Just inside the northwest corner of Leopold's Preserve, the land where the Thoroughfare Colored/North Fork School stood from 1885 to 1936 still marks its place. The building is gone. The preserve's own history page calls it one of the first public schools for Prince William County's African American children. It is a short walk from the Villages of Piedmont. That same history page names Piedmont directly. It describes how farmers along the Route 15 and Route 55 corridors sold their land and how new communities like the Villages of Piedmont grew up on this historic ground.
Most Piedmont walkers think of the preserve as a back yard of meadows and young forest. It is also the most open public window into the Thoroughfare community available today. Prince William County is designing a historic park around two village cemeteries, but that park is not built, not funded for construction and not open. The preserve's trails, meanwhile, are open every day from dawn to dusk at no cost.
The Trail Map Already Labels the History
The preserve's trail map lists interpretive stops by name, including "Old Homesteads," "The Thoroughfare Colored/North Fork School," "The Pinkard Family," "The Brown Families" and "On Hallowed Ground," plus a trail called the Thoroughfare Connector. The preserve's points of interest page and history page explain what sits behind several of those names.
| Stop | What the preserve says is there | Worth knowing before you go |
|---|---|---|
| North Fork School site | Former school, 1885 to 1936, just inside the northwest corner | The site remains; the building does not |
| Pinkard family cemetery | Burial place of Green and Hester Pinkard, who lived on this land starting in the 1880s and farmed corn | Reached from Pinkard's Loop on the south side of the preserve |
| The Old House | The preserve's most intact historic building, estimated to date to the early 20th century | Its occupants belonged to the nearby community founded by formerly enslaved people |
| Brown Cemetery | Sits on the preserve boundary | The preserve asks visitors to respect the neighboring property |
| Berry Pond | Named for a family that lived in the area | The county's history exhibit recalls it as a Thoroughfare swimming and fishing spot |
Late fall is a good time to look for these spots. The preserve notes that most of its wooded areas are young forest. Around 1900, most of the interior was farmed for corn, oats, wheat and hay, and only a few stands of trees were left. The woods along today's loops grew up over old fields, and the homesites and cemeteries inside them belonged to people who farmed those fields.
What Thoroughfare Was
Prince William County's Thoroughfare history exhibit tells the village's story through property records and named residents. The postwar community grew around Thoroughfare Station on the Manassas Gap Railroad. Free-born and formerly enslaved African Americans and people of Native American ancestry bought small lots there and built homes, businesses, churches and schools.
The exhibit dates the first documented transfer of Thoroughfare land to a person of color to September 1873. That year, Thomas Primas, formerly enslaved at Cloverland Plantation, received a 20-acre parcel. The Primas family later donated the land for North Fork School, the same school whose site now sits inside the preserve. Alexander Johnson and Moses Morrison bought lots in 1879. They are credited with starting the Oakrum Baptist congregation, which first met in Johnson's home. The congregation moved to New Zion Church around 1883, and the Oakrum Baptist Church building that stands today went up in 1909.
The tradespeople show up by name, too. Carpenter Frank Fletcher came in the 1880s. J.E.A. Peyton, a carpenter and wheelwright, opened his shop in 1887. Cornelius Allen, an early settler, had Pamunkey ancestry. Other landmarks have outlasted many of the homes. The Chambers Store dates to around 1920 and is now known as Royal Mart. The Thoroughfare Depot, built around 1910, was moved west in the 1940s. On October 10, 2004, after three descendants spent years pushing for it, a state highway marker was dedicated at Oakrum Baptist Church.
The two main sources give different founding dates. Leopold's Preserve says the village "had been established in 1828" by free African Americans who worked at nearby Chapman's Mill. The county exhibit says Thoroughfare existed before the Civil War, but the village at its current location developed in the decades after 1865. Both can be true if they describe different stages of one place.
The preserve's history page also covers the land before the village. Most of the preserve sits on the former Falkland Farm, which John Hill Carter established by 1823 on acreage carved from his father's Cloverland Farm. The page states that Carter profited from enslaved people who grew wheat and raised sheep there. In 1851, the Manassas Gap Railroad took part of his land for the line that later anchored Thoroughfare Station.
The County's Park Is Still on Paper
The village's two best-known cemeteries are not on the preserve. They are Fletcher-Allen Cemetery and Potter's Field, which is also called Peyton Cemetery or the Allen Home Place, and the county exhibit says neither is currently open to the public. The historic Primas House and the James and Emily Mount House are private homes and also closed to visitors. That makes the preserve, not the village center, the place where a walker can actually stand at a Thoroughfare school site or family cemetery today.
The county plans to change that. Its Thoroughfare Community Updates page describes a master plan to turn county-owned parcels into a public historic park that also protects both cemeteries. Consultant Land Collective led three public meetings, the last one at Haymarket Town Hall on June 25, 2026. In January, an archaeology team surveyed four of the parcels and left a 25-foot buffer around all known cemetery boundaries. Since the June 1 entry announcing that last meeting, the page has not posted a final plan.
InsideNoVa's coverage of the June meeting described two design schemes. One uses two county parcels joined by a trail easement. The other adds a central gathering space on a third, privately owned parcel. The same report said county officials expected a final design this fall, with Board adoption to follow, and that money to build the park had not been set aside. InsideNoVa reported how the designer described the goal:
David Rubin, the collective's founding principal, underscored the park's reliance on its "agrarian past," reiterating that it would serve chiefly as a community gathering site and "place of reverence" revolving around storytelling and shared heritage.
A separate state process is also waiting. At its June 12, 2025 meeting, Virginia's State Review Board deferred a decision on expanding the Thoroughfare district's National Register boundary until an archaeological review is done. Some protection work is already on the ground. In September 2023, a Commonwealth History Fund grant paid for a new board fence around Potter's Field.
November 14, and the Saturdays Around It
The best way in this season is the free walk on Saturday, November 14, from 10 a.m. to noon. The walk is called "Reading the Land." The event page says it will use physical, biological and cultural clues, including "cemeteries, foundations, and vegetation," to tell the story of the Thoroughfare community. A professional naturalist leads it at a slow pace, usually covering two miles or less, and it is open to everyone. Bull Run Mountains Conservancy and the White House Farm Foundation present it together. The listing has a registration button, so check the page before you go.
These naturalist walks run one weekend a month all year, each on a different seasonal topic. The next one, on Saturday, December 12, is "Winter Survival," about how mammals get through the cold months. For families, the preserve calendar lists a Wood Duck Nest Box Building youth event at noon on Saturday, November 7.
Volunteers can help care for the same trails through the Friday Conservation Corps, a weekly session run with Bull Run Mountains Conservancy. The start time moves from 8:30 a.m. to 9 a.m. in winter, and drop-ins can stay an hour or longer. Volunteers register online and must be at least 13, with a parent or guardian for anyone under 18. Wear closed-toe shoes and long pants, and bring sturdy work gloves and your own water. The work is usually trail maintenance, invasive-plant control and brush clearing.
If you drive, access is by gravel Thoroughfare Road. The east lot serves most trails, and the west lot serves the wetlands platform and Wood Duck Way. For the North Fork School site, the "Old Homesteads" stop and Pinkard's Loop, check the trail map before you head out.
Our team at Washington Street Realty works out of downtown Haymarket, a few minutes from Thoroughfare Road, and we like hearing what neighbors find on these trails. If you take the November 14 walk and want to talk about Piedmont, the preserve or what the county's park plan could mean down the road, schedule a consultation with us.
