Opinion Rural America is vanishing. This tiny county is fighting back. WaPo Milbank
CULPEPER, Va. — Culpeper National Cemetery, on the edge of this rural town’s historic center, has for more than 150 years been the final resting place for about 1,300 Union soldiers killed in the Civil War. Stone monuments honor regiments from Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania that fought the battles of Cedar Mountain, Brandy Station and others nearby. But these hallowed grounds are about to become a monument to something else: the destruction of the American countryside.
Look east from the cemetery, to an adjacent field where cattle graze, birds sing and a brook babbles: This will become a 116-acre data center housing 2.2 million square feet of massive structures with concrete walls up to 70 feet high. Look to the south from the cemetery at another green field: Here will rise the electrical substation powering the 600-megawatt monster.
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But Supervisor Gary Deal lectured constituents that they “have to understand that we have to plan for the future.” That future, he said, involves millions of dollars in tax revenue from data centers. “We have a low tax rate right now,” Deal acknowledged, but he thinks Culpeper can “even do better.” The lure of easy dollars explains why, on a former horse farm seven miles outside of town, a massive crane is erecting the walls for still another data center. And in August, county supervisors will vote on a gargantuan, 4.6 million-square-foot data center six miles out of town in Brandy Station, spoiling the nearby Culpeper Battlefields State Park.
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It’s the latest chapter in the story of how the internet ate Northern Virginia. The insatiable need for computing infrastructure, first for the cloud and now for artificial intelligence, has already consumed suburban counties such as Loudoun and Prince William in Northern Virginia. Now it is threatening to devour rural counties such as Culpeper. Back in 1749, a 17-year-old George Washington served as surveyor for what was then the frontier county of Culpeper. Now, after nearly three centuries as a rural community, Culpeper is on the frontier of rural destruction.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Culpeper’s neighbor, Rappahannock County, has gone in the opposite direction. Its board of supervisors has for years rejected almost all development, and its population hasn’t grown at all. With 7,348 residents in the 2020 census, Rappahannock has roughly the same population it had in 2000 — and in 1920, for that matter. Rappahannock fends off development with its 25-acre minimum zoning requirement, and resists construction of cellular towers to protect its “view shed,” content to leave most of the county in a dead zone. “I don’t even want to talk about growth. It’s not a word that should be in our active vocabulary,” Keir Whitson, vice chairman of the board of supervisors, tells me.
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https://wapo.st/3zTDgfI