Fairfax: Phoenix or Failure?

    Previous monographs have not done justice to Fairfax County's experience in the last third of the nineteenth century. The explanation rests simply in the fact that when compared to the Revolutionary era when such giants as George Washington and George Mason called Fairfax home, or to the Civil War period when the legendary John S. Mosby made his most daring raids behind northern lines in the county, the late nineteenth century must seem uneventful. The conclusions of the sparse studies of this period have fallen consistently into two categories. Several accounts depict the defeated yet determined citizens stoically scratching out an existence from the war-torn countryside as the region reeled in the recesses of Reconstruction-bred turmoil. One life-long resident of the county, whose "family had lived through this," recalled an invasion of "carpet baggers" and "scalawags," while a 1924 University of Virginia-sponsored economic survey of the county concluded that "the scars of war were left deep upon the breast of Fairfax County. Probably no other county in the state suffered to an equal extent. Only [after 1900] did the anemia of war give place to returning vitality."1 An alternate but equally unsubstantiated treatment of the period found that the county "was not scarred by ... great and decisive military events." Like the mythical phoenix, the populace threw off its postwar problems and oppressors and arose from the ashes of wartime and Reconstruction destruction.

    Neither of these conclusions will stand serious scrutiny. On the contrary, Fairfax County's story between 1870 and 1900 is neither one of unrelieved suffering and stagnation, nor of unparalleled progress. It is one of a quiet agricultural area, drifting through times of both moderate difficulties and moderate advance. Yet, lest one conclude that earlier students were correct in largely ignoring this period in favor of more colorful and heroic times, the era's established rural and emerging village patterns of life reveal not only a charming serenity, but also some subtle hints of new directions the county would take after the turn of the century.

Postwar Conditions

    Even though earlier evaluations of events were undeniably exaggerated, previous historians were quite accurate in their estimates of obstacles to be overcome as the people of Fairfax faced the post-Civil War era. Because of the county's strategic location between and behind the lines of both armies during the war, physical damage had been substantial. John F. Trowbridge, a northerner who visited Virginia shortly after Lee's surrender at Appomattox, described the area between Alexandria and Manassas as showing "no sign of human industry, save here and there a sickly, half-cultivated corn field. The country for the most part consisted of fenceless fields abandoned to weeds, stump lots and undergrowth."3 A United States Department of Agriculture survey of farm conditions in Virginia in 1870 prefaced its findings with the comment "that only five years have elapsed since the agriculture of the state was utterly prostrated. The people waked up as out of a dream, to see their labor system overthrown, and their lands lying idle. Nearly all kinds of farm stock had been swept off by the hurricane which passed over the country, and but few agricultural implements remained."4 And even exceeding the physical decimation of the county were the remaining emotional burdens, the still divided loyalties, the loss of loved ones, and the utter lack of hope that must have accompanied such conditions.

    Despite these adversities, there appeared signs of awakening almost immediately after Appomattox. Oddly enough, or perhaps appropriately, the source of new hope was the North which sent out many of its sons in search of at least potentially greener pastures after the war. Cheap land prices, the proximity of Washington, D.C., and the milder climate made Fairfax County an attractive area to northemers, many of whom had probably passed through the region during the war and now retumed with their families to become permanent settlers. Small colonies of these northemers settled in and around the communities of Accotink, Chantilly, Clifton, Hemdon, Vienna, Merrifield, and Falls Church, and the settlers quickly became leading and widely respected citizens. The United States Department of Agriculture team even noticed the change in Virginians' attitude "toward the outside world. Formerly they were indisposed to encourage immigration from other states. Now … strangers from every state are cordially welcomed whenever they show any disposition to become permanent settlers and industrious citizens. In many counties a strong tide of immigration is setting in, bearing with it improved stock and better implements, which cannot fail to import a healthy impulse to improvement."5 The following decades demonstrated that the department's report did not exaggerate the significance of these newcomers to Fairfax County.

Reconstructed Institutions

     In the meantime, residents of Fairfax went about the business of restructuring their institutions to meet the realities of the postwar situation. The Underwood Constitution, ratified by Virginia voters in 1869 while still under a Reconstruction regime, required that each county establish a board of supervisors as its chief administrative agency, preempting many of the duties of the old county court system. In December 1870, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, members of which were elected from each of six townships, officially took charge of county property from the court.6

     Most of the board's energies were expended in raising revenue and paying the county's bills. Taxes in late nineteenth-century America were extremely low: federal and state income and sales taxes were nonexistent, and county taxpayers had only to fund a budget of $9,904 in fiscal 1880. In that representative year, a tax rate of only fifty cents per $100 in real and personal property, plus a fifty cent "tithe" for each adult male and each dog owner produced a surplus of $973.7 However, at a time when county newspapers were continually referring to "hard times" and "a stringency in the money market," even these tax rates must have seemed steep to many. The long lists of delinquent taxpayers published annually in the local newspaper attest to this fact, and in 1874 the Board of Supervisors found itself with no money in its treasury and $1,500 in outstanding bills. At this point some county residents seemed uncertain about the board's activities; the Fairfax News called on county officials "to make all expenditures public to help the people understand this new system of local administration."8

    During this period of adjustment and despite its seemingly miniscule budgets, the Board of Supervisors performed a number of essential services for county residents. Unquestionably, the board saw as its first duty the protection and promotion of its constituents' leading economic pursuit: agriculture. A cause with which both the Board of Supervisors and the Fairfax News seemed preoccupied in the 1870s and 1880s was the protection of farmers' sheep and other livestock from stray dogs and wild predators. During the campaign for the General Assembly in 1873, the News felt that a firm stand on the "dog issue" was the chief qualification a candidate must possess. "Our next representative should be a man of nerve," it declared. He must help secure a dog law "which will have the effect to exterminate the whole useless canine breed ... that literally infest[s] every square mile of territory in the County." When the new legislature failed to act promptly on the issue, the editor declared that the solution lay not simply in "taxing dogs to pay for the sheep destroyed.... That is dodging the question, and will not protect the sheep.... Kill first and tax afterwards, and allow none but farmers to keep dogs."9 Tired of waiting for the General Assembly to act, the Board of Supervisors took the more moderate course of requiring owners to register their dogs and contribute fifty cents per dog to a "dog fund." Farmers whose animals were killed were reimbursed from the fund. Along with the bounties paid for fox scalps, hawk and owl heads, and dogs not wearing collars, these claims continued to demand a substantial portion of the county's budget. In 1881 alone, the board paid farmers almost $1,000 for their losses, some $80 more than had been collected for the dog fund.10

    Another issue which accounted for much of the Board of Supervisors' agenda was the county road network. Again, the central concern was agriculture, as the roads, in the words of the board's minutes, "accomodate ... a large population of the county in reaching the markets of Alexandria and Washington." In 1871 the board took over operation of the Little River Turnpike (Route 236) and the Falls Bridge Turnpike (Route 193) from the state, and in 1872 it paid $300 to the Middle Turnpike (Route 7) Company to make it a free road owned and maintained by the county. In 1876 the supervisors appointed eighteen road commissioners, three from each district, and adopted "the mixed system of contract and laborer [sic] for making the roads," meaning that, in addition to a small tax levy for road maintenance, county citizens could be compelled to contribute up to three days of labor each year on the roads. By the early 1880s, road maintenance and bridge construction had become a major county expense, with more than $5,500 spent between 1881 and 1884 to bridge Pohick, Scotts, Difficult, and Accotink runs, and Hunting Creek.11

    In addition to its activities on behalf of the area's agrarians, the Board of Supervisors was concemed with the care of the county's convicts and paupers. In several annual reports these items represented the largest single outlay in the county budget. For example, in the 1880 budget of $9,904, appropriations for indigents accounted for $4,345. Although most of these bills were incurred in the operation of the county jail and poorhouse, miscellaneous expenses were regularly required. In 1879 the county appropriated $94 for coffins for paupers, and the following year the supervisors agreed to assume a $5 obstetrical fee for paupers and an additional fifty cents for medicine, an amount that might lead a modern-day obstetrician to wonder if his predecessor were not a resident of the poorhouse himself. In 1882 the board directed Overseers of the Poor in each district to spend $10 "for vaccinating people who cannot pay for it." The board authorized the sheriff to purchase "3 pair of hand cuffs and 1 pair of ankle chains for the jail" in 1875, and a year later a major expenditure of $8,000 was needed to replace the jail when it was destroyed by fire. This emergency necessitated a request to the General Assembly for permission to borrow $5,000 to pay for the jail and a new Hunting Creek Bridge which had recently collapsed.12

    With the county's welfare obligations continuing to mount, the Board of Supervisors attempted in 1875 to offset some of these expenses by authorizing the use of "Chain Gangs" on county projects. By late 1877, "since the Poor House [was] filled to its utmost capacity," the supervisors directed the Overseers of the Poor to arrange for "a suitable person or persons" to support paupers "on as reasonable terms as they can obtain." Sealed bids were used to auction off responsibility for the poor to county residents. Though the supervisors required that "the board ... furnished shall be of a good, plain and substantial character," the care of an "outside pauper" had cost the county a mere $15 to $20 per year in 1873. By 1880, however, the board allowed one Rebecca Marders $60 a year "for the support of a colored girl named Hannie Garrett." The growing welfare costs were accompanied by fears that this activity would contribute to an erosion of economic individualism and the work ethic. In 1875 the board resolved to "suppress as far as possible, the disposition on the part of a certain class of individuals in our community, to expect assistance outside the Poor's House, believing that the custom is abused [and] that imposition has been, and will be practiced if the greatest vigilance is not used."13

Reconstructed Politicians

    A final important responsibility of the County Board of Supervisors was the establishment and support of a new system of public schools called for by the Underwood Constitution of 1870. Before looking at the politics of public education in the county, however, one must consider this and other issues on state and national levels, where the foundations for so many Fairfax programs and attitudes were laid.

    As might be expected following the bitter hostilities and bloodshed of the 1860s, many old wounds were slow to heal. While more moderate and realistic Fairfax voices argued that "the time has [come] for a united sentiment," even the appeals of the Fairfax News for "the American people ... to stand forth shoulder to shoulder ... and restore the ancient regime" obscured a number of still unsettled disputes. Despite the fact that Reconstruction had ended in Virginia by 1870 and the Conservative or Democratic Party had been restored to power in the state in 1869, S. Simpson, editor of the News, still saw "tangible proof of the existence of Imperialism in our midst" in 1874. President U.S. Grant was criticized for his refusal to grant a general amnesty to Confederates and for his continued "inter-meddling" in southern affairs. Centreville Conservatives called the Republican-sponsored pay raises for Congress and the President in 1873 "an outrage," and the News felt the Civil Rights Bill of 1875 was "full of evil" and evidence of "an ingrained, malicious feeling on the part of Northern members against Southern people." The act was seen as a means of assuring Grant a third term on the strength of black votes from the southern states. The editor argued that to allow the county to fall into Republican hands would be to "acknowledge ourselves to be inferior to our late slaves" and warned that should "the knot of imperial consolidation be drawn tighter ... a culminating point shall have been reached, when its anaconda folds will again be severed by the sword." 14

    The views of the staunchly conservative Fairfax News were not unanimously held throughout Fairfax County. On the contrary, the large number of northern immigrants in the area and the newly granted political rights of the county's blacks assured local Republicans of a significant voice in county affairs. The six members of the Board of Supervisors elected in 1874 were evenly split between Conservatives and Republicans, and the News wondered "why are Republicans winning in Providence [Fairfax] Township when Conservatives have a majority there?"15 Several years later the editor of the Fairfax Herald offered an explanation for continuing Republican strength. Even though the Conservatives had "a good majority" estimated at 12,500 of the 21,000 eligible voters in the Eighth Congressional District, of which Fairfax was a part, he felt that "the Republicans can throw a full vote without much trouble, owing to the fact that the negro would rather vote than anything else." Whether relative white apathy was really the reason or not, as late as 1888 general elections in Fairfax County continued to be hotly contested. That year Grover Cleveland, the Democratic presidential candidate, outpolled Republican Benjamin Harrison in the county by a vote of 2,010 to 1,824, and Democrat Fitzhugh Lee defeated his Republican challenger Park Agnew in the Congressional race by the nearly identical margin of 2,004 votes to 1,836.

    A still better indication of the lack of politican unanimity in the county can be seen by focusing on a pair of statewide issues, on which there even appeared serious disagreements within the Conservative ranks. The most divisive issue among Virginians in the fifteen years following Reconstruction was the state debt controversy, a question closely linked to the second serious dispute, over the future of public education in Virginia. Would Virginians honor their pre-Civil War obligations, which by 1870 had risen to $45,000,000, or could the state justifiably declare bankruptcy and cancel at least a portion of its debt? Advocates of full payment, the "Funders," included many older, aristocratic, and politically powerful planters and businessmen, or "Bourbons," while less conservative middle-class whites and newly enfranchised blacks argued that if saddled with such an obligation in already depressed conditions, the state could not meet the ordinary expenses of government, much less fulfill its recent commitment to build a statewide system of free public schools. These "Readjusters" chose as their standard bearer a controversial ex-Confederate and soon-to-be dominant Virginia politico, General William Mahone, who "weighed about l00 pounds, had a squeaky voice, and was so fastidious as to his clothes that his tailor said he would rather make dresses for eight women than one suit for the general." When Funders, including Governors James L. Kemper and Frederick W. M. Holliday, continued to impound constitutionally appropriated school funds in the 1870s, support grew for the Readjusters, and in the elections of 1879, they swept into the majority in both houses of the General Assembly. Mahone himself was elected to the United States Senate. In 1881 Readjuster William E. Cameron, handpicked by Mahone, captured the gubernatorial contest by defeating John W. Daniel, who had recently declared that he would "rather see a bonfire made of every schoolhouse in the state" than see the debt reduced. Following Cameron's victory, the debt was legislatively lowered to about $21,000,000, and funds desperately needed were freed for the state's struggling schools."

    The dispute over the debt and public education in Fairfax County mirrored and, on occasion, contributed to the statewide disagreements during the 1870s and 1880s. Despite the highly controversial tactics of General Mahone (his means of achieving power had been ruthless; he used his position to reap large personal profits and reward his followers; and he openly appealed to the state's black voters, even becoming a Republican after he was safely entrenched as a Conservative in the U.S. Senate), both he and his policies enjoyed substantial support among county residents. His Readjuster stance had at least the unequivocal support of the editor of the Fairfax News who proclaimed in 1875 that "we have ever had but one opinion about the State debt, and that is, despoiled, subjugated, and dismembered as the State has been, we have no State debt that we are bound either in honor or in law to pay one cent of." The editor then revealed what seems a glaring contradiction between his opinion on the fate of the debt and his earlier denunciations of federal "intermeddling" and "imperialism." "The whole responsibility of payment of what was once the debt of Virginia," he argued, "now rests upon the government of the United States.... Funding bills and Court of Appeals decisions are all swept out of sight by the avalanche of Federal responsibility."18

    With no tradition of free public education to build on, many local citizens were skeptical of the need for and feasibility of the Underwood Constitution's "Act to Establish and Maintain a Uniform System of Public Free Schools." The already overburdened economy and the rural character of the county were other obstacles to an early implementation and efficient operation of the new educational system. In spite of opposition from "some narrowminded and contrary people" in the county, and largely because of the energy of the state's first Superintendent of Public Instruction, William H. Ruffner, Fairfax County had forty-one schoolhouses in operation by the fall of 1870. Although the report of Thomas M. Moore, the county's first Superintendent of Schools, admitted that all but one of these primitive schools consisted of a single room, only sixteen were equipped with outhouses, and the school term averaged less than five months, their very existence reveals a strong determination on the part of many county residents to provide their children with educational opportunities.19 But hurdles remained. In 1873 the Fairfax News criticized the new brick school under construction "at the eastern end of the village," costing between $2,500 and $3,000, as being too expensive. The editor called the building "better than what [the children] live in," and pointed out that since the county had "to sustain two separate school establishments ... the negro people ... will demand one for their use equally expensive."20 The following year a group of local citizens circulated a petition calling for the removal of County Superintendent of Schools Daniel McCarty Chichester. The County School Board refused to dismiss the superintendent, and praised "his efficiency, indefatigability, and unbounded feeling toward free schools." Chichester, however, was convinced by the incident that "there are still many enemies of the system."21

    Destined to be an even more serious enemy of the system was the economic situation and the desire by the state's Funders to deprive the schools in order to honor Virginia's mounting debt. Annual school taxes of ten to twenty cents per $100 probably played a large part in the protests of local property owners, and when the dominant Bourbon element in the General Assembly voted the Funding Act of 1877, schools in all parts of the state felt the impact. With the state's supplements severely slashed, there were seven fewer Fairfax schools in the fall of 1878 than in the previous year, and the length of the average school term was cut from almost five and a half months in 1876-77 to barely three months in 1878-79. Enrollment in Fairfax schools fell from 2,839 in 1877-78 to 2,190 the following school year, and teachers' salaries fell from an average of $33 per month in 1876-77 to only $22 in 1879-80. The assault on the young school system reached a climax when the State School Board considered a motion that public schools be closed altogether for the ensuing year. Although the motion was defeated, inadequate funds ultimately forced a number of schools to close their doors. At the end of the first decade of Fairfax County's experiment in public education, only 50 percent of its school-age population had been enrolled, and a mere 30 percent were actually attending its schools.

    The fall elections of 1879 witnessed the statewide triumph of Mahone and the Readjusters, with their promises to free impounded state funds for education, so that progressive local citizens could confidently look forward to a more certain future for Fairfax schools. Despite the problems encountered in the late 1870s, F. D. Ficklin, who had replaced Chichester as County Superintendent in 1878, attested to the continuing determination of county residents when he "reported in 1879 having trouble with the clamor of people compelling the trustees to open more schools than the funds on hand justified."23 These brighter prospects were deceiving, for not long after the Readjusters had succeeded in reducing the debt in early 1882, the Mahone machine began a wholesale housecleaning, dismissing Funders from state offices and replacing them with loyal Readjusters. "Worst of all," according to Virginius Dabney, "was the discharge of William H. Ruffner, the able and devoted head of the public school system, and his replacement with Richard R. Farr," former County Treasurer, Surveyor, and three-term delegate to the State Assembly from Fairfax.24

    Though they had never been known as friends of the schools, Funder reaction to the appointment of Farr was hysterical. Delegate Charles E. Stuart of Alexandria told the General Assembly that he had lived near Farr for many years and had "never known that he was fit to be superintendent of the public schools in any county, let alone ... Superintendent of Public Instruction of Virginia." He concluded that Farr was "thoroughly incompetent."25 The Alexandria Gazette published "a few of Mr. Farr's far-away and funny fights against ordinary spelling," and the Richmond State continued the attack in verse:

Haste thee, teacher, haste away,

Farr too long has been thy stay;

Farr too bad thy words are spelt

Much too strong thyself hath smelt ...26

Since their concern was obviously not the fate of the system, Funder opposition to Farr may have been based on a fear that he favored "Mixed Schools." Not to his credit, Farr unequivocably denied this charge, stating that "nobody wants mixed schools.... So repugnant is this matter to our people that our Governor [Readjuster Cameron] made special mention of it in terms of condemnation." Yet while the criticism would continue, Farr received high marks for his four-year tenure in office from two former political opponents. Dr. J. L. M. Curry, the southern representative of a northem philanthropist of public education and "a national figure," wrote in 1885 that "in my work as Peabody Agent I found no superintendent more devoted to the cause of public schools, more energetic, more faithful, more efficient than Mr. Farr."27 Even the replaced Dr. Ruffner saw "a vigor and a laudable progressive spirit" in Farr's administration."28

    While county conservatives were willing to make only backhanded concessions to cooperation, and then only with the other hand out, the weakening of radical Republican reformism and northern concessions to southern intransigence closed the sectional gap considerably. When a relative of the Alexander Haight family at Sully visited the county in early 1877, she wrote to her own family in Kansas "that 'most all' of the people of the area were 'bitterly disappointed' at the election of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes over the Democratic nominee, Samuel Tilden. [But] after her nephew, Henry Haight, attended inaugural ceremonies in Washington, she reported how his attitude toward the new President changed upon hearing Hayes's avowal to win the goodwill of the South."35 Symbolic of the reconciliation of Fairfax to postwar realities was the visit of President and Mrs. Hayes to the county in 1878. After sightseeing at Mount Vernon and Woodlawn, the first family accepted an invitation to meet neighborhood residents at "Grand View," the home of Jacob M. and Ann Troth. The occasion was by all accounts pleasant. In fact, the Troth's daughter Sallie recalled that "Chalkley Gillingham, in Quaker fashion, addressed the charming wife of the President as 'Lucy.'" In his,diary, President Hayes described the day in Fairfax as "delightful."36

Agricultural Aggravation

    Yet despite the survey's conclusion that "in but few sections of the State has agriculture made any progress within the last ten years," its findings for Fairfax were extremely favorable. For example, it was found that "probably two-thirds of the land seeded to wheat and one-quarter of the com have commercial fertilizers applied to them," and "barnyard manure is husbanded with some care." While "the attention given to alternation of crops is probably not increasing, the rotation before and since 1860 being usually corn, oats, and wheat, then clover and timothy for two or three years, ... under this system, with the judicious application of fertilizers and farmyard manures, lands in the western part of the County have risen in value from $20 to $40 per acre, and their productive capacity increased from fifteen or twenty bushels to forty bushels of com per acre; oats from ten bushels to twenty-five or thirty bushels; hay, threefold." The survey algo reported that the "surface of the county is well adapted to labor saving implements, and they are generally in use for cutting grain and grass."38 The explanation for this relatively positive evaluation lies not only in the determination of native Fairfax farmers, but also in the influx of a group of highly industrious immigrants from the north.

    As the Fairfax News pointed out in 1874, one of the most serious problems facing Fairfax farmers after the war was "the want of an adequate and regular supply of trained labor."39 Despite the Department of Agriculture's confidence that "with kind treatment and payment according to contract, the negro" would be "as tractable as ever," many blacks were still unwilling to voluntarily return to dependent status by whatever name.40 A Union veteran who had served as tutor to the Fitzhugh family at "Oak Hill" before the war returned to Fairfax County after Appomattox to find the mansion abandoned. After acquiring the property, he described in letters the hardships encountered in rebuilding the estate "when servants and field workers were gone" and with "no one to till the fields."41 A second obstacle to improvement was a shortage of capital. Even those who were well established reported difficulties, as did George Mason of "Spring Bank," the grandson of the author of the Fairfax Resolves and the Virginia Bill of Rights, in a letter dated 1868 to Edward Curtis Gibbs, a Quaker who had bought "Hollin Hall" from Mason in 1852: "My son is so delighted with your success in raising Wheat, that he has persuaded me to try a Field this Fall in that Grain; but to do so effectually, will require a heavy expence in Seed and Fertilizers, and Money is now so scarce with me, that I am getting nothing of the Interest on all my Investments for nearly Thirty Years in Virginia Stocks." Mason also told of his inability to find an insurer for his house and property, as "they ceased to insure during the war."42

Northern Immigration

    If Edward Curtis Gibbs's "success in raising Wheat" contradicted the Department of Agriculture's report for Fairfax County that "wheat has been an uncertain crop for several years," his accomplishment was to be typical of the experience of other former Northerners who were finding their way to Fairfax .43 For while many long-time residents were saddled with debts and deprived of their accustomed labor, newcomers were able to take advantage of deflated land prices and the local demand for cash. These conditions must at least partially explain the decision of seven Union veterans from New York, who had seen the area during the war, to settle with their families near Merrifield on land made available to them at $25 per acre.44 This may explain as well the arrival of Harrison G. Otis whose family "was among several that migrated to Clifton from the North just after the Civil War," and the actions of Ancel St. Johns of New Jersey, who "with a number of friends," bought up much of the land surrounding Herndon.45 Perhaps this also accounts for the affliction of Jonathan Magarity, an Irishman described as "land crazy" by one of his granddaughters. In 1869 Magarity bought "Windy Hill Farm" and soon added "Storm Farm," both near Lewinsvilile, and several other tracts to his holdings.46 That same year the Gibbs family relocated in the Mount Vemon neighborhood, selling three hundred acres of "Hollin Hall" to a New York Quaker, Theron Thompson, whose family would soon pioneer the rise of the dairy industry in Fairfax County.47 By 1879 the Virginia Commissioner of Agriculture estimated that "six hundred families ... from the northern and western States have settled in this county since the war." 48

    Among the most successful Fairfax farmers in the immediate postwar period were a pair of earlier immigrants from the north, James Barlow of Sully Plantation and his neighbor Alexander Haight of Little Sully. Soon after the war, Barlow built a general store and a steam-powered grist mill on the Little River Turnpike, and after several other businesses were added, including Haight's sawmill and a post office, the community casually acquired the name "Chantilly." According to the census of 1870, Haight and Barlow had recovered from setbacks suffered during the war and both were worth more than $50,000. James Barlow's decision to sell Sully to Stephen Shear of New York and Shear's son Conrad of Michigan in 1870 for $20,000 was certainly not prompted by a need for quick capital. The elder Shear, "a Bible-carrying Quaker," soon returned to New York, but Conrad Shear stayed at Sully for thirty-seven years and prospered by preserving "the pattem of farming established years before, raising hay, wheat, com and some livestock," including a small dairy herd. The availability of dependable farm hands, many of them former slaves in the area, also contributed to the success enjoyed by Haight and Shear.49

    The advantages of those with adequate capital are easily recognized in the experience of Edward Daniels. By his own account, Daniels "came to this State in 1870 from Chicago and purchased 'Gunston Hall,' with a thousand acres of neglected and run down land. The old mansion was a ruin and the whole region was grown up to old field pine, briars and foul weeds. We put in a large force of men, with two sawmills, cleared two hundred acres, restored the old Hall at a cost of five thousand dollars, built barns and tenant houses, and began at once to plant [fruit] trees in all the open land."50

    Another successful northern immigrant was William E. Clark who bought "Hayfield," originally a part of Mount Vemon, in 1874 and soon enlarged the estate from 360 acres to 814 acres. Even more impressive was the double-octagon, or sixteen-sided barn which Clark constructed, obviously enlarging on the plans of a bam built in the vicinity by George Washington in 1793, but which had since been destroyed. Clark's barn reportedly cost $30,000, its first story constructed of brick and containing thirty-seven horse stalls. Four hundred tons of hay could be stored above and fed efficiently to the livestock by means of a 250 ton silo in the center. The side walls of the horse stalls were decorated with cast iron ornaments which featured Clark's initials.51

    Still another section of the original Mount Vernon estate passed into the hands of recent northern arrivals soon after the war. Stacy H. Snowden, a Quaker who had bought 652 acres on the Potomac from Charles A. Washington, the General's great nephew, in 1859, sold 820 acres known as 'Wellington'f to a three-man northern syndicate in 1866. Snowden, who called his home "Collingwood" after his birthplace in New Jersey, and his brother Isaac, who moved from 'Wellington" next door to "Riverview" in 1866, were joined in 1869 by a third brother, William, who bought a small tract back from the syndicate and built his home there. The Snowden family became tied to another group of recent arrivals when Isaac's daughter Elizabeth married Daniel Dickinson Thompson of "Hollin Hall," whose sister Theresa Thompson later acquired "Wellington" from the defunct syndicate. Although the Thompson family continued to spread through the neighborhood as their dairy interests grew, the dominant character in the community remained the colorful "Captain", William H. Snowden, who was a poet and historian as well as a farmer on this twenty-four acres. Because the post office in Alexandria would entrust the Captain with his neighbors' mail, his pantry window became a popular gathering place. After providing this service informally for several years, he was allowed to establish an official post office in his home in 1893. This office, which he romantically called "Arcturus" after a star, operated until 1902 and was not the extent of the Captain's development schemes for the neighborhood.52

    Undoubtedly the forerunner of formal agricultural organization was the spontaneous gathering at the country store. At Barlow's Mill, built between 1865 and 1870, farmers from the Chantilly area "gathered to swap news and transact business with one another as they waited for their com to be ground, or for a load of the powdered sumac which was used in tanning."54 Years later Hummer's Store remained the community center for Langley farmers, its airtight stove making it a comfortable place to pass a cold winter evening. Mr. Hummer, a Confederate veteran who kept his mustache "fairly well darkened with stove polish," kept his patrons fairly well entertained with stories of the "Damn Yankees" he had killed in the war and with his unorthodox business practices. Hummer was hard of hearing and often misunderstood orders, but customers learned to take whatever they were given rather than cause a ruckus; his method of weighing flour or sugar was to balance the scale with varied quantities of nails. John C. Mackall remembered only one occasion when Hummer's method and integrity were questioned, then by a "smart alec" young man to whom Hummer replied, "dod-zackit get your flour elsewhere!" as he poured the flour back. In addition to these anecdotes, Mackall recalled that "the subject of conversation was usually farm questions," with national and local politics "gone into fully."55

    The farmers who first recognized the economic and social benefits of organization in the postwar period were the Quakers of the Woodlawn community who were already closely linked by family, regional, and religious ties. In October 1865, twenty-one men, including the most prominent members of the community, signed the Constitution of the Woodlawn Horse Company, which they deemed "necessary for our mutual protection against horsethieves." Charles Kirk Wilkinson, descendant of a charter member, wrote that the organization consisted of "horse owners, regardless of race, who immediately formed vigilante type groups to seek out and recover a member's lost, strayed or stolen horse. The members met once a year, always on the last Monday in December. It was obligatory for a member to attend regardless of his own illness, illness in his family or because of the meeting ... falling on Christmas Day. If a member did not attend he was fined $2.00 ... quite a large sum in those days."

    No doubt more enjoyable were the monthly meetings of the Woodlawn Farmers' Club organized in 1866. Meetings always fell on the Saturday nearest the full moon, for after a full day of business meetings, "old-fashioned conversation," and dinner, furnished by the host family, there would be more light for finding the way home.56 The minutes for the May 1870 meeting provide a summary of the club's activities:

The regular monthly meeting of the Woodlawn Farmers' Club was held on Saturday at Huntley, the residence of A.W. Harrison. The President being absent, Courtland Lukens was appointed Chairman pro tem. Twenty four members were present. Theron Thompson was admitted as a member. The report of the committee on vegetables was ... discussed at some length. The committee on cereals presented their report on the condition of things about the farm and premises of Huntley, which was a good one and rather commendatory of Mr. Harrison, as a practical farmer, and elicited several pertinent questions and answers. Some discussion ensued as to the best method of ridding farms of garlic. E. E. Mason produced several "Pips" taken dexteriously with the thumb nail from under the tongue of young chickens. The "Pip" is a little boney substance similar to a fish scale, a negative of the tongue, and prevents the chick from eating unless it is removed. A conversational style of discussion ensured [sic] on the subject of poultry. An invitation to supper, as usual, was unanimously accepted without debate. The club then adjourned to meet one month hence at Edward Daniels'.57

Members of both the Woodlawn Horse Company and Farmers' Club undoubtedly participated in the three-day Farmers' Fair held at Woodlawn in September 1877, called "the largest, best conducted one ever held in that section of Fairfax County," and both groups continued to meet well into the twentieth century.58

    The largest organization to involve Fairfax farmers in the late nineteenth century was the Potomac Fruit Growers' Association. According to Edward Daniels, "its membership extended on both sides of the river including the whole section tributary to Washington. The exhibits of this society were magnificent; they were made monthly ... often in the summer on steamboats chartered for the occasion."59 In l876 400 members and guests of the group were entertained aboard the Mary Washington, a steamboat operated from 1874 to 1882 between Washington, Alexandria, and Mount Vernon by Paul Hillman Troth, a prominent resident of the Woodlawn community.60 The Virginia Commissioner of Agriculture, Thomas Whitehead, testified to the success of the organization in 1880 when he found Fairfax "at the head of the list of counties in the value of orchard products."61 Even though the Fruit Growers' Association disbanded during the 1880s because of "the stagnation of trade" and inadequate transportation facilities, its example was cited by subsequent leaders of organizational efforts among county farmers.61

    By the 1870s a number of other farmers' clubs had been organized. In 1873 the Fairfax News published a letter from the Farmers' Club of Accotink urging legislation to compel people to take care of their own animals and pay for the use of neighbors' fences. The following year the paper reported the formation of the Central Farmers' Club which met at Fairfax Court House and became an outspoken voice for more effective dog laws and more and better railroad service to Washington's markets. At other meetings in 1874, the fourteen to seventeen members in attendance discussed the relative merits of grazing and cropping, the best methods for preparing the ground for corn crops, and the techniques for improving land and cutting hay. Equally active was the Vienna Farmers' Club which included women participants in its business as well as its social gatherings and which discussed such issues as "cultivation of the potatoe" and the relative profits of dairy farming and fruit growing. The Fairfax News not only regularly reported the activities of these organizations, but also encouraged them to increase their cooperative efforts. In early 1874, for example, the editor urged county farmers to patronize the new Guanahani Guano Company of Alexandria, insisting that if the fertilizer distributor had been in operation the previous year, over half a million dollars "would have been kept at home."63

    Destined to play a more influential role in the future of county agriculture was the Piedmont Milk and Produce Association, which held its first annual meeting in February 1873. This organizational gathering was devoted to preaching the benefits of dairying, such as the improvement of worn-out lands by dairy stock manure and the promise of a steady cash income rather than the uncertainty of fluctuating market prices once or twice a year. One Fairfax dairy farmer was reported to have netted $450 from eight cows in only eight months. The spokesman also called for a daily milk train with a refrigerator car from Fairfax County to Washington, a suggestion that the News seconded, calling it the key to realizing the full potential of the Washington market. At the association's second annual meeting in 1874, both progress and problems were reported, but prospects for the future seemed bright. Although there was still no night train to Washington and wagons had to be sent over the twenty-four-mile distance daily, the association reported that members had realized $13,092 in gross sales of milk, and $1,335 for other produce, while paying $2,987 in railroad and wagon freight charges. The report added that the price received for milk had averaged fourteen cents per gallon. Finally, the members decided that in the following year, farmers using their facilities would be charged a fifty-cent membership fee whether they wanted to belong to the organization or not. At its 1875 meeting, the Piedmont Milk and Produce Association reported 67,582 gallons of milk shipped, with gross receipts increasing to $15,538 and shipping costs falling to $2,598. The average profit per cow for the year was $57.33.64

    The names of individual members of the Piedmont Milk and Produce Association are no longer available, but neither its membership nor its potential was any secret to the Fairfax News. An editorial appeared in the paper in February 1874 concerning the association's second annual meeting, pointing out that "all but one or two members are Northemers.... There is money in it and our northem friends are first to find it out and profit by it."65 It can safely be assumed that even if they were not active participants in the association (and they probably were), the experience of this early cooperative effort was not lost on the Theron Thompson family of "Hollin Hall." In 1881 Thompson's son John rented a building in Washington to receive and process milk produced by his father and brothers. The milk was shipped by wagon to Alexandria, then by ferry to the Washington distribution center. After processing, John Thompson would peddle it door-to-door to capital residents from a horse-drawn wagon.66 In 1886 the Fairfax Herald reported that James Duncan of Vienna had also started a milk route to Washington, and that "besides milk that is being shipped by the railroad, there is now milk being shipped by three daily [wagon] routes from that vicinity."67 By the mid-1890s John Storm had developed a large dairy farm near Lewinsville, also transporting the milk daily by wagon to his own processing plant called the Storm and Sherwood Dairy located on Q Street in Georgetown.68 With markets, herds, skilled farmers, and entrepreneurs on hand, only the highly inefficient transportation system still stood between these modest successes and state leadership for Fairfax in the dairy industry, a development which awaited the arrival of electric trolley lines around the turn of the century.

    Although there is no evidence that directly links these local cooperative efforts to national agricultural organizations, any or all of them may have been at least loosely associated with the Patrons of Husbandry, better known as the Grange. The appointment of Richard R. Farr as Local Deputy of the State Grange in 1876 attests to the existence of the organization in Fairiax, though another reference to the group does not appear for a decade when a post office was established at "Grange Camp" just west of Vienna."69 Nationally, the Grange was founded to provide a social outlet for farmers, but it soon turned to economic and political action as well. Local Grangers may have fit into this pattern, for in 1886 the County Board of Supervisors gave "grangers and others interested" permission to erect a flagpole on the courthouse lot for weather signals and flags, although the board specified that no political flags would be permitted.70 Grangers may also have been responsible for the "First Annual Farmers' Institute and Exhibition" which met at Fairfax Courthouse for three days in 1891. The meeting, held "for the interest of agriculture, to promote the welfare of our county, and to aid in its development," attracted "large crowds" and was described as "very successful."71

    There is also no direct evidence that the Populist Party made significant inroads in the county in the 1890s, despite the fact that Fairfax farmers surely felt the pinch of falling farm prices in the nationwide depression of those years. In the 1893 state elections, Fairfax voters gave only 162 of their 1,580 votes to Edmund R. Cocke, the Populist candidate for governor. However, William Jennings Bryan, the Populist as well as the Democratic presidential candidate in 1896, outpolled Republican William McKinley in the county 2,109 to 1,877, and Bryan increased his margin to 2,136 to 1,507 in a 1900 rematch.72 The best evidence that the Populists' frustrated and confused cry for help did not go completely unheeded in Fairfax County may have been the political metamorphosis at Sully Plantation. Robert S. Gamble wrote that Conrad Shear, who lost one son fighting for the Union and whose parlor prominently featured an engraving of Abraham Lincoln, "did not waver in his Republicanism - though he found himself in the midst of a staunchly Democratic countryside - until 1896. Then, swayed by the fiery populist appeal of William Jennings Bryan and the spectre of the "Cross of Gold" upon which the American farmer was allegedly being crucified by monied Eastern interests, he forsook the GOP for the first time and voted the Democratic Ticket."73

Community Cooperation: Religion and Education

    While most Fairfax residents lived and labored on the land in the late nineteenth century, community life was coming to play an increasingly important role in the county. The center of most communities had always been the church, so it is natural to find that many citizens' earliest efforts after the war were to rebuild their places of worship. During the war, many county church buildings had been occupied by troops from both armies and used as everything from hospitals to stables. The Lewinsville Presbyterian Church manse, stable, and school were occupied by federal troops for about two years, and it was not until forty years later that the federal government compensated the church for the severe damages its buildings had suffered.74 The historic Pohick Church suffered extensively, though by 1872, $1,250 had been raised and the church was restored to usable condition.75 The Reverend W. A. Aldrich, who was sent soon after the war to reorganize the Fairfax Zion Episcopal Church, which had been completely destroyed by Union troops, found only eighteen participants at services held in the courthouse, yet reported "a deep interest manifested in religious matters, and a willingness to make every sacrifice for the sake of the Master and His cause. The people, in their impoverished condition; are making an eamest effort to rebuild." In 1869 Washington's Bishop Whittle, who conducted a service for fourteen participants in their roofed but still unfinished new building, wrote that he knew of "no congregation in the Diosese more deserving of help than this, where the people have shown such a determination to help themselves." Whether assistance was forthcoming or not, the building was completed in 1872, and by 1876 it was furnished and out of debt.76 Despite these hopeful signs, disputes and hardships were not at an end. The war had split many churches into northern and southern branches, and congregations giving allegiance to the different governing bodies continued to overlap geographically and to compete, so that long after sectional squabbles had subsided, county churches remained centers of both cooperation and occasional conflict.

    Second sources of community spirit and community pride after the Civil War were the new schoolhouses which spread over the county after the passage of the state school law in 1870. Actually, because of the depressed economy and the political conflicts surrounding the education issue, the guidelines established by the state guaranteed neither the implementation nor the success of the new system. A State Board of Education appointed a county school superintendent and three local trustees; their duties included examination and certification of teachers, management of school properties, administration of an annual school census, and arranging votes on school taxes. The burden for making the principle of public education a reality, however, remained in each individual community. As John K. Gott and Katherine S. Hogan pointed out in their brief history of county schools, it was the parents who "petitioned the district to start a school, and had a great deal of influence on the location, often providing the land, the school room or house, and making contributions of time, money and labor. Teachers, [although] appointed by the district trustees, were often located by the parents and boarded in a patron's home.... While the state provided books for indigent children other students had to supply their own."77 Perhaps a most appropriate means of beginning an estimation and an evaluation of the growth of both new and existing communities would be to account for the establishment and growth of these two centers of community spirit - the churches and the schools.

Friendly Persuasion

    Quakers had been the predominant religious group in the Woodlawn community since the large-scale migration of Friends into the area had begun in 1846. Although their pacifism had temporarily brought mistrust from both sides during the Civil War, rapid recovery in the neighborhood was stimulated by the wave of new arrivals after the war. In fact, about 1866 the size of the meeting house was doubled, and the meeting flourished through the remainder of the century, reflecting the prosperity the area farmers enjoyed.78 Education had always been a chief concern for these thrifty Quakers, and their postwar efforts in this area were exemplary. By 1868 they had organized the Woodlawn School Association, to which Courtland Lukens deeded a half acre of land for a proposed school. Though not used at the time, the present Woodlawn Elementary School was erected on this site in 1937.79 Meanwhile, the Snowden School was organized about 1870, at first meeting in the home of Valentine Baker, a member of the syndicate which had bought "Wellington" from Stacy Snowden four years earlier. Soon a one-room school building was erected by Baker, Snowden (who donated the land), William Hunter, and Theron Thompson. Kate Snowden, Stacy's daughter-in-law, later recalled that "the benches were crude and the only desks were boards around the sides of the room. Children worked facing the wall." For many years the school seems to have functioned independently of the new state system, serving neighborhood children whose parents were willing and able to operate the school on their own. Mrs. Snowden wrote that "school was held off and on for many years in the one room," with classes conducted in turn by Josephine Baker, Alice Dove, Nellie Nevitt, who would remain in the county system for over fifty years, and Mrs. Emmet Finks, whose son contended that she "taught there two years, without pay, before the County School Board knew Snowden School existed!" Even after the county had acquired the school and property and had taken over its administration, the minimum required attendance could not always be maintained, and for two years Daniel Dickinson Thompson, who had married Isaac Snowden's daughter, operated the school in his father-in-law's home, "Riverview," with Miss Dove the teacher. The building burned around 1900, was replaced in 1903, and burned again in 1941.80

    While their neighbors were struggling to keep the Snowden School in operation, the founders of the Woodlawn Quaker colony were attempting to follow the guidelines established by the state. Chalkley Gillingham, who had been an original member of the settlement in 1846, wrote in his diary in January 1871 that "I have been busy the past two weeks attending to help the inaugurating [sic] public free schools, according to a recent act of the state legislature." Gillingham expected "to start a white school on the 2nd day next in our meeting house," but was evidently encountering problems collecting authorized school taxes in the community. He wrote that despite "having a fund of our own, of which we can have the use of $100 per annum ... we have had considerable difficulty in getting it up, there always being some narrow minded and contrary people to contend with. If this were not true," he concluded, "the world would move on more rapidly in reformation from the oldness of the letter, into the newness of the spirit." By April, however, the problems had been overcome, for Gillingham's diary reported, "we have started the white free school in our meeting house. Sallie, the wife of John Parrish, as teacher, with upwards of 30 scholars ... remained two months, after which Maria Troth, the daughter of P. H. Troth of Accotink, took it and continues the teaching successfully." The school was supported by "15 dollars per month from the state and 15 per month from the Philadelphia Friends Fair Hill school fund."81 As in agriculture, the Woodlawn Quaker community set an admirable example for their fellow residents of Fairfax, both in their moral outlook and conduct and in their educational achievements.

    Yet if the Friends of Woodlawn were thriving economically and academically, there were occasional signs that their religious influence might be waning. In an isolated example from the Woodlawn community, a disagreement arose when Edward Curtis Gibbs failed to request the permission of the congregation to marry. When called on for an apology, Gibbs reportedly answered, "I'll be damned if I'll apologize to anyone for marrying my wife," and the family subsequently became Presbyterian.82 Nor was this the only case of diminishing devotion to the meeting. As Robert S. Gamble reported in his history of Sully Plantation, James Barlow, in one of his last acts before leaving Virginia for Kansas in 1873, gave $40, and along with fellow Quaker Alexander Haight, was one of the largest contributors toward the construction of Christ Episcopal Church at Chantilly. "The younger Haights affiliated in the 1870s with the small Episcopal flock ... worshipping of a Sunday morning with the Lees, the Turbervilles, and the proud, ruined Stuarts, in the diminutive Gothic-style chapel they had helped to build."83

Shear Determination

    At the same time establishment Episcopalians were converting their northern neighbors at Chantilly, educational opportunities in the area were expanding. By 1873 a school had been opened at Chantilly, and its teacher, Miss Frances Sherman, boarded with the Conrad Shear family at Sully.84 The Legato School, originally four miles southeast of Chantilly on Lee Highway but restored and relocated on the courthouse grounds during school centennial celebrations in 1970, was built in 1877.85 The Rotchford School on Ox Road must have been built about the same time and was described by Edna Force Davis, who attended the school in the 1880s, as a "small log school house with hand made board benches and desks, running to the wall from a narrow aisle in the middle. From four to six pupils sat in each seat." By 1890 Davis was the teacher at the one-room Ashford School near Burke. Usually about twenty of the forty students enrolled attended, and for her efforts, she received about $25 per month, $10 of which went to pay her board. Lillian W. Millan, who taught for forty-four years in Fairfax County schools, rode five miles on horseback every day to her first job at "Navy," two miles east of Chantilly. Her fifty students (of all ages) were crowded into a single room. These working conditions, her transportation hardships, and her $22.50 monthly salary were not her only difficulties. "One session," Millan remembered, "I had twenty pupils with the same surname, all related." She subsequently taught in one-room school houses at Chantilly, Pender, Legato, and Germantown.86

    A former student's remembrances of Miss Millan were affectionate if not entirely happy ones. Mary Elizabeth Balderson vividly recalled the day she absentmindedly tapped her pencil on her desk while studying. Not only did Miss Millan scold her before her classmates, but also accompanied Mary Elizabeth home, where she told the girl's mother that the child had been "flippin' her garters." But Balderson also remembered that while "discipline was stern, enterprising students did manage a few pranks. One teacher kept a clock on her desk, but during the winter months she would often go down into the room in order to sit by the stove as much as possible.... While she was working with a class, some big boy would sidle up to her desk and set the clock ahead. Then all the children could go home early."87 The contributions of such a dedicated teacher as Miss Millan to all these Fairfax communities certainly outlived the long years of her service.

Immigration and Accusation

    A new station was located on the Orange and Alexandria Railroad in southern Fairfax County in 1869 to provide an outlet for the area's farm products, pulp wood, and the soapstone mined nearby. Harrison G. Otis, whose family had immigrated to the area along with others from the north after the war, became the first postmaster of Clifton Station, probably naming the new community for a town near his home in New York. Otis also built the Clifton Hotel, which became a "popular vacation resort for families from Alexandria, Washington and Baltimore," and promoted the development of the town through his real estate business.88 An 1868 article in the Alexandria Gazette advertised that "immense tracts of open and waste land adjoin that now owned by Mr. Otis, which can be bought for comparatively a mere song, and which, with but a slight overlay could be made to 'blossom the rose.'"89 Even before the train began to stop, the newcomers had organized a Presbyterian Sunday school, and two years later, in 1870, they laid the cornerstone of their new church building. In 1872 the Clifton Baptist Church was organized, a one-room schoolhouse was in operation, replaced in the late 1870s by a two-story frame building, and the town's Masonic Lodge was chartered in 1877.90

    Despite the evidence of religious, educational, and fratemal cooperation, all was not peaceful in Clifton. When Mary A. Otis, wife of the postmaster and proprietress of the hotel, accused Margaret Hetzel, widow of a U.S. Army veteran killed in the Mexican War in 1847, of being a southern sympathizer during the late "War of the Rebellion," Hetzel was ostracized by her neighbors and reportedly investigated by the U.S. Pension Office. She responded with a $10,000 libel suit against Mrs. Otis. Though the outcome of the case is not known, here is a clear indication that bitter sectional and social tensions could arise even amid the rural tranquility of late nineteenth century Fairfax County.91

Relative Diversification

    Despite its distance from Washington, a total of twenty-one miles, the town of Herndon from its beginning was a relatively cosmopolitan community. This is due in part to the route of the Washington and Ohio Railroad, the link completed to Herndon in 1856-57, and in part a result of the arrival of a number of northern newcomers following the Civil War. In 1858 the town received a post office named for Captain William Lewis Herndon, a Virginia-born sea captain who had heroically gone down with his ship after directing his passengers and crew into lifeboats. A survivor supposedly told this story at a meeting held to choose a name for the new post office and persuaded the village fathers to honor the dead hero.92 Ancel St. John, originally from New Jersey, seems to have been a leader of the new arrivals after the war, a group which also included families from New York and Pennsylvania. These families were probably instrumental in the construction of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Herndon in 1872, which affiliated with the northern governing body of that denomination. Lottie Dyer Schneider, in her own Memories of Herndon, wrote that "about this time, a number of New England people had come to town who were Congregationalists. The Methodists graciously offered the use of their church to these people for worship."93 By 1873 the Congregationalists had completed their own building, and by 1876 local Episcopalians, including the Castelmans, Thorntons, Cockerills, Fitzhughs, and other families with southern roots, had done likewise.94

    Herndon citizens were early and enthusiastic in their support for public education, completing their first school building the year before the state school system began operation in 1870. Rita Schug, in a study of the community, attributed this interest to the fact that so many townspeople came from the north and were accustomed to the principle of public support for schools. When the original building burned down in the early 1870s, residents were quick to rebuild, using their own cash subscriptions and contributions of labor.95 By the early eighties, this school was one of only five "graded schools" in the county, boasting of two teachers for its seventy-nine first- and second-grade students.96 The public schoolhouse was not the only educational facility in the town, for by 1876 Mrs. Robcrt Allen Castleman, a widowed first cousin of Robert E. Lee, along with her son and four daughters had established the Herndon Episcopal Seminary for Girls. Mrs. Castleman's son later became the Episcopal minister at Falls Church, but all four daughters remained at home and continued to hold classes and board students until the mid-1920s. The sisters taught the Episcopal catechism, but excused students from this instruction at their parents' request. The school also featured individualized instruction beyond the primary grades, promoted one sport, girls' basketball, and in all things stressed "discipline, deportment and poise." Tuition was $10 per month.97

   The detailed study of town records by Rita Schug and the personal remembrances of Lottie Dyer Schneider, born the year Herndon was incorporated, provide a unique view of the vision and experience of a growing Fairfax community in the late nineteenth century. Following reception of the town charter in January 1879, officials were elected, including Mayor Isaiah Bready, originally of New York, Town Clerk Howard Blanchard of Maine, and Town Councilmen Ancel St. John of New Jersey, Stephen Killam of Nova Scotia, William D. Sweetzer of New England, William Urick, Lawrence Hindle, and C.H. Hathaway.98 "To preserve order and property," the Council soon passed a series of ordinances, making it a crime to injure a tree on public or private property, to loiter, to insult passersby, to disturb a religious congregation, to deface property, to throw missiles, or to allow stock to wander into the "built-up" area of the town. Ball playing on Sundays was also prohibited, as were profanity or indecency in dress, manner or speech, carrying a concealed weapon, and trespassing.99 Although the population was only 442, the incorporated area included 4 1/3 square miles of land, supposedly so that "saloons could not be established within easy walking distance of the railroad station and so create a 'town nuisance."'100 Schneider, whose father Elisha Dyer was Mayor, President of the School Board, or Town Sergeant for many years, remembered that "when Father was active in town affairs he had many problems with men of both races drinking and with petty thefts. I recall at one time that he had the jail full and had to house a few in the cellar. Mother was loud in denouncing this, and I think it only occurred once." On another occasion "a note was fastened to the gate threatening Father if he put any more animals in the pound. People would let their animals roam the streets and would get angry when they had to redeem them....... It worried me as a child when Father buckled on his pistol and went out to do his duty, giving little heed to threats. Gradually the town became a saner and safer place to live."101

Languid Isolation

    A log schoolhouse was in use early in the 1870s at Langley, with Miss Cordelia Slade the teacher. Several young Episcopalians, including Martha Reid, Fannie Mackall, and Kate and Helen Smoot, also used the building to give religious instruction on Sundays. By the midseventies, students from the Alexandria Theological Seminary had accepted the invitation of local Episcopalians to conduct weekly services "in the public school which had by then been established in the Methodist Church building" on the Georgetown Pike. But the trip was a difficult one for the students over undependable roads, and the congregation soon determined to erect its own building and secure a permanent minister. Both Arthur Taylor and General Benjamin F. Mackall, an honored Confederate veteran, generously offered tracts of land for the church, both sites near the intersection of the Georgetown Turnpike and Chain Bridge Road. A controversy arose, however, when it was realized that the Mackall site was directly across the road from the local tavern, which also served as a relay station for the stage line from Washington to Leesburg. Bertram G. Foster wrote in St. John's First Fifty Years that some parishioners contended "proximity to a barroom, or as one designated it, the 'very gates of Hell,' was no place for a church, whereas others as vigorously held that such was an ideal place for it. Whether the ... danger to the weaker brethren" played any part in the decision is unknown, but Mr. Taylor's offer was finally accepted.103

    St. John's Episcopal Church was consecrated in 1877. Within a few years neighbors had added by stock subscription a town hall, the scene of dances, drama productions, and civic meetings. Despite these diversions, however, and the entertainment always available at Hummer's Store, the community was struggling by the turn of the century, primarily because of its isolation, even though the nation's capital lay within five miles. As John C. Mackall, one of the General's five children who attended school in Georgetown, remembered, "due to the terrible condition of the roads and the fact that my father also had his law office in Washington, my family had been compelled to take up quarters in Georgetown for the winter months."104 For the Mackalls' less affluent neighbors, trying to reach markets, schools, and churches must have been a real hardship. Even St. John's, only two decades after its completion, "fell on evil days. It was actually closed for a year or so for lack of a minister, and some" referred to it as 'St. John's in the Wildemess'."105 But the Langley community, like several others in the county, would be transformed within a few years by the arrival of the electric trolley.

Restoration and Fraternization

    At least some county residents were desperate for new neighbors in the 1850s, for when Dr. William Hendricks offered to settle at "Ayr Hill" if the citizens would change the community's name to "Vienna," Hendrick's hometown in New York, they agreed.106 Another New Yorker, Orrin E. Hine, arrived in 1866 and had an even greater impact on the community. William West, born in Vienna in 1873, explained 102 years later that during the Civil War northern "men were soldiering through here [and] could see what the prospects were for peacetime.... Major Hine was one of those who after the war came back and bought quite a tract of land." Tax records back up this assertion, for by 1885 Hine owned 6,440 acres in the vicinity, with property and buildings appraised at more than $45,000.107 In addition to running his extensive farm and a real estate office, Hine has been credited with straightening and widening the town's streets and then lining them with six miles of maple trees. When the town was incorporated in 1890, "in order to improve its public schools and ... streets," he became its first mayor, a position he held until 1900.108 If these activities and honors are not tribute enough, in 1897 the Hamilton (Loudoun County) Telephone evaluated his contributions to Vienna over three decades: "to the credit of Major Hine ... after the late war was over he came back to the credit of Major Hine ... after the late war was over he came back to the very section where, per force of the necessities of cruel war, his men had contributed to the desolation of the country, and has devoted all of the succeeding years in 'making glad the waste places' and surely, it can be truthfully said of him that he has restored to this section more than he destroyed."109

    Major Hine was also deeply interested in the principle of public education, for in 1868 he went to Richmond where he testified before the General Assembly on the operation of public schools in the North, and two years after the state's system had been established, Vienna had a two-story frame school house.110 By 1882 it was another of Fairfax County's five "graded schools," with two teachers and two grades for its sixty-seven students.111 Vienna Presbyterians completed their church in 1874, while Methodist and Episcopolian congregations were organized in the 1890s.112 Perhaps equally important to many residents were the numerous clubs and secret societies around which "the principle warfare of the town is centered" and "for which the town is famed," according to the Industrial and Historical Sketch of the county published by the Board of Supervisors in 1907. Among the organizations listed were the Woman's Club, the Business Men's Club, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Masons, the Odd Fellows, the United Woodmen, the Good Templars, the Village Improvement Society, and the Junior Order United American Mechanics. 113

Enthusiasts for Education

    Other nearby communities were showing a similar interest in education if not for civic and fratemal affiliation. In fact, there is at least one claim that the one-room school at Flint Hill, later Oakton, was the first "public" school in the county, that is, the first supported by the tithes of local residents. It held its first session in 1849. This school burned soon after the war but was replaced by another one-room building at the intersection of Hunter's Mill and Chain Bridge Roads in 1874.114 The seven northern families who had settled at Merrifield after the war also refused to wait for state and county assistance, instead taking "matters into their own hands to provide an education for their children." Pearl Dunn recalled that "first, they organized the Mill's Crossroads Literacy Society.... Some gave money, [up to] $10 per family.... Others gave materials; some gave labor.... Results ... a one room log school" completed in 1874.115 Parents were not alone in their desire to help. Mrs. Arthur Wynkoop proudly remembered the efforts of older students a few years later to obtain a new school to replace the old store building on the corner of Hunters Mill and Lawyers Roads which had been leased by the school board. The students, "so anxious for a school house, had strawberry and ice cream festivals and oyster suppers and raised $100 which they gave to the School Board ... for the new building."116

Isolated Stagnation

    Although it was the county seat and famed for the sweetness of the water from the well on its public square, Fairfax Court House could hardly be described as a thriving community in the late years of the nineteenth century. The opposition to the town's new brick school under construction in 1873 has been mentioned, as have the hardships of the Zion Episcopalians in trying to rebuild their church after the war. When the town abandoned its former name "Providence" in favor of "Fairfax" in 1874, Providence seems to have abandoned Fairfax in return.117 In 1875 the locally published Fairfax News folded. The town of 376 received a booster in 1881 when Captain Stephen R. Donohoe arrived from Alexandria to establish and edit the Fairfax Herald, and more capable leadership was provided through the 1880s by Frank Page, Rector of Zion Church from 1878 to 1889 and brother of Thomas Nelson Page whose romantic novels about the Old South made even Northerners shed nostalgic tears.118 But the "scattered rural membership" of the Duncan Chapel Methodist Church (South), which replaced an earlier church in 1882, "was hampered by severe winters, bad roads, and diphtheria epidemics," and in 1888 its minister, Rev. O. C. Beak, wrote of a "general business depression in this area" which caused the church and no doubt the entire community to suffer "from removals." Even the town's most treasured possession, the will of George Washington, was threatened with removal to the State Library in Richmond by action of the General Assembly in 1876.120 The standard explanation for the town's troubles, appearing regularly in the Herald until the arrival of the trolley line in 1904, was the lack of a rail link and the unreliable roads, isolating the courthouse from most of the county in bad weather. Whatever the reason, when Fairfax Court House received its charter of incorporation in 1892, its population had fallen, by one estimate, to two hundred; it had three white and two black churches, a school for each race, three or four stores, a newspaper office, an old-fashioned tavem, a coach and wagon maker, and seemingly busiest of all, an undertaker's establishment.121

Pachyderm's Predilection

    Two families played leading roles in the growth of the settlement surrounding Baileys Cross Roads in the thirty years after the war: the Munsons and the Baileys. Timothy Munson, a New York Presbyterian, had brought his family to the area in 1851, and in 1869, Daniel Munson inherited his father's 260-acre nursery known as Munson Hill Farm. A Northern sympathizer during the war, the younger Munson had the distinction of being kidnapped by the legendary Colonel Mosby in 1863, and his good fortune in escaping earned him his own claim to the title "Colonel." Daniel Munson's biographer called him "a mighty successful horticulturist, having business relations from Maine to Texas," and from Munson's correspondence comes a more revealing assessment of the scope of his business. In 1883 he wrote, "I am very busy, having from 20 to 30 men to attend in my nursery and also 40 agents to look after." More lasting but unfortunately not permanent testimonials were the hundreds of Munson maples which lined the streets of Falls Church, making that village a "riot of color" every fall until they fell to the wider streets which the automobile demanded in the twentieth century.122

    The source of the settlement's name was Hachaliah Bailey, "Father of the American Circus," in the words of the greatest showman of them all, P.T. Barnum. The crossroads had been the winter home of the famed Barnum & Bailey Circus for many years, but as Jane Chapman Whitt wrote in her lively account of Elephants and Quaker Guns, "the upkeep of circus menageries had become a luxury that Hachaliah Bailey descendants, divided by the war, found difficult to maintain." Remaining animals returned to the circus circuit, but Mariah Bailey, Hachaliah's daughter-in-law, who had inherited the Baileys Cross Roads property in 1843, stayed on. In the 1870s Mariah deeded land to Fairfax County for the settlement's first public school, and in 1886 she not only donated the two-acre site, but also volunteered her carpenter son Theodore's labor for the construction of St. Paul's Episcopal Chapel. In addition, she always entertained the students, who came from the Alexandria Episcopal Seminary to conduct weekly services, at the boarding house she had fashioned by moving the old Cross Roads Inn to adjoin the family mansion "Maury." According to Whitt, Maury" became a popular resort for Washingtonians "who would come to the countryside to spend a weekend or the summer. Guests who enjoyed riding to hounds could find Virginia hunters in the stable [or] would head for the old circular riding ring." Ironically, an injury forced the energetic matriarch to spend her last years bedridden, but she was no doubt provided constant company by her eight children and their offspring, her two greyhounds, and her South American parrot, a gift from sympathetic circus friends. The bird's vocabulary was described as "a shocking jargon of Espanol and circusese." Mariah Bailey died in 1896, but as if to commemorate the colorful past her' family had contributed to the community, soon after the turn of the century, an electrical storm caused a stampede of terrified elephants from a nearby amusement park. "Trumpeting wildly ... one of the animals crashed his way up the slopes from Four Mile Run to Bailey's where he was lassoed in a cornfield," still another symbol of the county's past that was, by then, vanishing rapidly.123

    Vestiges of the past were vanishing even more rapidly down the road at Falls Church, speeded by the postwar arrival of a large number of Northerners to what had been a "mere hamlet of perhaps a dozen  houses." One of the first was Isaac Cross, a Pennsylvanian attracted to the village by the farmland available so close to Washington at $40 per acre.124 Far more representative of Falls Church's future, however, were Charles H. Buxton and W. W. Kinsley, both government clerks in Washington who decided to make their homes in the village in 1871. Despite the fact that "at that time the railroad facilities to Washington were most unpromising," others soon followed these "pioneers" of the town's "department colony," including G. A. L. Merrifield and M. S. Roberts, employees of the Pension Bureau, Albert P. Eastman of the War Department, and George F. Rollins of the Treasury Department.125 In 1873 Joseph S. Riley, also of Washington, took up residence at Cherry Hill Farm, one block northeast of Route 7, where he would hold court sessions after he became Town Magistrate and Justice of the Peace.

    In the meantime, residents of Falls Church were devoting abundant attention to their schools, but occasionally inappropriate attention to their churches. Another M.E. (Methodist Episcopal) Church came to town when newly arrived northern Methodists, apparently feeling unwelcome in the Dulin Chapel Methodist Church (South), established their own in 1875. Antagonism over religious matters was heightened the following year when recent emigrants from New England organized a Congregational Church. Even a purely promotional pamphlet, printed by a local developer a number of years later, admitted "that some residents had thought" that another church in such a small town would result in dissension among the Christian people." At its first meeting, the new church felt called upon to issue a resolution expressing its "good wishes toward every church of Christ in this place," and its "desire to co-operate with them in every good work."128 With evidently more unanimity, inhabitants initiated a drive for a local educational institution. Many signed a petition in 1875 pledging themselves to the principle of public education and binding themselves "for the purpose of aiding and sustaining a public graded school in the Village of Falls Church."129 Already in 1871 a school had been established, probably meeting in the Columbia Baptist Church, and by the early 1880s the two-story brick Jefferson School had been completed, built largely with the contributions of local citizens.130 County school records reveal that the town's school, even in the seventies, was graded and consistently had the highest enrollment and attendance of any in the county. For several years after moving into the new building in the 1880s, the school had an unprecedented three teachers, and it divided as many as 193 students into as many as seven grades. These were accomplishments which would not be approached anywhere in the county through the remainder of the century.131

    Ada Walker's Memories of Old Jefferson Institute provides a former student's intimate look into this exceptional school and into the Falls Church community in the early 1890s. In a tribute to James Isaac Brown, a Quaker from Loudoun County and the school's principal from 1890 until his death in 1893, Walker cited the kindness and flexibility with which he administered his considerable authority. To illustrate, she told of a request made by the school's older girls that they be permitted to include a "college song" in each day's opening exercises, along with the usual hymn and Bible reading. Brown gave his permission, leaving the girls with the responsibility of preparing the other students, and on the following morning, Walker recalled, they most inappropriately led the class in "There is a Tavern in This Town." "Principal Brown sat quietly with his arms folded until the song was concluded. With no apparent feeling, he broke the strange silence ... by saying, 'if that is a good example of college songs, I think we'll sing no more of them."' Yet when the girls apologized for their mistake, Brown granted them a second chance, and "the next day when the singing of 'The Spanish Cavalier' was concluded, Mr. Brown said pleasantly, 'that is more like it, and you will do even better than that,' and they did." Another of Brown's students, William H. Emerson, remembered that occasionally the principal would allow schedule changes so that male students could accept the standing challenge of unenrolled working boys in the village to a noontime baseball game. Word would rapidly spread, and no doubt many of the more than eight hundred residents of Falls Church would assemble to witness the big event.132 Although these innocent pleasures persisted, Falls Church was becoming even more impatient than other Fairfax communities in awaiting the arrival of the electric trolley, an event which would cause the developments of the coming decade to quickly overshadow the progress of the previous three.

    Church services and socials, school activities, and fund raisers for churches and schools provided the residents of every Fairfax County community with enjoyable and meaningful diversions from their labors. Although it was hardly an abundant commodity in the late nineteenth century, what the people did with their leisure time can tell much about their interests, values, and goals. A turn-of-the-century county directory revealed that several communities other than Vienna featured professional societies, fraternal lodges, and patriotic organizations. Listed were five Masonic lodges, three chapters of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, five of the Junior Order United American Mechanics, two of the International Order of Good Templars, many Sunday school associations, a businessman's club, a medical society, Daughters of America and Daughters of the American Revolution chapters, a fruit growers' association, and a Confederate veterans' camp.133 County newspapers regularly reported that the carnivals, expositions, jousting tournaments (the target being a small metal ring on a rope), picnics, and even balloon ascensions sponsored by these groups were open to the public and were well attended. Baseball was the leading athletic pastime, but tennis was also popular, as the organization of a lawn tennis club in Fairfax in 1887 indicates. Shopping or sightseeing excursions into Washington, except for farmers going to market, were infrequent for most, but competition from large Washington, D.C., stores may have been responsible for the Fairfax merchant's offer in 1886 of a $75 bedroom set to the couple who would agree to be married in the store's show window. The Fairfax Herald reported that there were five applicants, and a large crowd was no doubt entertained by the ceremony for the lucky pair. An even more amusing spectacle may have been the occasional "masked ball" at which the guests appeared disguised as anyone from "Alonzo the Fair" to "Black Eyed Susan."134

Edification and Organization

Sexual Limitation

    Despite their involvement in these worthy causes, it is interesting to note that women never actively participated in the debates of county lyceums. Instead, women served as secretaries for the groups and were occasionally allowed to read "a select piece," recite a temperance poem, or on one occasion, to render "a humorous dialogue, entitled 'Mrs. Tweezle and Sir Peter."137 Meanwhile, women teachers in county schools received salaries averaging ten percent less than men doing the same job.138 Since there is no evidence of dissent, the Fairfax News may have accurately reflected a county consensus on the role and position of women when it responded in 1874 to a recent incident in Ohio where "women banded together in a crusade against barrooms, converting them, for the moment, into places of prayer. The design may have been good, and the effect may have been felt, still we do not think 'the end justifies the means,' as it cannot be the duty of women to foresake their homes and household affairs and wander about in that manner. It is not their province, nor have they the power to suppress the liquor traffic, or the drinking of liquor. It must come chiefly (if at all) through other instrumentalities, such as legislation and the united action of men."139

Legacy of Emancipation

Racial Intimidation

    If the editorial voices of the Fairfax News and Fairfax Herald were representative of the racial views of the county's Conservative (Democratic) majority, for whom both claimed to speak, many whites had neither confidence in blacks' ability to overcome their handicaps nor great concem over the prospect of their failure. The response of the News to a speech delivered by Govemor James L. Kemper to the black members of the Virginia Assembly in 1874 was typical. The Govemor insisted that "we must all enjoy a common prosperity, or we must all go down in a common ruin," and that "each race [must] stand up for the interests and rights of the other and of both," to which the News replied, "we do not believe one word of it.... We do believe ... that the negro is wholly dependent upon the white race for his prosperity as he now enjoys it, [but] the white race is in no degree, or sense, dependent upon the colored race for a like condition. In short, we think the two races would be infinitely better off if they were separated by an impassable gulf. The Anglo-Saxon's career is onward and upward, regardless of what the colored race may do. The only question to be considered is, will the negro follow our example, and keep up in the great contest for the acquirement of property and general intelligence? We have the gravest doubts that he will, and the more pertinent question is, how much is he likely to clog and retard the advancement of the white race by his inactivity and uncongenial presence?"140 While few blacks would have read this reply, it was hardly calculated to heighten blacks' self-esteem or to harmonize relations between the races. On the contrary, the more likely purpose of such diatribes was the aggravation of tensions, both out of sheer bigotry and in an effort to enhance a political advantage.

    The decision by county Republicans to nominate a black for constable in the Providence District in 1889 gave the Fairfax Herald an opportunity to get maximum political mileage out of its appeal to its readers' fears. The paper admitted that it knew nothing about the candidate, but explained that "it is the suicidal and pernicious policy of electing negroes to office to the injury and detriment of our county, to which we wish to call the attention of the people.... A negro constable now, means a negro overseer of the poor, negro justices, and negroes for all the other offices after a while. It is useless to deny the fact, for we can name counties in this State where Republicans have had control. . . . In one case . . . under the old whipping post law, a white girl sixteen or seventeen years of age, charged with petty larceny, was sentenced to be whipped, and the lashes were actually administered by a negro sheriff! ... If you are opposed to negro rule, you should not only vote against the negro candidate, but against all the Republican nominees. . . . and thus administer a rebuke to that party that it will not soon forget."145 The black candidate was not elected.

A Fordable Privation: Affordable Habitation

    The black settlement at Gum Springs could trace its origin back to 1829 when West Ford, a former slave, was willed a tract of land by Bushrod Washington, the General's nephew. Ford eventually divided his 211 acres among his children who, in tum, subdivided, and by 1880, this settlement of freedmen included twelve families, among them Ford's grandson West who was the florist at nearby Mount Vemon. The availability of steady employment at Washington's home, by then open to the public with a large maintenance staff, must partially explain these blacks' ability to acquire their own land so quickly, for census records reveal that several other members of the community were also employed there. A second explanation was the cheapness of the marshy Gum Springs property, which certainly deserved its name. One of the men, whose name was King, attempted to improved his plot by promoting it as one of the county s first land fills, and the new home he built there was a testament to his success.148

     Contrary to the case in most parts of the South, there was little sharecropping in Fairfax County, so the vicious cycle of diminishing crops and rising debts was avoided. But unless a freedman possessed some skill or trade, he had few employment alternatives to farm labor, which often too closely resembled his former condition in slavery, with the exception that he received wages of fifty to seventy-five cents per day. Blacks in the Chantilly vicinity seemed satisfied to remain on the land they had worked as slaves. Jacob Barlow of Sully Plantation recorded a payment of $45.98 to Caleb Ray, a freedman, his Wife, and his son on I January 1868, and over the coming years, George Currie, Oscar Mason, and other workers, "most of whom had once been slaves in the area ... performed the myriad tasks that kept Sully going: baling hay, repair-ing fences, plowing, sowing, and reaping." Currie and his wife Ellen, "also ... born in Slavery but now ... a paid domestic," would continue to work at Sully and neighboring farms into the twentieth century.151

    The Christian religion had always been important to black Americans: a comfort, a diversion, and a promise that unrelieved suffering was redemptive. Probably no county resident realized more clearly the continuing importance of the church to blacks after emancipation than did Cyrus Carter. Soon after their arrival, Lincolnville residents organized a Baptist Church and held services in members' homes. Then in December 1866, barely a year after the community had been established, a small wooden church building was dedicated, built on Carter's land. Carter also donated a one-acre cemetery plot and served as pastor of the church until his death in 1891. For fourteen years Carter also served as minister to the Baptist congregaton at Odricks Comer, and he may have been instrumental in the establishment of other freedmen's churches in Vienna and Falls Church.159

Conspicuous Cooperation

    Freedmen in the Vienna vicinity probably had the widest range of economic opportunities in the county, although those able to acquire land remained a distinct minority. William West recalled in a recent interview that his maternal grandparents, Simon and Lucinda Alexander, were among the earliest local black landowners. The Alexanders had been slaves at "Woodacre," the plantation of Frank Williams, a captain in the company of Colonel Mosby. Although the property had been devastated during the war, the former slaves remained, and for their loyalty through the difficult times, the captain's mother, Frances Williams, deeded them a parcel of land for $1.00 in 1869. William West's paternal grandfather Thomas and his father Daniel West were among the many laborers on the extensive farm of Major Orrin E. Hine. By 1870, the Wests had acquired their own small plot, valued by the census taker at $100. Equally important to the black community was the arrival of another Northerner, Captain Harmon L. Salsbury, who, according to William West, had commanded a division of blacks during the war and had developed "a great and civil regard for his men." His Vienna property must have amounted to several hundred acres, for in the 1870 census it was valued at $10,000. And as Andrew Wolf observed, "since the names in the census were-. . . listed in the order of the families along the roads, it could be seen that there was a cluster of black families in the immediate area of Salsbury's home. This certainly stands to reason, for ... not only did he make the property available, he also facilitated the obtainment of his lots by extending easy credit to the Vienna blacks, few of whom had ... capital. West (recalled] that when he bought his first acre from Salsbury in the early 1890's, he was charged $100, but was given ten years to pay the money. During the first five years, no interest was demanded; after that there was only a minimal rate." In addition to the work available on the large farms, blacks in the area could find employment at several local industries. The Moses Commins Plow Factory, which operated until the late 1870s, paid its workers $1.00 per day, considerably higher than current farm wages. A fertilizer plant and a tomato canning factory also provided blacks with opportunities to acquire capital and eventually, perhaps, a piece of property. William West described relations between the races in Vienna as "very good; a black could go into any white store, and none were prevented from buying land."159

    Soon after his arrival in Vienna, Major Hine heard his field hands discussing their desire to organize a church. At his suggestion they applied to the government and were given permission to use the lumber in the numerous abandoned ammunition shelters left in the area. On a plot donated by Hine, they erected a Baptist Church in 1867.160 An 1887 county map labeled this building "Cold. Schl Ho.," so it clearly served a dual purpose.161 While not debunking Hine's generosity, one life-long county resident suggested that there may have been an ulterior motive behind the major's gift. Captain Harmon L. Salsbury, "Hine's rival in real estate," owned the property adjacent to the church site, she explained, so Hine may have hoped to depreciate the value of Salsbury's land, "since he believed that whites were often wary of living near freedmen." However, considering Salsbury's open-mindedness and Hine's record as an employer and civic leader, such an explanation seems unlikely. Both of these men were probably deserving of the praise given Hine in 1897 by an area newspaper, which saluted "the applied energy of the new men and new money that he had been instrumental in locating here," and "the forceful effect of the ... progressive ideas that he has helped introduce."162 Certainly the blacks of Vienna had benefited by their presence in the community.

Constructive Occupations

    Two other successful and very self-sufficient black settlements were located near Vienna at Odricks Corner and on what is now Belleview Road. Alfred Odrick, who gained his freedom from the Coleman family of Dranesville on Proclamation Day, 1863, was a skilled carpenter, and by 1872 he had saved $450 with which he bought thirty acres of land. He evidently succeeded at farming, for he soon replaced his log hut with a large, comfortable house for his family. The 1880 census reported that eight or nine more black families settled nearby, including Cyrus Carter's son Andrew, a skilled craftsman in his own right from the Lincolnville settlement, who had married Odrick's sister-in-law. Interestingly, Carter bought his seventeen acres at Odricks Corner from General John S. Crocker who had sold the original Lincolnville property to his father shortly after the war. Even before Alfred Odrick built his own home, he constructed a community schoolhouse on his property, and beginning in 1873, Cyrus Carter came to conduct weekly Baptist services in the building. In 1887, the elder Carter laid the cornerstone for the Shiloh Baptist Church, also built on property donated by Odrick. Meanwhile less than a mile away, another community was crystallizing around the homestead of Samuel Sharper whose grandfather had earned his freedom and acquired the thirty-four-acre farm in 1825. The 1870 census valued Sharper's real property at $1,000, an amount to which he added $500 in 1874. That the community was growing is obvious from the successive marriages of three of Sharper's daughters to three sons of Albert Henderson, a neighbor. John Jackson, another neighbor, was probably not alone in seeing that his children got an education, but he was surely a proud father when his son Lewis became the teacher at Odricks School, indicating that the two communities worshipped and studied together.163

    Just as it lagged behind the rest of the county economically after the war, Fairfax Court House needed to improve relations between its two racial groups. Perhaps the rhetoric of the locally published Fairfax News and Fairfax Herald contributed to the ill feelings, for in November 1873, the News reported that a recent political rally and barbecue "came near to ending in a general row. Some colored blood was made to flow, rocks were in demand, and some powder was bumt. Fortunately. . . . the propelled lead flew wide of its mark. Some were seen down in the streets hunting for specimens of quartz rocks, while others went down because they could not help it.... Several sore heads were felt the next morning. All this was the result of an attempt to harmonize the races."164 Fortunately also, such an occurrence was not representative of all contact between blacks and whites in the vicinity. Francis Honesty, a life-long resident of Fairfax, recalled that Dr. Clarke Brooke, a large landowner and the local tax collector, employed many freedmen on his farm, and later sold land to a number of them. Honesty's wife's grandfather operated a general store in this black community about a mile south of town on Braddock Road. Honesty also remembered that many blacks "found employment in the saw mills which were busily producing ties for the expanding [railroads, and] blacksmithing evolved as a popular trade among the freedmen below Fairfax, for the saw millers often needed wom equipment and broken bolts ... replaced."165

Cross Roads Integration

    The John Bell family joined the Daniel Munson and the Mariah Bailey families as leaders in the Baileys Cross Roads community after the Civil War. Bell, who had received an education from his former master or employer, left North Carolina in the 1860s for Washington, D.C., where he took a job in the U.S. Patent Office. After several years in the city, Bell decided that he wanted his children to grow up in a rural environment, so, like the thousands who would follow him, he came to northern Virginia in search of a home within commuting distance to his government office. In the early 1870s, Miles Munson, Daniel's younger brother, heartbroken over the recent loss of his new home and young daughter in a tragic fire, decided to leave Virginia and sold his fifty-acre tract near the Columbia Pike to John Bell. By 1880 Bell had hired a live-in farm attendant, a freedman named Jefferson Davis. There were many other employment opportunities for blacks on several large white-owned farms in the area (Munson Hill Nursery was probably the biggest employer), and Bell's granddaughter Mrs. Julia Bell Sheppard recalled that several white families subdivided and sold parcels of their land to local blacks. The 1880 census found that fifty of Baileys Cross Roads' eighty-nine inhabitants were black, so this must have been one of the more densely and peacefully settled black communities in the county. John Bell was clearly a leader in maintaining this happy condition, for Iiis granddaughter remembered stories of how "he used to set up long wooden tables on his lawn where officials and citizens of both races who were concerned for the development of the area would spend many an afternoon discussing various local problems."169

Pleasant Consolidation

Economic Diversification and Foote-dragging Segregation

    The largest and most diversified group of blacks in the postwar period settled in the vicinity of Falls Church. Frederick Forrest Foote, a slave of the Minor family until 1863, was the first to acquire land. To accomplish this, Foote enlisted in the Union Army whije continuing to work nights on the Chesapeake and Ohio canal, and by 1864, he was able to make a down payment to his former owner on a twenty-eight-acre tract where he built his home. Although Foote did not complete payment on the property until 1882, he acquired several other plots of land before 1878, including three lots in Falls Church valued at $2,100. It may have been on these lots that Foote's son, Frederick, Jr., established his shoemaker's shop and his large grocery and provisions store. In 1881, the voters of the village elected Frederick Foote, Jr., to the Falls Church Town Council, evidently the first black to hold such a position in the county. Foote remained on the council until his death in 1889. Six years later, when Frederick, Sr., died at the age of ninety-five, a member of the Minor family paid tribute in a deposition, writing that "old Frederick Foote was thought a great deal of by the white people and children used to very frequently go to their house and stay all night."172

    Despite the high regard of the white community for the Frederick Foote family, census records indicate that Falls Church blacks lived in three very distinct and segregated neighborhoods. The first, called simply "the hill," was settled by the freed slaves of the Dulany family whose land was subdivided for them after the war. Immediately after this was done, a man was reported trying to take "advantage of the naivete of these blacks as landholders by imposing upon them monthly rents.... This corrupt activity was discovered, however, and the scoundrel was apprehended."173 A second settlement was the "Southgate Subdivision," one of many developments conceived and promoted by entrepreneur extraordinaire Merton E. Church who arrived in the town in 1886. By the early 1900s, this settlement was reported to include "probably a hundred cottages with a population of between 400 and 500.... Many of the little cottages and surroundings indicate industry and thrift in the occupants."174 The third black settlement was in West Falls Church and was known as "Gravel Banks." As Andrew Wolf observed, the census taker in 1880 must have begun "his trek through the village in one of [these] communities, because the list ... commences with 29 black families, or 149 individuals. The striking feature of this group [was] the degree of occupational variation among the working men." On the list Wolf found "a carpenter, a Baptist minister, a blacksmith, a wheelwright, several schoolteachers, and even an enterprising banker."175

    As in the particular case of relations between the races, so, in general, was Fairfax neither phoenix nor failure in the late nineteenth century. Population growth was steady, reflecting a mood of moderate optimism. Not quite 13,000 people inhabited the county in 1870; by 1900 the figure had reached 18,580, an increase of 43.5 percent.179 Meanwhile, land values, the county's key economic gauge, had not kept pace. Just two years after the war, the county's 265,153 acres had an average assessed value of approximately $17. By the mid-1870s, this figure had fallen to $15, then to less than $14 in 1883. By 1896, county properties at $15.38 per acre, were still well below their value of thirty years before.180 Statistics can never stand alone, but the glimpses of farm and community life, the accounts of religious and educational institutions, and the sketches of individual endeavor have confirmed this conclusion, disclosing both successes and serious remaining obstacles to progress. Since one of man's unique characteristics is his imagination, perhaps the plans and the dreams of a people are as important as contemporary realities in an evaluation. An effort to determine how the people of Fairfax viewed their personal and their county's future is in order.

    Second thoughts about the impact such a tax hike might have on a rail Service, along with an injunction obtained by the W&O Railroad against the County Treasurer to restrain him from collecting the taxes, convinced the board to reduce the assessment back to $5,000 per mile. Further railroad investment in Fairfax was certainly not encouraged by the board's action, and poor service continued.188 A Falls Church developer's handbook in 1906 described the rail service to Washington of thirty years earlier as "unpromising. The coaches were little better than the present freight car caboose, and the schedule was unreliable, the trains slow, and a change of cars had to be made at the Alexandria junction."189 A more recent monograph described "the road's operation ... as attuned to its surroundings-, being slow moving, casual and carrying a halcyon air."190 Despite the railroad's nineteenth-century shortcomings, probably most county residents continued to agree with the Fairfax News that the railroad was the "greatest invention in history."191 While some would argue a qualitative meaning for "greatest" in this claim inaccurate, the quantitative impact on the county could hardly be exaggerated after existing railroads were converted to and supplemented by electric trolley lines in the 1890s and early 1900s.

Suburbanization

Military Invasion

The Search for Perfection

    Beyond Dunn-Loring, the Washington, Ohio & Western passed through Vienna, Hunter's Mill, and Thornton Station, where yet another nineteenth-century vision of Fairfax County's future received a brief trial. In 1886, General William McKee F. Dunn of the Loring Company and Dr. Carl Adolf Max Wiehle, a German-born, recently retired physician from Philadelphia, jointly bought, then divided 6,449 acres in the vicinity, with most of Wiehle's 3,500 acres north of the railroad line. According to a subsequent owner of the property, Dr. Wiehle was a "perfectionist," who "dreamed of a Utopia carved out of this virgin forest of white oak." To give his dreams credibility; he convinced the government to establish a post office at 'Wiehle" in 1887, and to prove his personal commitment, he built for his family a gingerbread-covered summer home there the following year. Then to shape his vision, he imported a professional city planner from Germany, who by 1892 had produced a detailed map of the proposed community. To convey order, streets were systematically and symmetrically laid out, and given such and the construction of the new town began.199

1. John C. Mackall, "McLean, Fairfax County, Virginia," Yearbook of the Historical Society of Fairfax County; Virginia, 4 (1955):S (hereinafter cited as Historical Society Yearbook); Lehman Patton Nickell and Cary J. Randolph, An Economic and Social Survey of Fairfax County, University of Virginia Record Extension Series, vol. 8, no. 12 (Charlottesville, Va.: Michie, 1924), p. 16 (hereinafter cited as Nickell and Randolph, Economic and Social Survey).

2. Frederick Gutheim, A History Program for Fairfax County, Virginia (Fairfax County Park Authority, 1973), p. 33.

3. John F. Trowbridge, The South: A Tour of its Battlefields and Ruined Cities (Hartford, Conn.: L. Stebbins, 1866), p. 82.

4. "Status of Virginia Agriculture in 1870," Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture, 1870 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1871), p. 291 (hereinafter cited as "Status of Agriculture in 1870")

5. Ibid.

6. Fairfax County's first Board of Supervisors, representing the Centreville, Lee, Mount Vernon, Falls Church, Providence, and Dranesville Townships, included H.D. Rice, Dr. Wflliam H. Day, Courtiand Lukens, J.Y. Worthington, Judge Jonathan Gray, and Richard Hirst. Board of Supervisors Minute Book, 1:15 (hereinafter cited as BOSMB).

7. Ibid., 1:209. The entire budget for 1874 amounted to only $3,548.10. That year, the salary of county Judge James Sangster was $259.50, while Superintendent of the Poor, Thomas T. Burke, received $250 for his services. Fairfax News, 28 February 1875 (hereinafter referred to as News).

8. News, 28 February 1874; 26 June 1874.

9. Ibid., 6 June 1873; 13 February 1874.

10. BOSMB, 2:1.

11. Ibid., i:l, 47, 91, 95, 193, 225, 235, 263; 2:2.

12. Ibid., 1:79, 175, 208-91 261, 270-71; 2:1.

13. Ibid., 1:83, 88, 122, 182, 254.

14. News, 17 June 1874; 14 December 1872; 18 July 1873; 5 March 1875; 31 October 1873.

15. Ibid., 5 June 1874; 3 October 1873; 9 October 1874.

16. Fairfax Herald, 5 October 1888; 9 November 1888 (hereinafter cited as Herald).

17. Virginius Dabney, Virginia: The New Dominion (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971), opposite p. 367, pp. 381, 386-87 (hereinafter cited as Dabney, Virginia).

18. News, 8 January 1875.

19. Virginia Andrus, "Selected Phases of Early Public Elementary Schools in Fairfax County, Virginia" (M.A. thesis, George Washington University, 1947), pp. 27, 29, 92-93 (hereinafter cited as Andrus, "Selected Phases").

20. News, 5 September 1873.

21. John K. Gott and Katherine S. Hogan, "Fairfax County Public Schools: A Brief History," Legato School: A Centennial Souvenir (Fairfax, Va.: Office of Comprehensive Planning, 1976), p. 25 (hereinafter cited as Gott and Hogan,"Fairfax Public Schools").22. Andrus, "Selected Phases," pp. 29, 38.

23. Ibid., P. 31.

24. Dabney, Virginia, p. 389.

25. Clayton Beverly Phillips, "Education in Virginia Under Superintendent Richard Radcliffe Farr, 1882-1886" (M.A. thesis, University of Virginia, 1932), p. 26 (hereinafter cited as Phillips, "Education Under Farr").

26. Alexandria Gazette, 9 January 1882 (hereinafter cited as Gazette); Richmond State, 31 January 1882, and 2 February 1882.

27. Phillips, "Education Under Farr," p. 160.

28. Gott and Hogan, "Fairfax Public Schools," p. 26.

29. Ibid., p. 27.

30. Andrus, "Selected Phases," pp. 51, 53, 59.

31. News, 24 October 1873.

96. Andrus, "Selected Phases," p. 68.

97. Schug, "Herndon," p. 21.

100. Bureau of Census, Compendium of Census, 1880, p. 315; Geddes, Historical Highlights, p. 119.

101. Schneider, Memories, p. 28.

102. Ibid., pp. 7, 26, 27.113. Supervisors, Industrial and Historical Sketch, p. 12.

103. Louise L. Smith, "St. John's Episcopal Church in McLean," Historical Society Yearbook, 5 (1956-57):33-34.

104. Mackall, "McLean, Fairfax County, Virginia," Historical Society Yearbook, 4 (1955):13.

105. Smith, "St. John's Church," Historical Society Yearbook, 5 (1956-57):34.

106. Supervisors, Industrial and Historical Sketch, p. 12.

107. Andrew M. D. Wolf, "Black Settlement in Fairfax County, Virginia, during Reconstruction" (Fairfax, Va., unpublished study, 1975), p. 32 (hereinafter cited as Wolf, Black Settlement).

108. Elizabeth C. Burke, "History of Fairfax County," Historical Society Yearbook, 5 (1956-57):ll.

109. Wolf, Black Settlement, p. 33.

110. Burke, "History of Fairfax County," Historical Society Yearbook 5 (1956-57):Il.

111. Andrus, "Selected Phases," p. 68.

112. Burke, "History of Fairfax County," Historical Society Yearbook 5 (1956-57):ll.

113. Supervisors, Industrial and Historical Sketch, p. 12.

114. Helen Rector Jones, "A History of the Oakton School," Historical Society Yearbook, 7 (1960-61):27-28. When Squire E. Smith applied for a post office at Flint Hill in 1883, he learned that another Virginia community had already claimed the name, so he chose "Oakton" for the huge oak tree then at the intersection of routes 674 and 123. The tree was cut, as were most of Major Hine's maples, when the roads were widened to accommodate automobile traffic in the twentieth century.

115. Dunn-Matthews interview, p. 2.

116. Peters, "Legato School," p. 37.

117. The county seat of Culpeper County had formerly claimed the name Fairfax, but freed the name for the Fairfax County seat and changed its name to Culpeper.

118. Candace Jo Sheris, "Truro Rectory," Historical Society Yearbook, 11 (1971): 96-97.

119. Rust, Town of Fairfax, p. 62.

120. News, 11 December 1874. County protests against the move were ultimately successful, and the historic document remained in the historic old courthouse. BOSMB, 1:90, 96.

121. Rust, Town of Fairfax, p. 66. As early as 1873, in sharp contrast to realities two decades later, the Fairfax News had proudly boasted of the town's amenities and limitless future: "We have four stores, two merchant tailors, one grocery, one bakery, one wheelwright and carriage shop, two hotels, one hostelry, a travelling butcher, two bar rooms, three schools, two doctors, six lawyers, three churches, with a fourth in expectancy, a brick kiln, a full share of fourteenth amendments and a lot of free dogs.... But what especially gives interest and a name to the place is ... the old Court House, with an unrivalled well outside, and Washington's will inside. Enough said. Quantum sufficit. Glory, honor, ancient Romans. Spartans nowhere." At least the well had not gone dry twenty years later. News, 28 March 1873.

124.  Charles Alexander Stewart, A Virginia Village: Historical Sketch of Falls Church and the Old Colonial Church (Falls Church, Va.: J.H. Newell, 1904), pp. 2, Z2 (hereinafter cited as Stewart, Virginia Village).

125. Nickell and Randolph, Economic and Social Survey, p. 21; Stewart, Virginia Village, pp. 7-8.

126. Melvin Lee Steadman, Jr., Falls Church: By Fence and Fireside (Falls Church, Va.: Falls Church Public Library, 1964), pp. 76, 407 (hereinafter cited as Steadman, Fence and Fireside).

127. Tony P. Wrenn, Falls Church: History of a Virginia Village (Falls Church, Va., 1972), p. 27 (hereinafter cited as Wrenn, Falls Church).

128. Nickell and Randolph, Economic and Social Survey, p. 22; Stewart, Virginia Village, p. 81.

129. Steadman, Fence and Fireside, p. 407.

130, Burke, "Fairfax County," p. 9; Ada Walker, Memories of Old Jefferson Institute (Falls Church, Va., 196,4), p. 3 (hereinafter cited as Walker, Old Jefferson Imtitute].

131. Andrus, "Selected Phases," pp. 49, 68, 85-86.

132. Walker, Old Jefferson Institute, pp. 2, 3.

133. William G. Collins, ed., Fairfax County, Va., Directory, 1906 (Falls Church, Va., 1906), pp. 15, 17, 19, 21.

134. Herald, 27 May 1887; 3 December 1886; 29 December 1893.

135. News, 13 November 1873; 15 December 1874; 29 January 1875.

136. Wilkinson, "Sherwood Farm and Surrounding Area," Historical Society Yearbook, 9 (196465):78-80.

137. News, 29 January 1875.

138. Andrus, "Selected Phases," pp. 29, 53.

139. News, 22 May 1874. In this same year the News argued that the General Assembly was "wasting time in discussing the rights of married women." News, 27 March 1874.

140. Ibid., 15 May 1874,

141. Ibid., 10 October 1873.

142. Ibid., 17 January 1873; Herald, 28 December 1888; 29 March 1889; 11 December 1891; 19 April 1889; 9 March 1889.

143. Ibid., 5 December 1873; 29 May 1874.

144. Herald, 19 April 1889.

145. Ibid., 17 May 1889.

146. Ibid., 7 December 1888.

147. Bureau of Census, Compendium of Census, 1880, p. 376.

148. Wolf, Black Settlement, pp. 23-24.

149. Andrus, "Selected Phases," pp. 92-93.

150. Wolf, Black Settlement, p. 26.

151. Gamble, Sully, pp. 116, 122, 124.

152. Schug, "Herndon," p. 36.

153. Schneider, Memories, p. ii.

154. Wolf, Black Settlement, p. 65.

155. Gamble, Sully, pp. 115-16.

156. G.M. Hopkins, Atlas of Fifteen Miles Around Washington Including the Counties of Fairfax and Alexandria, Virginia (Philadelphia, 1879), p. 69 (hereinafter cited as Hopkins, Atlas); Schneider, Memories, p. 28.

158. Ibid., pp. 70-71.

159. Ibid., pp. 30, 34-37.

160. Ibid., p. 71.

161. Hopkins, Atlas, p. 69.

162. Wolf, Black Settlement, pp. 23, 34.

163. Ibid., pp. 51, 53-55.

164. News, 7 November 1873.

165. Wolf, Black Settlement, p. 63.

166. Ibid., pp. 63-64.

167. Rust, Town of Fairfax, p. 66.

168. Wolf, Black Settlement, pp. 67-69.

169. Ibid,, pp. 57-61.

170. Ibid., pp. 49-50, 72.

171. Whitt, Elephants and Quaker Guns, pp. 78-79.172.

172. Wolf, Black Settlement, pp. 37, 39-40.

173. Ibid., p. 40.

174. Stewart, Virginia Village, p. 22.

175. Wolf, Black Settlement, pp. 40-41.

176. Wrenn, Falls Church, p. 30.

177. News, 31 October 1873.

178. Wrenn, Falls Church, p. 30.

179. U.S. Bureau of Census, Ninth Census, The Statistics of the Population of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1872), 1:68; U.S. Bureau of Census, Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1902), I:Ivi.

180. Chataigne's Virginia Gazetteer and Classifted Business Directory (Richmond: J.H. Chataigne, 1877-1878), p. 463; Chataigne's Virginia Gazetteer and Classifted Business Direcotry (Richmond: J.H. Chataigne, 1884-1885), p. 232; Chataigne's Virginia Gazetteer and Classified Business Directory (Richmond: J.H. Chataigne, 1897), p. 408.

181. News, 17 July 1874.

189. Stewart, Virginia Village, p. 3.

190. Curran and Curran, McLean Remembers, pp. 28-29.

192. Loring Land and Improvement Company, Town of Dunn Loring (Judd & Detwiler, 1887), pp. 3-4.

201. Herald, 11 March 1892; 5 April 1889.