Mickie Gordon Park: field of dreams or future cricket center?

By Laura Longley

About a mile east of Middleburg on the north side of Rt. 50 near the historically African American hamlet of Macsville, there is a 99-acre park with open fields, old oak trees, a fishing pond, tennis courts, a baseball field, and a lighted cricket field, which was formerly a baseball field. After all, Mickie Gordon Memorial Park was a baseball park, which was known for decades as Hall’s Park, one of the few places in highly segregated Loudoun County where a Black person could play ball.

Here, every year until African American civic activist, prominent contractor, and park owner William Nathaniel Hall needed to sell it, the Black community gathered annually for three gala field days. Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Odd Fellows’ Turn Out Day in early September always meant good times together—horse races, marching bands, and doubleheaders with the Middleburg Braves. 

Hall lived in a stone home on Carters Farm Lane next door to his park property. Although enlarged since then, the home still stands some 400 feet from what remains the oldest of the region’s Black heritage baseball fields.

“Hall’s was a nice park,” recalls Asbury Lloyd Jr., the now-94-year-old former pitcher for the Middleburg Braves. Lloyd, who grew up in Philomont, played on that Black team with friends like Louis Haley, who lived in Macsville until his passing two years ago. They wore uniforms modeled after the Boston Braves (later Milwaukee, now Atlanta Braves). “Blue and white with red stripes, and they had two hip pockets. Most of ‘em didn’t have one,” Lloyd laughs.

Lloyd played baseball in Loudoun for 27 years and loves telling stories of his exploits, especially the time he and his unstoppable curve ball retired 12 batters to deliver a 1-0 win for the Braves. Eventually, though, after Will Hall sold the land to a white horse breeder, Hall’s Park became the property of Loudoun County Public Schools, which had considered it as a site for a segregated school until settling on the village of St. Louis for Banneker Elementary School. Since then, the school board has leased the land to the Parks, Recreation, and Community Services department, which renamed it for Mickie Gordon, the coach of Middleburg’s initially all-white Babe Ruth League team.

Goodbye to all that?

In 2005, PRCS found there was enough interest to launch a Loudoun County Cricket League. They started out with seven teams. Today, that English cousin of baseball is the largest adult sports program operated by PRCS. According to PRCS Communications Manager Kraig Troxell, the Loudoun County Cricket League (LCCL) now boasts 60 teams serving nearly 1,800 participants

With that growth has come the growing problem of where to play. A few years ago, the department looked around and saw one solution at Mickie Gordon Park, where it would be possible to convert a baseball field into a cricket field. That move proved to be but a stopgap, even as the county modified fields at Leesburg’s Philip A. Bolen Park by adding temporary and later permanent cricket pitches on shared use fields. 

Meanwhile, fewer than 10 miles east of Mickie Gordon Park at Brambleton, the county proceeded to plan and build the $100 million, 257-acre Hal and Berni Hanson Regional Park. Now open, Hanson Park features 17 lighted athletic fields, but only one of them is dedicated to cricket. 

The ongoing lack of available fields in the county frustrates avid players like Kaushal Kansara, who learned to play in his native India. “Cricket is an old sport, the national sport of the UK, that became the game to play throughout the British Empire, in India, Asia, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa. Here it’s new, and Americans are eager to learn and play new sports. You can see that now with pickleball.” 

While finding fields for adult LCCL teams to play is challenging, Kansara says it’s even harder to find places for the 1,000 kids in Loudoun who want to play. Many parents drive them to fields in Maryland for games.

Given the need, PRCS is now moving ahead with plans for a full-on cricket center at Mickie Gordon Park. Nothing would remain of its past as a Black baseball park beloved as Hall’s Park. 

The park renovation calls for a championship field with permanent bleachers, press box, concessions building, and restrooms, requiring construction of a park septic system; two additional large cricket fields also with permanent bleachers; and a new path connecting the fields to new parking lots for some 250 cars.

The transformation requires Board of Supervisors approval of a Special Exception to make the existing park in the AR-2 (Agricultural Rural) zoning district eligible for “active recreational uses.” The Planning Commission has set a public hearing for June 27.

Are cricket fields right for Mickie Gordon Park? 

Cricket fields are bigger than other athletic grounds. At 450 to 500 feet in diameter, they are much larger than football or soccer fields, which means they need brighter lighting. Also, cricket matches are longer than other games, ranging from 3.5 hours for short play to 7 or 8 hours for a traditional match. Games can stretch over multiple days. 

Originally, PRCS proposed lighting only one of the new fields. Later, the park design was revised to light all three fields with six 100-foot-tall light towers each. At three or four stories above the tree line, they would be visible from both Carters Farm Lane and John S. Mosby Highway, the historic gateway to Middleburg and Hunt Country. 

With lights on from 6 to 11 p.m. daily throughout the May–November athletic season, many residents envision permanent negative impacts to the night skies, local wildlife, and rural character of western Loudoun. They see the 18 light towers as adding insult to injury after the county last year approved construction of a 150-foot cell tower in this park.

Furthermore, area residents contend the larger facilities and increased park use usage would lead to greater noise. Although the application doesn’t say it, they fear one or more fields may be fitted with loudspeakers. 

Also troubling to residents is the proposed paving of a new entrance from Rt. 50 and the widening and paving of the existing Carters Farm Lane entrance. The plan calls for two paved parking lots to accommodate more than 250 cars while sidewalks and paths would be added inside the park. County planners also want a 10-foot-wide asphalt path to run alongside Rt. 50.

Residents also are concerned about erasing the rich history of this rural baseball park. One resident said he moved to the Middleburg area from Ashburn to escape large-scale lighted athletic fields which are not appropriate for the rural community and character of Middleburg.

To handle runoff, the existing fishing pond is earmarked for conversion to a stormwater management facility.

VDOT estimates current park usage will rise to 346 vehicle trips on weekdays and 1,681 vehicle trips on Saturdays.

While VDOT concluded that traffic projections didn’t meet its standards for requiring turn lanes, the county’s planners want dedicated westbound and eastbound turn lanes anyway. 

The introduction of turn lanes is contrary to the traffic-calming design and engineering of the highway from Aldie through Middleburg and Upperville, including the portion at Mickie Gordon Park.

Places that instill shared memories of community are at the heart of heritage. For African Americans in Loudoun County, Mickie Gordon Park—still called Hall’s Park by most folks over 60—created a sense of place and belonging not to mention a love of baseball. 

Perhaps it is pure coincidence, but this proposal is reaching county decision makers precisely at the time two county-sponsored projects are underway to better address Loudoun’s Black history. With Friends of Thomas Balch Library’s Black History Committee and EHT Traceries, Inc. of Washington, D.C. the county is updating and expanding the Cultural Information Systems database of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. 

This database is the one planners use to assess architectural and cultural resources as they impact Special Exception applications. SPEX-2022-0020 for Mickie Gordon Park was reviewed two years ago against the outdated version of the database.

Also, through the Board of Supervisors, a community-based reconciliation task force is examining past and continuing institutional racial inequities in education. Loudoun’s Chief Equity Officer Carl Rush described it as “a restorative approach to reconcile division and heal from the shared, troubled past in Loudoun County.”

Across the county, key officials are only now learning about PRCS’s plans for this heritage park.

“Many members of the Middleburg community and I are very concerned with the county’s proposal to convert Mickie Gordon Park and its baseball diamonds to a large, three-field cricket facility,” said Middleburg Mayor Bridge Littleton.

“Mickie Gordon Park has a deeply important history within our community. It served, during segregation, as the only baseball field where African Americans were allowed to play in this area of Loudoun. 

“We should not abandon this history lightly; it teaches us all valuable lessons,” Littleton added. “It is unfortunate that the county has progressed these plans this far without public engagement and outreach to the community to understand their thoughts and concerns on Mickie Gordon’s future. I hope this can happen before any final decisions are taken. We owe it to this important legacy.”