At Loudoun County crossroads, 98-year-old Gilberts Corner gas station torn down

If you’ve traveled in Loudoun County, Virginia, chances are you have driven past it, and maybe even wondered what it was. But now, a familiar landmark has been razed.

In 1927, William Gilbert built a gas station at the intersection of U.S. Route 50 and U.S. Route 15, east of Aldie. It’s stood at what’s known as “Gilberts Corner” since then.

While its current location is an unpaved lot near a large roundabout, when it was built, the location was literally a corner, since U.S. 15 hadn’t yet extended south of the intersection.

The Piedmont Environmental Council said after three years of evaluation and consultation with historic restoration and engineering firms, the building had to be taken down in the interest of public safety.

The process began on Tuesday. During a WTOP visit on Thursday morning, a Christmas tree stand was in full operation, a few feet from where heavy machinery removed wooden rubble from the hole in the ground and piled the remnants of the gas station building.

PEC took ownership of the Gilberts Corner Farmers Market in 2019, and raised funds for an archaeological study of the site and to research the gas station building.

Recently, the group realized that renovating the building to make it safe would have required replacing virtually every piece of the building, leaving almost none of the original structure intact. Historic architectural elements were removed from the building, before the heavy machinery began tearing it down.

The farmers market will continue to operate, according to the PEC.

107 years earlier

When Gilbert bought the 150 acres in 1917, and built the original structure 10 years later, automobiles were still becoming commonplace. The Sinclair gasoline cost 12 cents a gallon at the time, according to the PEC.

An adjacent restaurant was added soon after.

In 1956, the gas station building was moved back 8 feet from the corner to make way for a traffic light, as Route 15 was extended farther south. But by the 1960s, the restaurant closed; and in 1982, Gilbert’s gas station permanently closed.

Since then, the building’s windows and doors have remained boarded up, in a dirt and rock lot — the sole skeleton of a building visible to drivers navigating the roundabout.

In case you’re wondering why the area named for Gilbert doesn’t have an apostrophe in Gilberts Corner, the PEC says the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, which governs the naming of geographic features for federal records, has a policy to omit apostrophes.

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