If you live in Raspberry Falls, you have your own private ritual with the White's Ferry sign. Maybe it's the drive up Route 15 where the turnoff sits, still marked, still closed, a landmark for a crossing that hasn't carried a single car since December 28, 2020. For six years that sign has been a running joke, a shortcut that isn't one, a piece of local trivia you explain to visitors who ask why there's a ferry that doesn't ferry anything.
This summer, something actually changed. Not a press release promising progress. Not another deadline that quietly expired. An actual transfer of ownership, on paper, with a dollar figure attached. And if you understand what kind of change it was, you'll understand why this is the first real movement in a fight that has outlasted three governors' worth of "final" offers.
The Deal Wasn't The One Everyone Was Waiting For
For years, the story around White's Ferry followed the same shape: two private owners, unable to agree, being begged by government officials to just work it out. Chuck and Stacy Kuhn, who own JK Moving Services, bought the ferry in February 2021 hoping to reopen it. On the other side sat Rockland Farm, the Virginia property whose owners, Libby Devlin and her brother Peter Brown, controlled the landing site the ferry needs to touch Virginia soil at all.
Every attempt to break that deadlock came from the outside, urging the two of them toward a deal. In March 2023, a combined offer from the Kuhns and local governments was rejected by Rockland Farm, even though it would have reopened the ferry within 30 days. In 2024, Kuhn offered to donate the entire Maryland-side operation to Montgomery County if Rockland would do the same on the Virginia side. In April 2025, Maryland, Montgomery County, and the Town of Poolesville put $3 million on the table as what they called a last chance incentive, with a hard requirement: both private parties had to sign a binding agreement by July 1, 2026, or the money would go away.
July 1 came and went. No agreement.
So Montgomery County did something different. Instead of waiting for two exhausted private owners to find common ground, the county simply bought Kuhn out. In a deal finalized in late July 2026, Montgomery County agreed to pay $1.5 million for the roughly 2.5 acres of Maryland riverfront property, the store, the ferry ramp, the boat launch, and the storage buildings. The Kuhns then donated the ferry boats and remaining business assets, valued at more than $7 million, to the county at no cost.
County Executive Marc Elrich called it a major milestone, a significant step toward reopening the ferry, and he wasn't just being polite about a deal his own county had spent years chasing. This is the first time in the entire six-year saga that one side of the negotiation has stopped being a private party with private incentives and started being a government agency with public accountability and public tools.
Why That Distinction Actually Matters For Your Commute
Here's the part that gets lost in most coverage of this story: the reason six years of talks went nowhere wasn't stubbornness. It was structure. Two private owners, each with their own math about what the land and the ferry were worth to them, had no obligation to agree on anything. Rockland Farm reportedly turned down a $13.5 million cash offer for the entire farm, a figure that was actually higher than two independent appraisals. That's not a negotiation stuck on details. That's two parties who simply didn't need each other's deal enough to make one.
A government agency changes that math. Montgomery County now owns the boat, the equipment, and the Maryland landing outright. The only remaining obstacle is securing landing rights on the Virginia side at Rockland Farm, and Elrich has already acknowledged publicly that eminent domain is on the table, even as he called it a last resort he'd rather avoid because of how long a court fight could drag on.
Loudoun County's own economic development director, Buddy Rizer, put it simply:
"This is an important milestone toward improving regional connectivity."
That's diplomatic language for what residents of Raspberry Falls already know from six years of experience: this crossing was never a nice-to-have. Before the closure, White's Ferry carried between 600 and 800 vehicles a day, and it was the only Potomac crossing for 35 miles between Point of Rocks and the American Legion Bridge. If you work in the I-270 corridor or in Bethesda and live on this side of the river, that closure didn't just cost you a scenic detour. It cost you real minutes, every single day, for six years.
A 2021 study by the two counties estimated the ferry's reopening would generate more than $9 million a year in benefits from travel time savings, reduced congestion, and safety improvements. A more recent estimate, cited as part of this summer's deal coverage, puts the overall annual economic impact between $9 million and $13 million, with travel time savings alone projected to grow to roughly $1.77 million a year by 2040 as the region keeps adding jobs and residents. Those numbers only mean something once you attach them to a specific daily habit: the number of times you've pointed your car toward Leesburg Pike or the Dulles Greenway because the direct route across the river simply wasn't there.
What Happens Next, And What Doesn't Happen Yet
The county's next physical step is mundane but real: pull the ferry vessel out of the river, assess it for repairs, and figure out what it will take to get it operational again. Montgomery County has also said it plans to keep the ferry's associated store, the White's Ferry Grill, running without interruption, which tells you this isn't a purely symbolic acquisition. Someone is planning to actually run this place again.
What hasn't happened is the one thing that would let you circle a date on the calendar. Virginia landing rights remain unresolved. Loudoun County has said it views the Maryland deal as a positive development and wants to see a commercially reasonable price for the Virginia land, but no agreement with Rockland Farm exists yet, and no one, including Elrich himself, is promising a fast resolution if eminent domain becomes the only path forward.
So the honest version of this story is this: the six-year deadlock just lost one of its two sides. That's a genuinely different situation than the one you've been driving around since 2020, even if it doesn't come with a reopening date yet. If you've lived in Raspberry Falls through the whole closure, you've earned the right to be skeptical of every new headline about this ferry. This one is worth paying attention to anyway, because for the first time, the party standing between you and that crossing isn't a private landowner weighing their own math. It's a government that just spent real money to remove itself from the old deadlock entirely.
Keep an eye on Loudoun County's own updates on the landing rights question. That's the piece that will actually determine when, not if, you get your shortcut back.
If you're curious how changes like this ripple through property values and daily life in Raspberry Falls and the surrounding Leesburg communities, the Matt Elliott Home Selling Team knows this stretch of Loudoun County block by block. Request a Free Seller Consultation whenever you want a conversation grounded in what's actually happening here, not just what the portals say.
