B2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAY, MAY 17 , 2022
nine streets in Mosby Woods
should be called something else.
Residents say their community
is straining under the weight of
the topic, noting that some neigh-
bors are no longer friendly to one
another as they walk their dogs
past Reb Street or shuttle their
kids to school along Blue Coat
Drive.
“This is such a lovely commu-
nity and people are nervous that
this conversation is going to ruin
that,” said Amanda Stamp, who
has lived with her husband in
their Antietam Avenue house for
six years.
One neighbor suggested she
move, telling her “you don’t be-
long here” after learning that she
supported changing the street
names, Stamp said.
“I feel like that’s how our whole
country is right now,” she said.
“ ‘You either agree with me or we
don’t talk.’ ”
Neighbors for change
Grace Gillespie realized the
group she co-founded in 2020 —
Neighbors for Change — had
touched a nerve when she re-
turned home after passing out
fliers about renaming the streets
and read an email accusing the
volunteer organization of being
funded by liberal philanthropist
George Soros.
“I actually had to look up who
George Soros was,” Gillespie re-
called.
More emails followed, some
from outside the community.
“If those who forget history are
bound to repeat it, I would HATE
to see what happens to those who
try to rewrite it,” one read, calling
the effort “virtue signaling” and
signing off by suggesting that
Gillespie and her neighbor Laura
Bowles, the group’s co-founder,
“kill yourselves.”
They informed the police, who
took a report. No charges resulted
from the case, a Fairfax police
spokeswoman said.
Gillespie’s family has been in
STREET NAMES FROM B1 Mosby Woods since it was built, a
common boast in a neighborhood
of brick ramblers and two-story
Colonial-style houses 45 minutes
from D.C. that features its own
community swimming pool.
In the early 1960s, Gillespie’s
grandparents bought into devel-
oper Stephen Yeonas’s vision of a
self-contained community sur-
rounded by parks, restaurants
and shopping plazas in what was
then a rapidly growing section of
Northern Virginia.
The name “Mosby Woods” and
its Civil War theme was a market-
ing scheme born during local
centennial commemorations of
the start of the Civil War, Yeonas
told the local community associa-
tion president for a 2012 book
commemorating the develop-
ment’s 50th anniversary.
Mosby was known for his
“Midnight Raid” of 1863, when
the Confederate colonel and his
Rangers captured a Union Army
brigadier general while he was
sleeping in nearby Fairfax Court-
house — a Southern victory com-
memorated by a local historical
state marker that inspired the
developer’s son to suggest the
name, according to Bob Reinsel,
the book’s author. Yeonas died in
2020.
Gillespie paid only passing at-
tention to the street names while
visiting her grandparents as a
child, she said. Then, they passed
away and Gillespie and her hus-
band moved into the home on
Plantation Parkway.
Their son, Micah, brought up
the street names one day in 2017
after a fourth-grade lesson in
Virginia history, Gillespie said.
“He started asking: ‘Is it racist
to have streets like Plantation
and Confederate?’ ” she recalled.
Others in the community had
similar questions after the white
supremacist rally over a Confed-
erate statue in Charlottesville
that year led to the death of a
32-year-old woman.
But it was the Floyd killing that
moved Gillespie and Bowles into
action.
Streets named for
Confederacy divide
a neighborhood
er Confederate markers around
town — including the city seal
that features an image of John
Quincy Marr, the first Confeder-
ate soldier killed by a Union
soldier in combat.
Neighbors for Change also re-
searched the history of Confeder-
ate monuments and street names
in the South, noting on its website
how such memorials to the “Lost
Cause” multiplied during the
start of the civil rights movement,
about when Mosby Woods was
being built.
Amy Chase said that awareness
made her think differently about
her cheerful home on Ranger
Road, named after Mosby’s
troops.
“Within these walls were peo-
ple sending their White kids to
White-only schools,” she said. “It
made history feel more recent.”
Laura Gerber, whose daughter
Monet, 22, is biracial, said the
national tension over race during
the past two years has made the
street names unbearable.
“I don’t want my Black daugh-
ter and her friends driving down
Plantation Parkway,” Gerber said.
“It’s wrong. It’s hurtful.”‘We are not responsible for
this history’
Last fall, an advisory group
convened by the Fairfax City
Council recommended a host of
changes to the Confederate mark-
ers across the city of 24,000 resi-
dents, nearly a third of whom
were born outside the United
States.
For example, the city seal — a
coat of arms noticeable on police
officers’ uniforms during traffic
stops — should not feature Marr’s
square-jawed image next to that
of Thomas Fairfax, the British
lord for whom the city is named,
the group said. The council is now
considering a new seal that only
features an image of City Hall.
Monuments to fallen Confed-
erate soldiers and the United
Daughters of the Confederacy
could remain untouched in the
local cemetery. But the text on
other markers — including the
one about Mosby’s raid — should
be changed so they’re not reflect-
ing an anti-United States view,
the group said.
Mosby Woods residents fo-
cused on the recommendations
to change 14 street names in the
city, most of them in their neigh-
borhood.
Opponents of the changes ar-
gued that they would be an un-
necessary and potentially costly
inconvenience, forcing residents
to alter the address on their
driver’s licenses, credit cards,
wills and other documents.
They point out the few street
names that honor the North —
two bearing the name of Union
Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman— or that bear neutral military
connotations. They also note
that, after the Civil War, Mosby
befriended Union Gen. Ulysses S.
Grant and expressed regret over
his role in the Southern cause to
maintain slavery, making his leg-
acy more complicated.
The street names carry the
memories of a community that
has long been welcoming to new-
comers, they said, though Mosby
Woods is still mostly White. Lati-
no immigrants, who have stayed
out of the debate, live in an
apartment complex on the edge
of the development.
Yo Kimura, a Japanese Ameri-
can who has lived on Confederate
Lane for 46 years, wants the
street name kept as it is.
“We are not responsible for this
history,” Kimura said about Vir-
ginia’s role in the Confederacy.
“We are not carrying the spirit of
this history either.”Neighbor against neighbor
On Ranger Road one recent
afternoon, an elderly White wom-
an opened her front door with a
cheerful smile while shooing
away her yapping dog.
Her face hardened when she
was asked about the sign on her
front lawn.
Like about a dozen others on
her block, the sign urged neigh-
bors to “Tell City Hall!” that they
wanted to keep their street name
intact. “Your Street. Your Voice.
Don’t Be Silent!!”
“No, thank you,” the woman
said to an invitation to share her
views, shutting her door. “Bye
bye.”
Francis Dietz, a neighbor on
Ranger Road who printed those
signs, said some residents who’ve
taken a stance against the name
changes live in fear of being
called racist as a result.
He blamed the city and Neigh-
bors for Change for wanting to
“re-litigate or relight the Civil
War that has been over for 160
years.”
In the advisory group report,
“one of the things they said was:
‘You’re going to need a period of
healing after this,’ ” Dietz said.
“I’m like: Well, you don’t need a
period of healing if you don’t
cause division to begin with.”
The emotions behind the de-
bate distract from some of the
arguments, others said.
For example, Dietz’s neighbors
on Ranger Road and residents
who live on Traveler Road (a
misspelled homage to Lee’s
horse) or Shiloh Street (named
after a demoralizing 1862 Confed-
erate defeat in Tennessee) say
their street names mean little to
anyone who doesn’t already know
about their links to the Civil War.
“Nobody on our street thinks
‘Traveler’ is offensive, and it
shouldn’t be,” said Chris An-They invited neighbors to join
and petitioned the city, which was
already discussing changing oth-drews, a resident of nearly 30
years. “It’s just a wayfarer.”
Some on both sides have sug-
gested that Mosby Woods re-
brand itself by changing its name
altogether and shedding the Con-
federate raider on its logo, giving
the less-obviously Confederate
street names a chance to take on
new connotations.
That decision would come
from the Mosby Woods Commu-
nity Association. In April, the
group polled residents, finding
that about 48 percent of those
surveyed disliked the idea of a
new neighborhood name while
nearly 40 percent favored it. An-
other 12 percent were undecided.Festering resentments
Reinsel, the community associ-
ation president, has navigated
the debate with one overriding
concern: preserving the neigh-
borhood’s sense of unity.
“We have always been working
to keep the community together,
working as a community, even
though we all have our own
thoughts about this,” said Rein-
sel, who grew up in Mosby Woods
during the 1970s and ’80s.
Mosby Woods has faced divi-
sions before, he said.
Residents in a portion of the
development that was initially
over the Fairfax County boundary
line resisted efforts to move the
boundary so they’d be part of the
city — a fight over the quality of
government services and schools
that ended in 1980 and bred
resentments between neighbors.
“But the community worked
through it,” Reinsel said, adding
that he thought the same will
happen this time.
Some residents agree. Others
say the hard feelings have been
allowed to fester after nearly two
years of debate, including back-
and-forth arguments posted to
the community association’s
Facebook page and a city website
dedicated to the issue.
“I wish the city had gotten
involved more quickly so it would
be taken out of the hands of
neighbors,” said Chase, on Ranger
Road.
Fairfax City Mayor David Mey-
er agreed that the matter should
have been resolved sooner, fol-
lowing several postponed votes
on the issue by the city council,
which appears to be favoring
some combination of name
changes.
Given the controversial history
of Confederate symbols in Vir-
ginia, the city has tried to hear
from as many residents as possi-
ble while also exploring its role in
that history, Meyer said.
“I don’t believe, in the 40 years
that I’ve been involved in commu-
nity leadership in the city of
Fairfax, that I’ve witnessed any-
thing that comes close to the kind
of outreach and citizen engage-
ment that we’ve had on this is-
sue,” he said.
Mako Honda said she is eager
to get past the feeling that she
and her husband, Ryan Finley,
live on “the worst street corner in
Fairfax City and, even, across the
U.S.”
The couple bought their brick
rambler in 2019, so focused on the
relatively lower price in expen-
sive Northern Virginia that they
didn’t think much about the
streets around their new home:
the intersection of Plantation
Parkway and Confederate Lane.
After Floyd’s murder, a neigh-
bor printed Black Lives Matter
lawn signs and passed them out.
Finley took one and drove it into
the grass in front of their house,
facing the street signs.
There it will sit until the street
names change, he said, marveling
at how what started as a market-
ing ploy to lure buyers to Mosby
Woods has now pitted neighbor
against neighbor.
“It’s just annoying that this was
snuck in by some dude looking to
sell houses,” Finley said.PHOTOS BY MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POSTTOP: A sign for Confederate Lane i n the Mosby Woods neighborhood in Fairfax City. ABOVE: Francis
Dietz doesn’t have a problem with the street names and said the Neighbors for Change group working
to alter them is trying to “re-litigate or relight the Civil War that has been over for 160 years.”RELIABLE DECK EXPERTS
YOU CAN COUNT ON!
$250OFF
WOOD RESTORE
WITH THE WASHINGTON POST OFFER ONLY. NOT
VALID WITH ANY OTHER OFFER. EXPIRES 6/30/22RESTORE- Sand All Deckboards
- Replace Loose Nails
with Screws - Replace Rotted or
Damaged Wood - A pply 2 Coats Color-
Enhanced Sealer
$350OFF
KDAT
WITH THE WASHINGTON POST OFFER ONLY. NOT
VALID WITH ANY OTHER OFFER. EXPIRES 6/30/22REPLACE- Replace Old Decking
with New Kiln Dried
Wood Decking - Replace Old Rail with
New Rail - A pply 2 Coats Color-
Enhanced Sealer
REPLACE- Replace Old Decking
with New Kiln Dried
Wood Decking - Replace Old Rail with
New Rail - A pply 2 Coats Color-
Enhanced Sealer
$750OFF
ALL COMPOSITE DECK UPGRADES
WITH THE WASHINGTON POST OFFER ONLY. NOT
VALID WITH ANY OTHER OFFER. EXPIRES 6/30/22UPGRADE- Replace Old Decking
- Remove Old Rails
- Install New Low
Maintenance
Composite Decking - Install New Low
Maintenance Vinyl Rails
UPGRADE- Replace Old Decking
- Remove Old Rails
- Install New Low
Maintenance
Composite Decking - Install New Low
Maintenance Vinyl Rails
571-500-3407WPDECKGURU.COM