About Sterling

In the beginning of 1962, large farms made up the 1,762 acres of what today is called Sterling Park. Route 7, also known as Leesburg Pike, bordered what used to be Jesse Hughes’s dairy farm. Hughes arrived in Loudoun County in the early 20th century and was a longtime head of the county’s Democrats. Tavenner had purchased land from Albert Shaw Jr., who had inherited it from his father Albert B. Shaw, editor and publisher of the American Review of Reviews. One of Shaw’s spreads, totaling 1,640 acres, was called “The Experimental Farm”, because he was the first area farmer to receive a U.S. grant for applying “scientific methods”, as Tavenner called them.