History

Bloomfield is a small crossroads at the meeting of Airmont Road and Bloomfield Road in western Loudoun, a short distance from Unison. The General Assembly established a town here on January 13, 1816, and the name is said to come from the wildflower fields that bloomed toward the Blue Ridge.

Bloomfield’s place in history comes largely from the Civil War. J.E.B. Stuart’s cavalry camped here at the time of the November 1862 fighting around Unison. Two years later, after the Greenback Raid on a Union payroll train in West Virginia, John Mosby’s Rangers came to the area to divide the captured money, roughly $173,000, on October 13, 1864.

Nearby stand the two Ebenezer Baptist churches, sharing a walled cemetery. Baptists were meeting on the site by 1769; the old stone meetinghouse probably dates to about 1806, and a Greek Revival church was built beside it around 1855 after a doctrinal split between Old School and New School Baptists. Around 1876 local artist Lucien Whiting Powell painted folk trompe-l’oeil decoration inside the newer church. Both buildings joined the state and national registers in 1994. Loudoun County today recognizes Bloomfield as a Rural Historic Community.