Drive Old Reston Avenue slowly, and you will pass a two-story frame house set back in the trees, easy to miss between the apartment buildings and the townhouses rising around it. That is the Robert Wiehle House. It has stood there since the 1890s, and on July 5, a storm dropped a tree through its roof. The man it is named for is the same man Wiehle Avenue is named for, which is what pulled us into this week's main topic: where Reston's street names actually came from, and how many of them were here long before Reston was. We also got into Clarity a day before it opened to the public. We follow both kinds of stories as local agents, because what gets preserved and what gets built shape how people feel about a neighborhood long before they ever look at a listing.

You can watch the full episode or jump straight to the sections that interest you using the links below.

We got an invitation to the soft opening on Thursday, one day before the doors opened to everyone. Kathy started with the crispy burrata, which held up to its name, and had the halibut with artichoke. Graham took the pork belly on a bed of corn and farro, then the short rib with potato puree, which fell apart the way a short rib should. The owner came over to say hello, which was a nice touch on a day when the staff had plenty else to manage. Worth knowing: the Vienna location is staying open, and the same owner is bringing Dogfish Head Alehouse to the same area around October.

Watch the Clarity review.

Ten pieces of public art around Reston, a printable card with QR codes, a selfie at each one, and a shot at a $500 prize. Cards are free at the Reston Museum and both Reston Community Centers, or you can download one at home. We are four down with six to go. The best one so far is a mural that thousands of people have seen from a car window at 35 miles an hour and almost nobody has stood in front of.

Watch the scavenger hunt segment.

The Fairfax County Carnival and Fair runs July 30 through August 2 at Frying Pan Farm Park off West Ox Road. Admission is free and parking is $10 Friday through Sunday. If you want unlimited ride wristbands, buy them before Thursday at 10am, because the presale price is $25 and it goes to $30 after that. Wristbands are good Thursday or Friday between 10 and 3 only. Big Truck Night is Friday the 31st from 5 to 7, and it is exactly what it sounds like.

Watch the carnival segment.

The Ken Thompson Reston Century starts and finishes at Reston Town Center West with four distances: 100 miles, 62, 31, and a 10-mile family ride. The family ride is $25 and every other distance is $85. If the longer routes sound out of reach, the rest stops are well stocked and nobody is racing. We have done the 31 with the kids and the 62 on our own, and both were a good day out rather than a test of endurance.

Watch the Reston Century segment.

The names split into two groups. Some were inherited from the farms, families, and country roads that were already here. Others were invented after 1964 by planners filling in a blank map.

Lawyers Road is the clearest of the inherited ones. The original Fairfax County Courthouse sat near what is now Tysons, and attorneys rode that route to reach it. Sunset Hills Road has nothing to do with the view, since it takes its name from the Bowman family's farm, which ran to 7,200 acres and included the old Wiehle town hall that the family turned into a distillery in 1934. Baron Cameron Avenue honors Thomas Fairfax, sixth Baron of Cameron, the same man the county is named for.

The invented names are stranger. Temporary Road was marked temporary on the plans and never renamed, and by the time anyone got around to fixing it, residents wanted it left alone. Jester Court has four lots, and a planner worked from four to April to April Fools Day and landed on jesters. The run of horse names across South Reston, Colts Neck and Halter and Canter and Steeplechase, goes back to the fox hunt the Bowman family founded on Sunset Hills Farm in 1928, which rode this ground until development pushed it west into Loudoun.

Watch the street names segment.

Wiehle Avenue is named for Dr. Carl Adolph Max Wiehle, a Philadelphia physician who retired from practice at 41, bought 3,228 acres north of the rail line in 1886, and hired a German surveyor to lay out a town of 800 homes where people would live and work in the same place. The General Assembly chartered the Town of Wiehle in 1898. He died in 1901 with roughly ten houses standing. Robert Simon bought the land from the Bowman family six decades later and built a version of the same idea that worked.

Three buildings survive from that chapter, and two of them sit on Old Reston Avenue. The Robert Wiehle House took a tree through the roof during the July 5 storm, and the owner has since said insurers stopped covering the property in 2025 because of its age. Nine days after that storm, the Board of Supervisors approved 57 townhouses around the neighboring Bowman House, with commitments to preserve the house, the gazebo, and the historic retaining wall.

Watch the Wiehle House segment.

Reston is usually described as a place invented in 1964, which makes it easy to miss how much of the map was already here. The street signs turned out to be the most durable record of that. They outlasted the farms, the distillery, the hunt, and the town that failed, and most of them will outlast whatever gets built next.

That is also what makes the next few months on Old Reston Avenue worth following. Growth and preservation are moving across the same few acres at the same time, and the outcome decides whether pre-Reston history stays something you can drive past and see, or something that survives only in a county inventory and a handful of photographs.

Follow along each week to keep up with the stories, debates, and local changes shaping Reston and Herndon. New episodes drop weekly.

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If you are trying to work out which part of Reston or Herndon actually fits how you live, or you are watching something go up near you and wondering what it means for your street, just reply. We are happy to talk it through, no pressure either way.