History

Aldie sits where the Little River slips through a gap between the Catoctin and Bull Run Mountains, a natural gateway that made it a meeting point for roads heading east to Alexandria, west toward the Blue Ridge and northwest toward Snickersville. A mill operated here as early as 1765 under James and George Mercer, but the village itself took shape in the early 1800s once the Little River Turnpike arrived.

Charles Fenton Mercer, a soldier, legislator and colonization advocate, settled here in 1804 and named his estate for Aldie Castle, his family’s ancestral seat in Scotland. His partner William Cooke built the present mill in 1807, and Mercer’s Federal-style house went up above it around 1810. The mill kept grinding into the 1970s; the pair of overshot waterwheels added in 1900 is a rare survivor in Virginia. Today the mill complex is a regional park.

On June 17, 1863, during the opening moves of the Gettysburg campaign, Union and Confederate cavalry fought for roughly four hours around the village in the Battle of Aldie, an engagement that ended without a clear victor. Just east of town, the 1851 Mount Zion Old School Baptist Church served as a gathering place for Mosby’s Rangers and as a wartime hospital and prison.