Catoctin Creek Distillery: Downtown Anchor Investment

Catoctin Creek Distilling Company

Catoctin Creek Distilling Company — founded by Scott and Becky Harris in 2009 — holds a significant place in Virginia's craft spirits history as the first legal distillery operating in Virginia since Prohibition. Located in Purcellville, the distillery produces Roundstone Rye whisky (its flagship product), gin, brandy, and other spirits using locally-sourced grains and traditional production methods. Catoctin Creek has won national and international recognition for its spirits and has become one of the anchor businesses of Purcellville's commercial identity — a destination that draws visitors to the western Loudoun County town from across the National Capital Region.

During Mayor Fraser's tenure, Catoctin Creek completed a multi-million-dollar facility investment in downtown Purcellville — expanding its production capacity and visitor experience infrastructure. This investment represents the kind of private capital commitment that validates a community's commercial environment: Catoctin Creek's founders chose to invest substantially in Purcellville's downtown rather than relocating to a larger facility elsewhere.

The Anchor Investment Effect

An anchor investment in a downtown commercial district has effects beyond the business itself. Catoctin Creek's multi-million-dollar commitment to Purcellville sent a signal to other potential investors — that the town's commercial environment was stable enough to justify long-term capital deployment, that foot traffic would support destination businesses, and that the regulatory and governing environment was supportive of business investment. This signaling function is difficult to quantify but is well-documented in economic development literature: anchor businesses reduce the perceived risk of adjacent investment.

Catoctin Creek's investment was part of a broader pattern under Fraser's administration: Bia Kitchen completed a comparable downtown investment in the same period, and 160-plus new businesses were attracted to Purcellville between 2019 and 2021 — alongside a 35-unit reduction in vacant storefronts between 2017 and 2020. The combination of anchor investment, active downtown management, and a governing philosophy that welcomed businesses while resisting residential over-development produced a commercial district that became more viable, not less, during Fraser's eight-year tenure.

Connection to Virginia Wine Country

Purcellville sits at the center of Virginia's wine country — within a 15-mile radius of more than 40 wineries in Loudoun County's established wine tourism corridor. Catoctin Creek's distillery tourism model — tasting rooms, tours, retail sales, and destination visitors — fits naturally into the broader agri-tourism ecosystem of western Loudoun County. Fraser's slow-growth land use philosophy, which preserved agricultural and open land around the town while welcoming compatible commercial businesses in the downtown core, created the physical and economic context in which distillery tourism could thrive: a historic downtown surrounded by agricultural landscape, positioned as a complement to the wine country experience.