The Goose Creek Rural Historic District is a scenically cohesive rural area of some 10,000 acres in central Loudoun County that sustained Virginia’s largest concentration of Quaker settlers. The English Friends who came into the area from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Jersey beginning in the 1730s gave their community a distinctive cast that is still reflected in the region’s small farms, many of which are yet defined by their 18th century land patents. Worked without slave labor, Quaker farms were limited in size to what could be run by a family unit. The district, which centers on the village of Lincoln, preserves a rich collection of 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century rural vernacular architecture, much of it incorporating the superb stone masonry peculiar to Quaker settlers. Though threatened with creeping suburbanization, few other areas of the region retain such a high degree of unspoiled pastoral beauty as the Goose Creek Rural Historic District.