Poolesville residents and others rallied Tuesday at the former site of White’s Ferry along the Potomac to call for its reopening.
The event commemorated the fifth anniversary of the ferry’s closure due to the lack of a legal landing site on the Loudoun County, Virginia, side of the river.
Poolesville officials from the Montgomery County, Maryland, side who helped organize the rally said the involved parties should “set aside old issues and forge an agreement to get the boat crossing the river again!”
The shuttered historic ferry operation was purchased by Chuck and Stacy Kuhn in 2021 with the hopes of starting the service back up again. The owners of the land on the Loudoun side are Rockland Farm, who want a per-vehicle service fee established to pay for the use of their land, according to the MoCo Show blog.
The ferry, which predated the bridges located elsewhere in Montgomery County, used to serve as a transportation and commercial artery between the Poolesville area and the area around Leesburg.
“A lot of people here used to go over to Vanish Brewery [in Loudoun] and they would go there all the time.
They used to go over [to Leesburg] and shop all the time. It’s a lot closer than Frederick, but now it literally is 45 minutes for us to go from here,” Link Hoewing, who leads the Fair Access Committee for the Western County, told news site Loudoun Now.
Tom Kettler from the Poolesville Chamber of Commerce told WTOP-FM that “the local businesses in Poolesville are really suffering, because this is one of our main arteries into our town, and it’s been cut off for five years.”
Maryland and Virginia state officials have also tried to solve the private business dispute to get the ferry reopened.
Virginia Del. David Reid, Loudoun County Democrat, said that “we as a commonwealth need to be able to solve the very simple process of being able to move people and their vehicles across a 1,100-foot stretch of water between Maryland and Virginia that prior to 2020, had existed for 200 years,” according to Loudoun Now.
Mr. Reid plans to introduce a bill to create a working group in the House of Delegates dedicated to the ferry issue.
On the other side, Montgomery County, Poolesville and the state of Maryland cobbled together a $3 million financial incentive to restore the ferry. The deadline for Rockland Farm and Potomac Crossing LLC to reach an agreement and get the incentive, which includes $1.5 million in state-appropriated funding, is July 1, 2026.
