Tom Shoop’s journey into Ilda and what he found there began with his taking of daily exercise in his Fairfax County neighborhood of Canterbury Woods near Annandale. He passed by a standard suburban Colonial-style house but with a “Black Lives Matter” banner suspended above the second-story balcony. He recalls, “These kinds of signs are not uncommon — but not common in my corner of suburbia.” A block and a half away, protected by a historical easement, stands circa 1790 plantation house named Oak Hill.
Author Tom Shoop
Shoop, now a Richmond resident, muses, “This got me thinking: I wonder how places like Fairfax County are changing how they tell their stories. Traditionally, it’s been a reflection of the Colonial past: ‘Thomas Jefferson slept here four times.’”
His walk took him past the Ilda Pool complex, which flickered up a memory of a nearby historic marker about something named Ilda, “and that turned out to be a much more interesting and complicated history than I could have known about,” he says.
Shoop’s curiosity led him into an exploration that resulted in a history published in February by the University of Virginia Press, titled “A Place Called Ilda: Race and Resilience at a Northern Virginia Crossroads.”
Shoop is participating in what should be the lively Virginia Forum, happening through April 6 at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture, which this year asks the question, “Who were/are Virginians?” There are varying registration levels, currently available by walk-up only.
He’ll be a member of the Friday, April 5, Session IV, Panel 13, “The Intertwined Histories of Black and White Virginians Across Three Centuries: A Roundtable on Latest Books and Newest Trends.” Sounds heavy, but what it all comes down to is the way stories are interpreted, who tells them and why.
And the passing of events for centuries at the current intersection of the present moved Shoop to write his book.
“I started pulling at various strands, digging into what Ilda was,” he says. “The real turning point came when I read about the road widening project in the early 2000s.”
This led him to a determined researcher and archivist with a superhero name, Maddy McCoy, who directed him to the Fairfax Regional Library to ask for the file on the Ilda Cemetery.
“The joke was on me,” Shoop says. “They had to wheel a cart out for all the documents they had. It was a treasure trove in connection with road widening, and the archaeological firm they hired conducted exhaustive search. It saved me about a thousand Freedom of Information Act requests. That really got me started, and so I kept digging.”
Author Tom Shoop’s new book, “A Place Called Ilda,” explores the history of a forgotten community in Fairfax.
What Shoop discovered was, indeed, intertwining histories, much of which were contained in bulging files, but also oral traditions and other materials that existed, but not in one place. And that’s what books can do.
For more than 30 years, Shoop wrote for Government Executive, which aggregates news related to federal government employees, and through that organization in 2021 he collected his first findings for an article in state and local government publication Route Fifty, “The Plantation and the Pizza Hut: A Suburban County Reconsiders Its History.”
Ilda arose following the Civil War through the enterprise of two formerly enslaved men, Moses Parker and Horace Gibson. They’d both trained as blacksmiths and, in no small feat, bought their freedom. They purchased land along the Little River Turnpike and opened a blacksmith shop. The business did well, and this allowed their landholdings to increase. The village’s name came from a contraction of Gibson’s daughter’s name, Matilda. At least, that’s local lore, but, Shoop notes, nobody’s found a better explanation.
The Ilda story contains a cavalcade of intriguing personalities, from the past into the present, and, like out of a novel where the countryside is a character, the Ilda Cemetery, perpetuated in memory by African American tradition, asserts itself by seeming to resist encroachment even after its presence nearly disappeared under overgrowth and neglect.
During the course of his research and writing, Shoop sensed the aspect of the unfortunate rhyming of history at this nondescript intersection.
“As I point out, it’s not a place, but a few buildings that are literally on one side of the road where once was located the blacksmith’s shop and then much later, the Jewish Community Center, both of which become a nexus for white supremacist hate. And on the other side is this cemetery, which almost has this supernatural ability to avoid development. Through the decades, builders tried a gas station, grocery store, two attempts at a child care center, a Salvation Army headquarters, and finally the road widening project brought it to light, and it wouldn’t have had not Dennis Howard made a lot of noise about it being there.”
Howard, a Gibson descendant, a star Randolph-Macon College basketball player, Vietnam War veteran, Howard University graduate and a career child protective services officer in Washington, D.C., spent more than 30 years researching his family history. The Ilda Cemetery became a focal point. In the 1990s, a phone call from his Aunt Ada connected him to Jesse Wright, who following military service converted to Islam and changed his name to Hareem Badil-Abish. Turns out, he and Howard were related; furthermore, Badil-Abish was conducting a parallel and painstaking search for his ancestors, ultimately for a book. The two combined their considerable information.
They are but a couple of the fascinating figures Shoop learned of in his own research.
He observes that after the Civil War, due to the near-constant battling in Fairfax, residents left, and Union soldiers who liked the land bought up cheap acreage. “You have, then, these veterans who think this is a great place to establish their farming techniques and former slaves who could buy land.”
This provided a genuine opportunity for real promise for real change. Shoop reflects, “Whites and Blacks were living in the same communities until Jim Crow reversed those social gains and absolutely squandered what might’ve been.”
And it all happened in a place called Ilda.
The Virginia Forum runs through April 6 at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture. Tom Shoop will be part of a panel titled “The Intertwined Histories of Black and White Virginians Across Three Centuries: A Roundtable on Latest Books and Newest Trends.” His book “A Place Called Ilda: Race and Resilience at a Northern Virginia Crossroads” is available now.
