Potomac View Road south of Rt 7 follows a ridge, also called Mirror Ridge for its use as a Civil War signalling station, now leads to Nokes Boulevard and Dulles Town Center.

The ridge is called Nokes Mountain.

In 1901 George Washington Nokes became the first black landowner in this eastern Loudoun settlement, followed by his three sons and other families. The children attended school in a little shanty until it burned down in the 1920s. Parents had to donate land to the school board before they would build a new school. The children did without schooling during the two years it took to raise $125 for one acre. The new school also served as a community center. The children walked together to school, the group growing larger with each house they passed. During winter snows, one former student remembers her father wrapping her legs in burlap bags and tying them above the knees, and bigger boys lifting the smaller children over the schoolyard fence. The cemetery in Nokes is one of the largest African American graveyards in the county, but the community didn’t have its own church until First Baptist was organized in 1962. On the north side of Route 7, two black families, the the Edds and the Ewings, owned and operated large dairy farms.