Leesburg Historic District

Author's Comments

Leesburg does not announce itself. The courthouse complex is the obvious anchor, and it deserves the attention it gets, particularly at dusk when the lights come up and the brick goes warm against a cooling sky. But the town rewards a slower read than that. I have walked Market and King at various hours and in various weathers, and what I keep finding are the small things - a cast iron bootscraper at a threshold, the paint fading off a sign that has been there longer than anyone remembers, the way late afternoon light in November rakes across brick that has been laid and relaid for two centuries. The alleyways are where I would spend my time. Behind King Street there are service lanes and back walls that nobody photographs, and they hold the better detail. Texture, mostly. The fronts of these buildings have been tended and touched up for tourists. The backs have been left to weather, and the weathering is the photograph. Golden hour here is brief in winter, longer and more generous in spring. Saturday mornings bring the market and a different kind of picture entirely, one with people in it and produce on tables and the town doing what it has done for a long time. Come for an afternoon. Stay until the courthouse lights. The place is quiet in the way that small county seats are quiet, which is to say not empty but unhurried, and the camera responds to that if you let it.

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