Long before Reston was conceived, the land in Northern Virginia was home to Indigenous peoples, including the Doeg and Tauxenent, who hunted and fished along the local waterways. By the 18th and 19th centuries, the area was primarily agricultural, passing through the hands of Lord Fairfax and later functioning as farmland and a distillery. In the 1890s, Dr. Carl Adolph Max Wiehle attempted to build a planned town here, though it ultimately remained a rural outpost known as Sunset Hills, famous for the A. Smith Bowman distillery.
The modern history of Reston began in 1961 when Robert E. Simon purchased 4,000 acres of this land using funds from his family's sale of Carnegie Hall in New York. Simon worked to change Fairfax County zoning laws to allow for a high-density, mixed-use environment. In 1964, Lake Anne Plaza opened as Reston's first village center. Its mid-century modern architecture and European plaza style were highly innovative. More importantly, Simon insisted that Reston be racially integrated from day one, a bold and historic stance in a Virginia that was still grappling with segregation.
Financial struggles led to Gulf Oil taking over the project in late 1967, but development continued largely according to Simon's master plan. The 1970s and 1980s saw the addition of new villages like Hunters Woods, South Lakes, and North Point. In 1990, the Reston Town Center opened, providing a centralized urban core that has been widely studied by urban planners.
In recent years, the arrival of the Washington Metro's Silver Line has spurred a new era of transit-oriented development, transforming Reston's industrial and office corridors into dense, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods while fiercely protecting the community's historic green spaces.
