Leesburg is a town in and the county seat of Loudoun County, Virginia, United States. Settlement in the area began around 1740, which is named for the Lee family, early leaders of the town. Located in the far northeast of the state, in the War of 1812 it was a refuge for important federal documents evacuated from Washington, DC, and in the Civil War, it changed hands several times.
Leesburg is west-northwest of Washington, D.C., along the base of Catoctin Mountain and close to the Potomac River. The town is the northwestern terminus of the Dulles Greenway, a private toll road that connects to the Dulles Toll Road at Washington Dulles International Airport. Its population was 48,250 as of the 2020 Census and an estimated 48,908 in 2021. It is Virginia's largest incorporated town within a county (rather than being an independent city).
Leesburg, like much of Loudoun County, has undergone considerable growth and development over the last 30 years, transforming from a small, rural, Piedmont town to a suburban bedroom community for commuters to the national capital. Growth in the town and its immediate area to the east (Lansdowne/Ashburn) concentrates along the Dulles Greenway and State Route 7, which roughly parallels the Potomac River between Winchester to the west and Alexandria to the east.
Leesburg is home to professional soccer team Loudoun United FC of the USL Championship division who play their home matches at Segra Field , a soccer-specific stadium located within Phillip A. Bolen Park, and adjacent to Loudoun Soccer Park. The season runs from March through October. Home and road matches are carried on the ESPN+ streaming platform which carries all USL Championship matches with some selected league matches on one of ESPN's linear channels
Northern Virginia United FC is another American soccer club based in Leesburg. They currently have teams in the fourth-tier National Premier Soccer League and fifth-tier United Premier Soccer League.The club play their home matches at Cropp Metcalfe Park at Evergreen Sportsplex. All home games are broadcast live from Evergreen Sportsplex via the club's YouTube channel.
The Federal Aviation Administration's Washington Air Route Traffic Control Center is in Leesburg.
Toponym
Leesburg may have been named to honor the influential Thomas Lee or more generally for the Lee family. The name change was passed by an Act of Assembly in 1758. Francis Lightfoot Lee and Phillip Ludwell Lee, two of Thomas' sons, were early town trustees. The town is not named, as is sometimes thought, for Robert E. Lee (Thomas' great-grandnephew).
History
Prior to European settlement, the area around Leesburg was occupied by various Native American tribes. John Lederer (1670) testified that the entire Piedmont region had once been occupied by the "Tacci, alias Dogi", but that the Siouan tribes, driven from the northwest, had occupied it for 400 years. In 1699, the Algonquian Piscataway (Conoy) moved to an island in the Potomac in the environs of Leesburg, and were there when the first known Europeans visited what is now Loudoun County.
What would become known as the Old Carolina Road (present day U.S. Route 15) was a major route of travel between north and south for Native tribes. According to local historians, a pitched battle was fought near present Leesburg between the warring Catawba and Lenape tribes, neither of whom lived in the area. A war party of Lenape had traveled from their home in New Jersey and neighboring regions, all the way to South Carolina to inflict a blow on their distant enemies, the Catawba. As they were returning northward, a party of Catawbas overtook them before they reached the Potomac, but were defeated in a pitched battle south of Leesburg. The surviving Lenape buried their dead in a huge burial mound, and early settlers reported that they would return to this mound to honor their dead on the anniversary of this battle for many years thereafter. The date of this conflict is unknown, but it seems the Lenape and Catawba were indeed at war in the 1720s and 1730s.