The family that has run Belvedere Plantation for nearly six decades went to Facebook this week to speak for itself.
The message was meant to be clear. The Fall Harvest Festival still opens Sept. 12. Field trips, the corn maze, and the pumpkin patch are not canceled. Nothing about this season changes. The Fulks family said it wanted customers to hear that from them, not from the rumor mill.
What followed was not gratitude for the update. It was a pile-on.
Within hours, the post had drawn more than 1,200 reactions and more than 500 shares. Angry and sad emojis outnumbered likes. Commenters treated the farm’s phrase — “technology campus” — as a euphemism for a data center, and they said so in plain language.
“Technology Campus is a WILD way to say data center,” one person wrote.
“I bet there is a data center working full time cranking out euphemisms for ‘data center,’” wrote another.
A third put it this way: “Your dining room decision is going to affect all of our dining room decisions.”
That last line landed because the family had said the decision was made around the dining table, with a fifth generation now present. The land has been in the Fulks family since 1968. The harvest festival has run for 44 years. For a generation of Fredericksburg-area parents, Belvedere is where you take a class on a Thursday, lose a kid in the maze, and leave with a pumpkin in the trunk.
The farm sits at 1410 Belvedere Drive in Spotsylvania County, about seven miles southeast of downtown Fredericksburg on Route 17. It is a working farm of roughly 645 acres on the Rappahannock. The mailing address says Fredericksburg. The tax map says Spotsylvania.
In the post, the family said it has “begun working with a very reputable organization that is looking to properly site a technology campus on this property.” It did not name a buyer, an operator, an acreage split, or a closing date. It promised to say more “directly and honestly” when there is more to share. For now, it said, come to the pumpkin patch.
The comment thread did not wait. Some people listed other farms still standing — Snead’s, Messick’s, Braehead, Round Hill, Miller’s, Belmont — as if they were writing a last-chance guide. Others accused the family of selling out. A smaller group argued that every phone in the thread is the reason the buildings exist. The tone was not a land-use workshop. It was a wake.
The hostility is not hard to explain in this region. Data centers have become the fight next door. On the same calendar week Belvedere posted, Fredericksburg City Council voted 7-0 after midnight to kill a proposed I-95 data campus outside the city’s Technology Overlay District. Spotsylvania residents have spent the last two years watching the same industry walk down the interstate from Loudoun and Prince William.
What the public record shows — and does not show
A review of Spotsylvania County’s posted rezoning and special-use files found no pending case in the name of Belvedere Plantation, the Fulks family, or 1410 Belvedere Drive.
Under a county ordinance adopted this year, data centers are not allowed by right anywhere in Spotsylvania. A project on this farm would have to come in as a rezoning, a special use permit, or both. Those applications are public. They get hearings before the Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors.
The absence of a filing is not the same thing as the absence of a deal. Purchase options, letters of intent, and pre-application meetings with staff do not have to be posted. The family’s own wording — “we have begun working with” — describes talks, not a recorded sale.
Until a deed or an application lands, the operator is unknown and the footprint is unknown. The family also said it is “committed to the future operation of the festival going forward,” which leaves open the possibility that only part of the farm is in play.
Spotsylvania has already approved eight data center projects, with about 10 more in the pipeline, according to reporting this summer. Amazon is building or entitling campuses at Cosner, Carters Store, Summit Crossing, and Mattameade. Other names in the queue include Crossroads, Powerhouse 95, Pairmont, Thornburg Business Park, and Massaponax Tech Campus.
Massaponax Tech is the one that sits on the same road. That case, R25-0004, seeks to rezone about 589 acres from Rural to Industrial-2 for as much as 6.1 million square feet of data center space south of Mills Drive / U.S. 17, off Massaponax Church Road. It is the same highway corridor as Belvedere. It is not the pumpkin farm. The applicant is listed as Lavue Lane Owner LLC.
Pairmont, another live rezoning, would put up to 900,000 square feet near the Caroline County line in the same Lee Hill / Berkeley area. Thornburg Business Park would put nearly 2 million square feet on U.S. 1.
Developers who used to stop in Loudoun and Prince William are shopping the I-95 and Route 17 belts. Spotsylvania changed its code this year to require every data center to go through a public hearing.
The festival still opens Sept. 12. The county file on this property is still empty. The comment section is not.
Virginia and data centers
Virginia hosts the largest concentration of data centers on Earth. Northern Virginia — Loudoun County’s “Data Center Alley” first, then Prince William, Fairfax, and now the I-95 corridor through Stafford, Fredericksburg, and Spotsylvania — is the world’s densest cluster of the buildings that store cloud computing, streaming, and artificial intelligence.
Industry trackers count hundreds of operating facilities in the commonwealth and hundreds more planned. Loudoun alone takes in more than a billion dollars a year in data-center tax revenue. The same industry is now the default land-use fight in almost every locality within an hour of Washington.
