the boundary between the two counties. Until 1797 when the boundary was adjusted to its current limits near today’s Dulles Airport, everyone east of the creek in the valley beat a path to Alexandria and eventually Fairfax Court House to attend to business. Those west of Difficult Run tacked northwest to far off Leesburg.²⁴ 

These minute distinctions long outlasted the temporary legal boundary. At the time of the Civil War, people of the Difficult Run Valley who lived on the western bank were said to reside in “Dranesville,” while those on the eastern bank were listed as residents of Fairfax. 

It was a multipolar existence. One negotiated, built, and administered by wealthy and prominent citizens who envisioned Difficult Run as an insignificant place. Never a destination, always a hindrance, the watershed was traversed at points by major roads out of geographic necessity, not social obligation. 

Beginning in 1795, Richard Bland Lee organized and promoted the company that would eventually build and fund the Little River Turnpike connecting Alexandria with the grain belt of Aldie by a route that crossed Difficult Run near today’s Fair Oaks Mall and not coincidentally passed directly in front of Lee’s home at Sully Plantation. The road opened in 1806.²⁵

In 1814 and 1815, a similar company financed the Warrenton Pike connecting lush wheat-producing districts in Fauquier County with Fairfax via Centreville on a trajectory that passed just above the highest headwaters of Difficult Run.²⁶

The Middle Turnpike uniting Leesburg with the grain port of Alexandria began construction in 1818 and opened completely in 1838. Bridging Difficult Run two and a half miles below Hunter’s Mill, the road was another avenue through, not to, the basin.²⁷

Difficult Run was a place “shot through” with the physical trappings of a world built to suit merchants, politicians, and first families elsewhere. Infrastructure tunneled through the place with little consideration or comment for the assemblage of middle and lower class farmers who staved off destitution not far from the wide macadamized thoroughfares that defined their world.

Here the universal indomitability of the human spirit and a certain penchant from pragmatic opportunism rise up to resist the gravity of the affluent world built around Difficult Run. Not content to slip further and further behind, the citizens of the basin leaned in to their isolation and topographic disadvantanges to capitalize on their place apart. 

Like a negative image of the plantation world of turnpikes and verandas that sat atop the county hierarchy, intrepid residents went to the very bottoms of the valley and established themselves as millers. Flood-prone creeks became motive power for the processing of local resources like wheat, timber, and wool that followed on the heels of the post-tobacco soil collapse. Better still, minor mill roads only grew in prominence as the vaunted turnpikes fell into disrepair and the burden of tolls encouraged shunpiking. 

In the decade before the Civil War, the Alexandria, Loudoun & Hampshire Railroad began operating on a line that stopped at Hunter’s Mill and other points nearby where unclearable and hard to plant land had unwittingly created a well-spring of timber that was very profitable as a European export.²⁸ 

As late as 1966, when much of the area between the Little River Turnpike and Hunter’s Mill voted overwhelmingly to refuse connection to the county sewer line, an idea of intentional isolation has influenced local identity along upper Difficult Run.²⁹ 

Substantial initial differences in land quality and disposition destined residents throughout history to a fate of harder labor to achieve a level of prosperity often less than that of their higher neighbors. Still, an opportunistic aspiration has exerted itself at every stage where geographic inadequacies seem most bleak. 

A SUNKEN PSYCHE OF PRIDE

Partially raised from the soil and otherwise reactive to forces beyond control, the localized psyche of the Upper Difficult Run Basin features prominent inversions of logic that require equal parts ambition and exertion to sustain itself. A maze of roads set in dense, misty woods and heavy thickets are a far cry from the long, straight turnpike thoroughfares above. These conditions seem to inspire the cultivation of alternative bearings and inventive path making where the want of cardinal directions and quality surfaces inspires a comfort with the uncertainty of swamp and forest alike. 

Despite long jags of near-desperation and inopportune collapses in economic standing, there is a pride nestled within this labyrinthine knowledge. Maybe navigating foggy trails encourages a comfort with uncertainty. Maybe living precariously just above hard-scrabble makes breaking with convention in order to survive all the easier. 

An analysis of the company rolls of Mosby’s Rangers reveals a broad hodge podge of constituent parts. There was no single place determinant for a good guerrilla. Nonetheless, conditions amidst the twisted, neglected low lands of Difficult Run seemed to put a healthy chip on the shoulder of local boys whose heads were rich with a lifetime’s worth of first-hand knowledge about slipping through rough terrain. 

CITATIONS

1.  Coverley, Merlin. Psychogeography. London: Pocket Essentials, 2010. 88-89.

2.  Tilley, Christopher. A Phenomenology of Landscapes. Oxford: Berg, 1994. 10-11.

3.  Spirn, Anne Whiston. The Language of Landscape. New Haven: Yale Press, 1998. 167.

4.  Deetz, James. In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life. New York City: Anchor Books, 1977. 34-35.

5.  Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York City: Harper Collins, 1990. 170.

6.  Christophers, Brett, Rebecca Lave, Jamie Peck, and Marion Werner, eds. The Doreen Massey Reader. Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing Limited, 2018. 155-156.

7.  Tilley, Christopher. A Phenomenology of Landscapes. Oxford: Berg, 1994. 11.

8.  Level III and IV Ecoregions of EPA Region 3. Scale 1:1,000,000. United States Environmental Protection Agency, 2003. https://gaftp.epa.gov/EPADataCommons/ORD/Ecoregions/reg3/reg3_eco.pdf 

9.  Conta, Jay, Tom Saxton, Erik Severson, and Steve Thomas. Virginia Site and Soil Evaluation Curriculum. Richmond: Virginia Department of Health, 2014. https://vdh.virginia.gov/content/uploads/sites/20/2016/05/Virginia-Site-and-Soil-Evaluation-Curriculum_2014.pdf. 88.

10.  Difficult Run Watershed. Scale not given. https://tysonslastforest.org/tysons-last-forest-stream-valley/environmental-benefits/difficult-run-watershed-old-courthouse-spring-branch-stream-valley/ 

11.  “Description & Interpretive Guide to Soils in Fairfax County.” Department of Public Works and Environmental Services, Land Development Services, Published April 2009/Revised May 2013. https://fairfaxcounty.gov/landdevelopment/sites/landdevelopment/files/assets/documents/pdf/publications/soils_map_guide.pdf

12.  Noe, Kenneth W. The Howling Storm: Weather, Climate, and the American Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. 28.

13.  Netherton, Nan, Donald Sweig, Janice Artemel, Patricia Hicks, and Patrick Reed. Fairfax County, Virginia: A History. Fairfax: Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, 1978. 192 and 267.

14.  Evans, D’anne A. The Story of Oakton, Virginia: 1758-1990. Oakton: The Optimist Club of Oakton, 1991. 30.

15. ibid p. 21.

16. ibid p. 14.

17.  Craven, Avery Odelle. Soil Exhaustion as a Factor in the Agricultural History of Virginia and Maryland, 1606-1860. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006. 32.

18. ibid p. 28.

19. ibid p. 16.

20. ibid p. 28.

21.  Evans, D’anne A. The Story of Oakton, Virginia: 1758-1990. Oakton: The Optimist Club of Oakton, 1991. 26-27.

22.  Netherton, Nan, Donald Sweig, Janice Artemel, Patricia Hicks, and Patrick Reed. Fairfax County, Virginia: A History. Fairfax: Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, 1978. 163.

23.  Bagby, George W. The Old Virginia Gentleman and Other Sketches. New York City: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911. https://google.com/books/edition/The_Old_Virginia_Gentleman/kndCc2rkAMIC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PR3&printsec=frontcover. 1. 

24.  Netherton, Nan, Donald Sweig, Janice Artemel, Patricia Hicks, and Patrick Reed. Fairfax County, Virginia: A History. Fairfax: Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, 1978. p. 26.

25. ibid p. 191-193.

26.  “Fauquier and Alexandria Turnpike—Chronology of Events.” Buckland Preservation Society. https://bucklandva.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Fauquier-and-Alexandria-Turnpike-Chronology-Timeline-Final.pdf 

27.  Netherton, Nan, Donald Sweig, Janice Artemel, Patricia Hicks, and Patrick Reed. Fairfax County, Virginia: A History. Fairfax: Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, 1978. 195-198.

28.  Harwood, Jr., H.H., Rails to the Blue Ridge. Falls Church: Pioneer America Society, 1969. 

29.  Evans, D’anne A. The Story of Oakton, Virginia: 1758-1990. Oakton: The Optimist Club of Oakton, 1991. p. 101.