Is the trade of a barn and an historic working farm for a
new grocery store - a Harris Teeter - really worth it?
Joni Mitchell: "They paved paradise ... to put up a parking lot ..."
Putting aside how some engineering geniuses accidentally knocked down an abandoned barn in Purcellville that they promised to preserve and protect, while making way for a spanking brand new Harris Teeter grocery store, you have to ask how many grocery stores does a town really need?
How much food can the town’s people eat?
We already have a few big stores in town, namely, Bloom and Giant, and there are other smaller stores as well, for example, for the health conscious, we have Healthway Natural Foods, also the 7-11 for small fast stops, and even “My Deli and Café” for the sandwich on the run.
I confess a personal bias for Giant as I shop there occasionally and my daughter Diana works there. But I used to shop at Bloom before Giant and sometimes still do. There’s the loaf of bread and milk I get at the 7-11. And we can’t overlook what's nearby, Natural Mercantile in Hamilton and Wegman’s only fifteen minutes away in Leesburg.
Meaning no offense, “why in the world do we need a Harris Teeter?”
It’s been long reported, seemingly without sufficient enviro or governmental empathy, that, at the same time we are planning for this new grocery store, right across the street, in order to make way for the SCR, we are destroying a 250-year old farm, Crooked Run Orchard Farms, where you can still pick fresh produce yourself; one friend said she picks 50 pounds of berries a season; it is bitterly ironic that, as we trash a producing historic farm, we are making way for a retail grocery store?
Now that the court cases are winding down, and this farm family has been crushed like a bug, a fleet of monstrous earth-moving machines stands ready, motors running, to punch holes in the ground, tear through their vegetable patches, knock down the barn, lay a road, and, slice and dice this family’s dreams to shreds.
Many came to this County because it was a land of farms, of rolling green pastures and country roads sunk out of sight by design because the sight of roads diminishes the landscape.
We are squandering our natural legacy by inches and miles, converting the living and beautiful into an everywhere sameness, supplanting the curve of a hill, rock outcroppings and pastures with manicured patches of grass, acres of asphalt, and glass and steel boxes that sell what we can get elsewhere or what we don’t need at all.
A Greek philosopher said, “Nothing improves our aim like having a target.”
Is our target eating more and getting fatter?
Is it endangering the groceries we have by increasing competition in the face of a doubtful demand?
Is it making a magnet store to attract more people to move here, without regard for how we afford the necessary services or infrastructure?
None of these “targets” are worthy.
We won’t receive a dime’s worth of benefit from this unrelenting and unnecessary fast-growth development.
But the profit that these developers expect make them totally indifferent to preserving and protecting what’s living, natural and beautiful about this County.
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