Lang and Judy Washburn moved to Holly Hill, near Middleburg in 1977.  They’ve been committed to the community and to leading by example ever since.

Their paths first crossed in 1964, at the GOP National Convention.

Lang, a decorated naval aviator, and post-war helicopter manufacturing pioneer, had been active in politics since 1952, when he invented a motorized, air-borne, search-lit approach to campaigning for Dwight Eisenhower that, literally, gave the term “bandwagon” its 21st century meaning.

Judy, a Californian, had come east to Cornell, gone west to Arizona, and come east again to work with General Eisenhower’s former deputy, General Lucius Clay, the father of the Berlin Airlift.  When Clay called on Lang to help rebuild the Republican Party after the Goldwater defeat in 1964, Judy met Lang for the first time.  They were married two years later.

Together they raised an extended family, while crisscrossing the country and the world, as Lang served two Presidents as an Assistant Secretary of Commerce, the Walt Disney Company as a senior Vice President, and the GOP as a senior strategist and fund-raiser.

Lang and Judy’s service to Loudoun County is as profound, as it is unsung.

Judy was a founder of the Windy Hill Foundation and was on the charter Board for over 31 years. She served on the Board of Evans Home for Children and was one of the founders of the Firehouse Chili Dinners in support of the Middleburg Volunteer Fire and Rescue Company.  She has written, by all accounts, hundreds, if not thousands, of personal letters that have moved tens of thousands of dollars toward local Loudoun charities.

Lang served as the irreplaceable, and (as always) the “unofficial” fundraising captain for the Windy Hill Foundation, collecting over $17 million for affordable housing in Loudoun County.  He was one of the founders of the Middleburg Forum, and led the Bicentennial Beautification Committee that replaced nearly all the trees on the main streets of Middleburg. We lost Lang in 2011.

“I think we owe it to this beautiful way of life to give back to it,” Judy recently told the Loudoun Times Mirror. By these ceremonies, and on behalf of all the Washburns have so unselfishly served, the Laurels Founders acknowledge the true nature of the debt, and to whom it is really owed.