The Electric Connection

Political Reaction

    "Progress" was the most important proposed product of the electric age that was dawning on Fairfax as the new century began. Yet amid the plans for growth and economic development, the county's conservative contingent was rapidly becoming the political consensus. Even though the Democratic party had been the dominant political party since the end of Reconstruction, county Republicans, including most of the many postwar northern emigrants, had offered the majority worthy opposition, rarely failing to receive less than forty percent of the vote in federal and state elections and holding on to a number of local offices by dominating several magisterial districts. But by the turn of the century, Fairfax County was well on its way toward joining the solid Democratic South. Between the presidential elections of 1896 and 1900, Democrat William Jennings Bryan increased his margin over the incumbent Republican William McKinley by 6 percent to win almost 59 percent of the Fairfax County vote; in 1904 Democratic candidate Alton Parker outpolled Republican Theodore Roosevelt with 65 percent of the county's votes; in 1908 Bryan was endorsed on 74 percent of Fairfax ballots against Republican William Howard Taft; and in 1912 Democrat Woodrow Wilson defeated both Taft and Roosevelt, this time the candidate of the Progressive Party, with the approval of 75 percent of Fairfax voters. State and local elections were becoming equally embarrassing for local Republicans, with Democratic gubernatorial and legislative candidates carrying the county by better than three-to-one margins in 1906 and 1909; and Democrat Charles C. Carlin of Alexandria, who represented the county in Congress from 1907 to 1919, was consistently reelected with the votes of approximately 80 percent of his Fairfax County constituents. Only in the Mount Vernon and the adjacent Lee districts, where post-Civil War northern settlement had been most dense, did county Republicans maintain a respectable but minority representation.2

Constitutional Corruption

    The most obvious explanation for the mounting Democratic majorities was the fact that on Virginia soil, appeals to the "Lost Cause" simply outlasted those of Republicans to the "Bloody Shirt." Even those northern newcomers who kept the faith no doubt found it difficult to pass on to their children the idealism that had characterized Republicanism at its best. The growing association of the party with the nation's big business interests, and the concurrent identification of the Democrats with the farmer-dominated Populists through their common candidate, William Jennings Bryan, helped secure the Democratic hold on the county. Yet there was another more sinister cause for the evolution of the countywide conservative consensus: the deliberate disfranchisement of Virginia's African Americans by means of a new state constitution. In his study of the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1901-1902, Ralph Clipman McDaniel wrote that through the late nineteenth century, "the conservative whites had a majority statewide and retained power in areas in which they were a minority through control of the government machinery or outright fraud.... Rising concern over the legality of depriving the Negro of his vote was unquestionably the leading motivating force for the Constitutional Convention."3 In other words, the concern of many Virginia conservatives was not to eliminate the corruption, but to legalize it.

    In an 1888 referendum, Virginians had been apathetic about the need for a new constitution, with fewer than six percent of the voters approving of a convention; but by 1897, 32 percent supported the idea. Finally in 1900, the state's voters accepted the call for a convention with 56 percent of the vote. In none of the referenda had Fairfax voters endorsed the constitutional convention. Fewer than 20 percent had approved in 1888 and 1897, and only 43 percent agreed with the statewide majority in 1900.4 Even after the final vote, opposition from the county continued. In August 1900, the Fairfax Herald reported that "the colored people of this vicinity recently held a meeting to express their opposition to the proposed constitutional convention" and elected John H. H. Bush to represent them at a conference on the issue in Charlottesville. But Fairfax conservatives were clearly coming to recognize the convention as an opportunity to strengthen their political grip on the county. Although the staunchly Democratic Herald had previously opposed the movement, the paper decided to make the most of the situation once Virginia voters had given their consent. As the delegates began their deliberations at Richmond in 1901, the Herald admitted that "the openly avowed object of this convention is to deprive the most ignorant and indolent members of the colored race of the right to vote," a goal which it wholeheartedly endorsed.5

    Equally enlightening was the role played by R. Walton Moore, Fairfax County's delegate to the convention. Moore was named Chairman of the important Legislative Committee, although the work of the Committee on the Elective Franchise overshadowed Moore's and every other committee's activities. After meeting for more than a year, the convention accepted the Franchise Committee's recommendations that after 1903, a prospective voter would be required to give, "in his own handwriting, without assistance," his name, age, and address, and to answer on oath any and all questions affecting his qualifications as an elector, submitted to him by the officers of registration. Since this provision could be applied at the local registrar's discretion, it hardly eliminated the irregularities, although it would eliminate thousands of blacks from the state's electoral processes. Registrants would also be obliged to pay a poll tax of $1.50, with the tax due a full six months before the next election or primary. Thus, the state's well-organized Democratic machine would gain an added advantage over the less informed and less prosperous blacks upon whom Virginia Republicans depended.6

    With these provisions agreed upon, the convention next had to determine the process by which the new constitution would take effect. Disregarding the instructions of the General Assembly that they submit their work to the state's voters for approval, the delegates decided simply to proclaim the document law, fearing that the targets of the new franchise provisions would block ratification. Robert A. Alden, R. Walton Moore's biographer, found that although the Fairfax delegate had personal misgivings about the legal and ethical propriety of this decision, "he favored the constitution and did not want to see it overthrown." Therefore, immediately after the vote for proclamation, Moore offered a resolution "that as it has been determined to proclaim the Constitution, provision should be made for its recognition ... by the political departments of the Government, and to that end the General Assembly shall be convened at an early date."7 Within a few days of the adoption of this resolution, its members were sworn in under the new constitution. A lone Republican holdout saw his seat declared vacant, and all judicial challenges brought by Virginia Republicans failed, with the United States Supreme Court weakly concluding that the convention's actions "cannot be undone by any order of the court."8 Although Fairfax had not been in the forefront of the movement for a new constitution, the county's role in its implementation was significant, and the impact of the constitution was no less profound in Fairfax than in other parts of the state. Between the elections of 1900 and 1904, the number of voters statewide fell by more than 50 percent, while in Fairfax County fewer than one-third as many votes were cast. In elections since the Civil War, the 15 to 25 percent of the population of Fairfax which had voted had given the county a degree of truly representative government. But after the Constitution of 1902 took effect, the 6 to 10 percent of the population still eligible and casting ballots allowed conservative Democrats complete political control of the county.

Educational Exceptions

    After taking from blacks their political rights, conservative whites used their political advantage to crush a movement to improve blacks' educational opportunities. When the 1905 Republican gubernatorial candidate John F. Lewis advocated free textbooks for the state's school children, the Fairfax Herald charged that "if the Republican plan is carried out, it will cost the people of Virginia $500,000 the first year, and after that ... at least $300,000 a year.... How would this Republican plan of free books affect Fairfax County? The negroes of this county constitute 26 percent of the school enrollment, they own 4 per cent of the property in the county. This means that out of every $26 worth of books furnished to negroes, the white people would pay $22 of it; and the negroes would pay $4." Nor was the projected cost of the program the only objection, as the Herald ridiculed the "ambition to make classical scholars ... of the negro race," while wondering who would remain to do "the hewing of wood, the drawing of water, and the hoeing of corn ... since they have to be done by somebody."9 Over and above the Herald's poor arithmetic, the most striking feature of these arguments is the absolute illogic of penalizing an already politically impotent people for their economic disability by denying them the basic educational tools they needed to overcome their handicaps.10 By 1920 the annual cost of instruction for each white pupil in the county was $13.29, while $6.44 was spent for each black student. White teachers received an average annual salary of $408, while blacks got but $239.11 Despite the emphasis on "progress" in the early years of the twentieth century, the county's conservative white establishment continued to deny county blacks the basic rights and opportunities of American citizenship. And as rapid economic development caused disruptions in established patterns of life over the coming twenty-five years, some whites sought scapegoats for their personal frustrations. Disadvantaged blacks furnished them a convenient target.

A Politician's Projections

    Easily the most influential political figure in Fairfax County at the turn of the century was Joseph E. Willard. A brief look at his career will provide an introduction to several other issues that would concern residents of the county over the following two and a half decades. Although he was not even born at the time, Willard's background in politics can be traced to the legendary exploits of Colonel John S. Mosby and his beautiful Fairfax County "informant" Antonia Ford. After one of Mosby's raids behind enemy lines, Union officers became convinced that the popular Miss Ford was serving as a spy for the "Gray Ghost." She was arrested and imprisoned in Washington, D.C., where she met a young Union officer, Major Joseph C. Willard, who secured her release, then married her. The story was given pathos when, "weakened by her imprisonment," Antonia died seven years later. The child of this wartime romance, young Joseph E. Willard, was sent to Fairfax County to live with his grandfather Ford, while his father and uncle Henry Willard became fabulously wealthy as the proprietors of Washington's famous Willard Hotel.12 In a letter dated August 1900, Colonel Mosby discounted all connection between himself and Antonia Ford. "There is not a particle of truth in the statement that she ever acted as a spy," he wrote. "She was innocent as Abraham Lincoln." Then referring to the fable that Antonia Ford had gotten her revenge against him by marrying a Union officer, Mosby jokingly added, "if it hadn't been for me there never [would] have been a Joe Willard.... Now don't you see the obligation that Joe Willard is under to me?... Don't you think he ought to pay me an annuity? Ask him."13 If Willard ever answered, he probably agreed, for he certainly could have afforded it, and whether fact or fiction, he surely realized that the stories connecting his mother to Colonel Mosby were partially responsible for the political popularity he enjoyed.14

    WilIard's political career actually began soon after his graduation from the University of Virginia Law School, when in 1893 he was elected to the State House of Delegates from Fairfax County. When the Spanish-American War erupted in 1898, he organized, equipped, and commanded a company of men from Fairfax, and in 1901, still only thirty-five years old, he was elected Virginia's Lieutenant Governor. Willard also remained active in local affairs. In 1900 he joined with R. Walton Moore in organizing the Fairfax Democratic Club, and on one occasion in 1904, he presided over the Fairfax Town Council in the absence of Mayor Walter T. Oliver. His estate, located just north of the courthouse, was a county showplace, "where every stalk of corn contains two or three splendidly developed ears." When Lieutenant Governor Willard announced his candidacy for the governorship in 1905, the Fairfax Herald declared that he would be "strongly supported here" and became his unswerving ally in the campaign. In fact, in the eyes of the Herald, Willard could do no wrong. Typical was the paper's report of a recent rabbit hunt, at which Willard declined to shoot the lone rabbit sighted." 'I'll give it a chance for its life,' he said, throwing down his gun. 'If it beats me running it can go free.' The chase that followed across an open field was an exciting one. Colonel Willard won and brought the rabbit back in his game bag." On weightier issues, the Herald was equally full of praise, if conveniently vague, citing the candidate's enthusiasm for education, roads, and business. Willard himself displayed political adeptness when asked his opinion on the proposed Mann Bill which would regulate the sale of liquor in Virginia. Willard neatly sidestepped the loaded question by responding, "I approve the Mann bill when construed as controlling and regulating the sale of whiskey, but I do not approve of it when construed as prohibition."15 Despite support from his home county and the $18,000 he spent during the campaign, almost twice as much as spent by each of his opponents, Willard ran a distant third behind Claude Swanson and Judge William Hodges Mann in the Democratic primary and called an abrupt halt to his career in politics.16

    Yet Willard's prominence in Fairfax County was far from finished. The marriage of his daughter Belle to Kermit Roosevelt, the son of the former president, in 1913 focused nationwide attention on the county, and the Fairfax Herald reported that "Layton Hall, the elegant home of Mr. Joseph E. Willard," was often "the scene of a very handsome entertainment." Willard was appointed to the State Corporation Commission in 1905, and two years later he anticipated a concern of county residents for highway safety when he was arrested by a bicycle policemen in New York for driving his automobile at a reckless thirty miles per hour. His philanthropy regularly won him more complimentary headlines, especially when his wealth was used to stimulate the "progress" that county leaders so anxiously awaited in the early 1900s. When the Fairfax Central Road League reported its financial condition "very good" in 1904, it especially acknowledged the "very substantial assistance" of J. E. Willard. One week earlier, the Herald reported Willard's offer of $25,000 to the Washington, Alexandria & Falls Church Railway if it could complete the electric trolley line then under construction to Fairfax within four months. With this stimulus, the county seat acquired the long-anticipated direct rail link with Washington well before the deadline. Willard’s contemporaneous campaign for governor may have helped to stimulate these acts of generosity, but even after he had left the county to become Woodrow Wilson's Minister to Spain from 1913 to 1921, he continued to remember his friends in Fairfax. In 1916, the organizers of the Fairfax County Fair gratefully acknowledged the "liberal contribution" of $150 from Fairfax County's fair-haired favorite son, Joseph E. Willard.17

Transportation Transformation

    The introduction of steam-powered trains in the mid-nineteenth century marked the first significant improvement in communications and transportation in Fairfax County since the construction of rolling roads in the colonial period. The trains created new towns, reinvigorated old ones, and became a symbol of hope for a more prosperous future. But plagued by financial difficulties, poor management, frequent accidents, and inadequate service, the steam trains failed to approach the impact predicted by postwar prophets of progress. Another advance arrived in 1887, when a telephone line connected Centreville, Fairfax Court House, Annandale, and Alexandria. From the Willcoxon Tavern at Fairfax, a caller could reach Alexandria for fifteen cents or other county exchanges for ten cents.16 Until the twentieth century, however, telephones were generally found only in public buildings, and certainly only a small percentage of the population was affected by the accessibility of instantaneous information by phone. Electric power and lights would not be available to most households and communities until the 1920s. Therefore, by comparison or by itself, the first technological innovation to deserve the description "revolutionary" in its impact on the county was the electric trolley. The University of Virginia's Economic and Social Survey of the county supplied an accurate, if unintentional, forecast in citing "the development taking place in the County as a result of the trolley lines" to back up its belief that "the day is not far distant when war stricken Fairfax will be a veritable land of Goshen, flowing with milk and honey."19 For even if beekeeping would never again approach housekeeping as a major activity in the county, the trolley allowed Fairfax dairy farmers to keep enough milk flowing to quench the demand of the expanding Washington and suburban Virginia market.

Access to Education

    Although the county's earliest electric line did not immediately have the effect desired by developers, its impact was nonetheless substantial. For if city dwellers still found Fairfax only a nice place to visit, county residents quickly took advantage of their new access to Washington. By 1906 there were thirty daily trains between Washington and Mount Vernon and a total of 1,743,734 passengers for the year.27 The destinations of many Fairfax County customers were District of Columbia schools, for despite the progress made by Fairfax public schools over their first quarter century, the State Board of Education required that "the teaching to extra branches [high school subjects] shall always be secondary and subsidiary to the interests of elementary education." Although there were already seventy-five high schools in Virginia, Fairfax County had none as late as 1906 when a new state school law provided especially for their establishment. As the Board of Supervisor's promotional Industrial and Historical Sketch explained in 1907, "the ease with which students were able to attend High School in Washington probably accounts, in no small degree, for the late establishment of high schools in Fairfax County."28

    The particular ease with which students in the Mount Vemon neighborhood could reach District schools by the Washington, Alexandria & Mount Vernon Electric Railway must account for the even later establishment of a high school there. Charles Kirk Wilkinson, born in 1894 and raised on the Sherwood Farm near Woodlawn, received two years of schooling at home, then took his lessons for four years at the nearby one-room Snowden School. By the age of twelve, Wilkinson had been exposed to all which local schools could offer, and so, along with many young neighbors, he began to make the daily trolley trip to the Sidwell Friends School in Washington.29 Though the new $7,500 four-room school built in 1917 at Potter's Hill in the Mount Vernon District probably offered some high school work, county school records still show no students attending high school in either the Mount Vernon or the adjacent Lee districts as late as the mid-1920s. In an effort to alleviate this obvious deficiency, the Fairfax County School Board gave the Mount Vernon and Lee School districts $500 each in 1918 to help pay tuition and transportation costs for their students at Alexandria public high schools. Two years later, a committee was formed to help Fairfax County School Superintendent Milton Dulany Hall decide which students should receive assistance, with the board matching each $25 payment made by eligible students' parents. In 1925 Hall stated his continued opposition to opening a high school at West End, actually at the northeastern edge of the county, since it would cost twice as much to operate the school as to continue paying tuition for Fairfax students going to schools in other jurisdictions.30 Although the trolley may have provided county officials an excuse for delaying the badly needed expansion of the local school system, it at least provided access to an adequate education elsewhere for those students who were able and willing to make the extra effort.

Pathway to Pasteurization

    While young people determined to complete their education would continue to be steady customers of the Washington, Alexandria & Mount Vernon Electric Railway, bringing the line even more business was the area's second most important, but much more easily spoiled resource: milk. Fairfax dairy farmers had always enjoyed an advantage over other Virginians because of their proximity to the Washington market; but now freed from dependence on the weather, the condition of the roads, and the unreliable steam trains, county dairymen could enlarge their herds and expand their facilities, confident that their milk would arrive fresh and find a ready market. The family of Theron Thompson, who immigrated to the Mount Vernon neighborhood from New York in 1869, played a central role in the rise of the county's dairy industry. Thompson's son John had established a Washington distribution center for the family’s dairy products in 1881, and when the trolley line was completed in 1892, he acquired a parcel of land from his neighbor, Stacy Snowden, on the line at Herbert Springs, where milk was collected for shipment to the Washington plant. John's brother Egbert soon took over the Herbert Springs facility, while brothers Daniel, of nearby Riverview Farm, and Arthur, who developed a dairy farm in Maryland, also shipped milk to the Washington center.31 Eventually the business of farmers from all over the county would help make Thompson's Dairy one of the Washington area's most successful enterprises and the Fairfax County dairy industry supreme in the state of Virginia.

Clifton Station’s Stagnation

    The railroad had created the community of Clifton in the late 1860s, and the town had grown steadily through the early years of the twentieth century. In 1902 the approximately 150 residents received a charter of incorporation and elected R. R. Buckley their first mayor.32 Following the passage of the new state school law in 1906, the Fairfax County School Board appropriated $250 for the establishment of a high school at Clifton, and the fifteen students who met in a room hastily added to the town's grade school in the fall of 1907 had the privilege of attending the county's first high school. By 1912, Clifton could boast of a new school building with six classrooms, a library, and an assembly hall.33

    Proud town officials soon came to feel that the kerosene lamps on the streets of their progressive community were old-fashioned, and when the Bull Run Power Company brought electricity to the town in the 1920s, the lanterns were ceremoniously replaced with electric street lights. Despite Clifton's confidence, these symbols of progress during the next thirty years would light the way for no more than two hundred inhabitants the town had counted in 1910. Clifton's economy had suffered an irreversible setback when the pulpwood supplies which had furnished the railroad the bulk of its local business were exhausted shortly after the turn of the century, and the automation of railroad switching and loading devices eliminated a number of residents' jobs on the line, by then a part of the Southern Railway system. 34 Several citizens of Clifton rode the train to jobs in Washington daily, but because the steam service was not geared to handle commuter traffic, prospective suburbanites sought homes in Fairfax County communities more accessible to the capital. By the time the private automobile replaced the electric trolley in other communities as the more convenient, although more expensive, means of commutation, Clifton had been bypassed by the developmental schemes and patterns which accompanied the trolley to the county over the first quarter of the century. As a result, the town remains uniquely unchanged from its turn-of-the-century appearance.

A Church Profession

    Merton E. Church's most characteristic appeal issued a welcome to "the jaded fathers and mothers from the city to the place where children may enjoy life with nature, where the climate, conducive to refreshing sleep, soothes tired nerves and makes life to such again buoyant with youthful hopes and joys."66 But perhaps more indicative of the changing character of Fairfax County was the fate of a wildcat sighted near the courthouse on Braddock Road shortly after the arrival of the trolley in 1905. "What it was doing in this part of the country is a mystery," reported the Fairfax Herald, but "after an exciting chase of about two hours, the animal was caught and killed."67 Despite Church's invitation to "enjoy life with nature," the tracks of such creatures would be permanently lost beneath those of the electric trolley as rapid suburbanization of the county continued.

Wartime Mobilization

    Since the turn of the century, the focus of Fairfax residents had been fixed firmly on local affairs. Although a growing number of them commuted daily to jobs in the nation's capital, the central concerns of most continued to be their families, homes, shops, and farms, their churches, schools, community social affairs, and civic responsibilities. Only during national elections did local newspapers seriously address wider issues, and even then with emphasis on local implications. Charlotte Comer, who arrived in the area in 1914 to teach at McLean's new Franklin Sherman School, recalled that her first stop had been the White House in Washington. A cousin who was "very high in the government at that time" had given her a ticket for a special White House tour, which included an audience with President Woodrow Wilson. "There were just about ten people there," Corner remembered, "but one was a great big Indian Chief.... He'd come to see his Great White Father. And I was so interested in this chief that I really wasn't too much interested in Wilson.... He didn't impress so much at that time, he seemed rather cold…. Of course the [First World] war [in Europe] had just broken out but wars were something I didn't know much about then.... Washington was more or less a country town. I didn't think too much of meeting all those people. It was just natural, we just took it for granted."68

    Corner also vividly recalled election night two years later, when Democrat Wilson sought reelection against Republican Charles Evans Hughes: "We thought it would be so nice to have a meeting in the school house, and have a special phone put in.... Every half hour or so ... the returns would come in.... By the time that we couldn't stay there any longer, I guess about midnight, it was decided that Hughes was elected.... Well, that pleased the Republicans very much [but] Mr. [Benjamin F.] Mackall was a very staunch Democrat.... Several of the men went down and draped the entrance to his home in black crepe to console him. And then of course, the next morning the report came in that Wilson was reelected so the tables turned."69 Five months later, county residents acquired a new and deeper awareness of the wider world when Woodrow Wilson, so recently reelected on the platform "He Kept Us Out of War," requested and received a declaration of war against Germany, and Fairfax prepared to fight the First World War.

Cause for Disillusion

    Despite their nearly unanimous support of Woodrow Wilson's conduct of the war, disillusionment among county residents with the president's idealism may have anticipated that of most of the nationwide majority which eventually came to regard American participation in the war as a tragic mistake. Wartime sacrifices undoubtedly disenchanted some. The Herald reported "a bad shortage of coal oil [kerosene] within most of Fairfax County" during the severe winter of 1917-1918, and at least one of the county's railroads, the Southern, was forced to curtail its passenger service in order to meet the expanded demands on its freight service.73 Charlotte Corner graphically revealed a more serious sacrifice, as well as her own growing doubts about Wilson's goal of creating a new world order, when she recalled that "during [1917] everybody was very enthusiastic, we were going over there and beat up the Germans and that was going to end wars forever.... And then that next year ... the bodies of the soldiers were ... coming back to Arlington.... I used to go over there, they were just piled up one on top of another. Oh, it was just pathetic."74 Within weeks of the armistice, the Herald criticized Wilson's decision to attend the peace conference at Versailles. The paper feared that the president would be "influenced by a beautiful conception of what should be rather than by a realization of the stern requirements of the occasion.... The celebrated [but ill-fated] fourteen principles as enumerated by Mr. Wilson ... were never really officially endorsed by this country [and are] vague." Like most Americans during the "Red Scare" of 1919 and the early 1920s, the county's disillusionment was not reserved for Wilson alone, but was also directed at his erstwhile Russian allies and his socialist adversaries. In 1921 the editor of the Herald came out strongly against a pardon for Eugene Debs, the perennial presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America, whose crime had been his pacifism, and recommended that "all radicals in this country" be sent "back to Russia as rapidly as possible and let them get a view close by of what their doctrines really are. The country will be rid of bad rubbish."75

Contagion and Immunization

    Along with the veterans and corpses returning from the war in Europe came yet another tribulation. Charlotte Corner well remembered that "on top of [the war deaths] we had that awful outbreak of flu.... You couldn't bury people 'cause they didn't have enough coffins…. And there were not enough doctors, there were not enough nurses.... My husband had the flu … my sister had the flu … the little boy had the flu. That ... was just awful."76 Although the County Board of Supervisors had adopted a "Code of Ordinances for the Protection of Public Health" in 1913, creating a Board of Health, appointing a Sanitary Inspector, and regulating the disposal of garbage and the running and slaughtering of animals, not until the First World War and the infamous influenza epidemic of 1918-19 did public health become a major local concern. A week after the declaration of war, the Fairfax Herald announced the inauguration of a Health Inspection Campaign to include an examination of all county school children and a sanitary survey and medical census of county households. Dr. E. L. Flanagan, the county's first public health officer, "found the largest percentage of defects in the teeth," but also urged "every mother ... to have her children examined for intestinal parasites," and recommended that "all grown people ... should be examined for hookworm disease." Early in 1918, the County School Board hired a public health nurse, Lena G. Townshend, who organized hygiene leagues and health campaigns at schools all over the county. Later that year, after Flanagan left the county for service in the army, the Herald reported that Fairfax County had no cases of typhoid "due largely to the excellent work done by ... health officials in ... educating the people to disease prevention."77

    Even had he been available, Flanagan could have done little to alleviate the influenza epidemic that fall, for as the Herald lamented, "the medical profession has discovered no means of checking the disease," but could only, as did the paper, "urge the people ... to stay away from ... Washington and Alexandria" where the flu was raging.78 One of the few remaining doctors in Fairfax County paid a high price for his diligence, as Mrs. Frances Van Patten, a lifelong resident of the Great Falls area, called the death from influenza of Dr. Alfred Lewis Leigh, "our old country doctor, the greatest blow for the whole neighborhood."79 Schools and churches were closed, the county fair and other community gatherings were cancelled, masks were worn by many in public, and by the time the disease subsided in the spring of 1919, more than eleven thousand Virginians were dead. Fairfax County's toll of 531 was higher than that of any other Virginia county with the exception of Prince George.80

Noble Experimentation and Excessive Expectation

    Another public health concern and a nationwide social crusade which reached fruition as a result of World War I was prohibition. After all, beer was "German," and as the Fairfax Herald argued in an article entitled "John Barleycorn a Poor Soldier," "prohibition is needed in the ranks as well as in the file," and "war is a sober business."84 Actually, although the struggle had been long and hard, Fairfax County and Virginia proponents of prohibition had achieved their goal several years before the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1919. Since its beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the temperance movement had been characterized by a strongly evangelical appeal. Perhaps the fact that the movement in the county and state had also gained the support of influential political figures and secular groups by the turn of the century explains its early realization in Virginia.

    The Sunshine Lodge of the International Order of Good Templars, probably centered at Fairfax Court House, claimed fifty-six members in 1904, twenty of them women, and invited their fellow citizens to "help us ... close up all the speakeasies in the community."85 The Pioneer Lodge of Falls Church had been organized in 1887, and by 1906 its membership had grown to eighty-five. In fact, Falls Church, which had been "dry" since its incorporation in 1873 under Virginia's local option law, was the headquarters of the Grand Lodge of the State, and local Postmaster George W. Hawxhurst served as Grand Secretary for Virginia's Good Templars for more than three decades.86 The Anti-Saloon League and the Women's Christian Temperance Union were active in several other Fairfax communities, and together these organizations spearheaded the movement in Fairfax for statewide prohibition over the following decade.

    An indication of the growing popularity of prohibition followed a statement before the General Assembly in 1910 by Delegate Walter T. Oliver, former Mayor of Fairfax, that "there are more drunkards in the dry towns than in the wet." The Fairfax Herald feared the statement would "create an erroneous impression" about Fairfax, which was a "dry" town, and argued that "there is nothing like as much liquor sold here now as would be sold if we had licensed bar rooms." The present mayor and members of the town council followed with their own indignant statement that Fairfax had no "confirmed drunkards." In 1908 the Herald announced that E. B. Sisson, who operated a distillery at Legato, could legally distribute his product to only a single licensed tavern keeper in the county, M. R. O'Sullivan, whose busy establishment was located in a part of Alexandria City which, at that time, was still in Fairfax County. Already, prohibition had become the predominant issue in state and local elections, and a 1914 petition signed by 69,936 Virginians, 571 of them from Fairfax County, finally convinced Governor Henry C. Stuart to call a referendum on the question of statewide prohibition. With almost unanimous support, or embarrassed silence, from the county's press and political and moral leadership, Fairfax voters joined the statewide majority by endorsing prohibition on fifty-seven percent of their ballots, a decision which took effect throughout Virginia in 1916.87

    The enthusiasm of prohibitionists was exceeded only by their expectations of what their success would mean. Many seriously believed that jails, asylums, and poorhouses would soon be empty, disease would be eliminated, and the sanctity of the home, womanhood, and the family would be restored.88 The Fairfax Herald happily heralded progress toward these goals by listing the net reductions in inmates at the state penitentiary during the first year of prohibition, but by 1918 second thoughts were creeping into its pages. Reports of raids and confiscations of illegal liquor began to appear more frequently, including a 1924 estimate that over a thousand dollars worth of stills, one holding two hundred gallons of whiskey, had been captured and destroyed by the sheriff during the preceeding eighteen months. During 1924 sixty-five of the county jail's 109 inmates had been convicted of prohibition law violations, and in 1925 the exasperated editor of the Herald reported "an orgie of law breaking.... The Fairfax Circuit Court is again ... clogged with trials of violators of the prohibition law and conditions seem to improve but little, in spite of all efforts to enforce the law."89 Disillusionment with the noble experiment was rapidly replacing the unrealistic hopes of Fairfax County prohibitionists.

Strained Relations

    Of greater concern to the county's law-abiding citizens than their own criminals were those incarcerated in the District of Columbia's Fairfax County workhouse. When Congress gave its approval for the reformatory and acquired fifteen hundred acres of land on Belvoir neck adjacent to the Woodlawn estate and three and one-half miles from Mount Vernon in 1910, the reaction from county residents, especially in the vicinity of the proposed facility, was hysterical. The Mount Vernon Ladies Association filed a formal protest against the plan, charging that "it would be sacrilege to establish a reformatory for criminals on land which has been so closely identified with the history of the Country," and appealed to Governor William Hodges Mann and President William Howard Taft to intercede against the project. The Fairfax Herald further stirred the controversy by reporting a false rumor that a Congressional subcommittee had recommended including Mount Vernon within the reformatory grounds. The protests only succeeded in having the facility moved a few miles to the west, between Lorton and Occoquan, and it was in operation by January 1911. Shortly thereafter, Howe Totten, a Washington lawyer whose Fairfax County home adjoined the new site, filed a $20,000 suit, alleging that inefficiency and a lack of discipline in the conduct of the workhouse had made the neighborhood dangerous and had forced him to abandon his home. Neighborhood nerves were certainly not soothed by a workhouse riot in February 1911, in which a guard was beaten and six prisoners escaped. Two months later, Joseph M. Springman, who operated a general store near Lorton, filed an affidavit in support of Totten's suit, claiming that his business had declined and that his store was no longer safe. In 1912 the Herald acknowledged that "the D.C. work house has made great improvements, and has certainly been helpful to this part of Fairfax County." The paper credited Lorton Superintendent W. H. Whittaker for the fine condition of Telegraph Road between Lorton and the facility and for providing employment for many Fairfax County residents. In 1915 the Herald even agreed with Whittaker that "the only punishment necessary to teach 'a normal' man to behave is to deprive him of his liberty," and seemingly approved of his exaggerated boast that "at Occoquan we have no guards and no walls." But the overwhelming sentiment in the county remained negative, especially in the wake of continued escapes. When an escapee attempted to assault two Fairfax County women within twenty-four hours of leaving Lorton in 1917, the county asked that federal authorities furnish more guards and tighten security at the facility, a request that would be renewed regularly over the following sixty years. 90

Religion's Attrition

    Several other issues of public morality surfaced in the years surrounding World War I. Strengthening the Sunday blue laws was a leading concern of many citizens, including the members of the Sunshine Lodge of Good Templars, who in 1904 asked for support in their efforts to "stop the gatherings on Sunday for the purpose of drinking and playing cards." In 1916 the Fairfax Herald criticized the "peculiar language" of the present blue law, which provided that "ice cream made on any [day other] than Sunday, can be delivered on Sunday on the ground of necessity."91 But a 1916 United States Census of Religious Bodies revealed that many county residents may have preferred ice cream and social gatherings to churchgoing on Sundays. The survey found that more than two-thirds of the county's church members were either Baptists or Methodists; 12 percent were Roman Catholics; 9 percent were Episcopalians; 5 percent were Presbyterians; 3 percent were Brethren; and one percent were Disciples of Christ. However, the 6,872 church members accounted for only 44 percent of the county's population over ten years of age, a statistic termed "not creditable" and "most lamentable" by the 1924 University of Virginia survey. By comparison, 61 percent of Virginia's population claimed church membership, with Fairfax ranking eighty-sixth out of one hundred counties in this category. 92

    Even more distressing to many was the county's embarrassingly high divorce rate. In 1907 Lewis H. Machen of Alexandria, who represented Fairfax County in the State Senate, suggested fixing the marriageable age at twenty-one for both sexes: "such a law ... would probably prevent many of the matrimonial mistakes resulting from the heedlessness of youth and might thus obviate the necessity for many divorces."93 But by 1922, even though the county's marriage rate was less than half that for the state as a whole, the divorce rate continued to climb, with Fairfax fifth among Virginia counties in per capita divorces.94 The Fairfax Herald noted that four years earlier, the county had ranked seventeenth in the state, and blamed the county's proximity to a growing Washington for the increase. In 1925 the paper called Virginia's divorce laws "too easy" and asked that they be tightened, failing to realize that stricter laws could hardly solve conjugal differences and that the days of rural stability, and domestic tranquility, were rapidly drawing to a close in Fairfax.95

    In addition to marital misunderstandings, the period witnessed a protracted misunderstanding involving a newly arrived religious group (the Dunkards), and the near extinction of another sect of long standing in the county (the Quakers). A small group of Dunkards had organized a German Baptist Brethren Church at Oakton in 1903, and counted 113 members when they dedicated "their commodious new church-house" in 1905. Then in 1912 the Fairfax Herald announced that "a large colony of Dunkards is to be established on Hayfield Farm, consisting of 804 acres of land ... on the telegraph road."96 Soon thereafter, another group of Dunkards requested permission to use the Legato School building between Centreville and Fairfax for a Sunday school, but then refused to accept local school trustees' negative response. Virginia Peters, in a history of the Legato School, wrote that "one B. F. A. Meyers was forbidden to enter the school and the trustee[s] ... appointed a committee of one to 'fix secure fasterners on the windows and the door.' These measures apparently did not deter the Dunkards because the school board minutes for one meeting in 1913 reveal that the group had been informed once more that since there was a church for such purposes, the Legato School was not available." In 1915 the Dunkards requested permission again, but "after due consideration and a great deal of controversy, it was decided not to grant the request."97

    Meanwhile, next door to the new colony at Hayfield, the Quaker community which had been centered at Woodlawn since the 1840s, continued to thrive, as it had since recovering from substantial Civil War setbacks. But in 1917, as Horace D. Buckman wrote in his brief study of the Woodlawn Quakers, there came "a second invasion by the armed forces. Fort Belvoir [then Camp Humphreys] was established in the area, and some of the members had their homes taken over by the military reservation. When the war ended and the Meeting could catch its breath and take stock, it found most of its members had moved away. It struggled on for a few years, then regular Meetings were discontinued, though the Meeting was never 'laid down.'"98 Two hundred and fifty years earlier, William Penn had counseled his pacifist followers that "truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders, than from the arguments of its opposers." Even as much of the community made a quiet exodus from the Fairfax County farms they had made flourish for seventy years, the Friends continued to set an admirable example for their neighbors.

Enfranchisement's Fruition

    The tum of the twentieth century brought many American women an opportunity to question the roles and restrictions that had been maintained for them since colonization. Only upper class women had earlier escaped the drudgery of making clothes and soap, preserving and preparing food, working beside husbands or fathers in fields or factories, and at the same time bearing and rearing children. But as commercial ice, packaged and canned foods, electric ranges, and sewing and washing machines became available, females from less prosperous families were discovering the unfamiliar commodity of leisure time.

    Many Fairfax women found alternatives to traditional domestic duties in Washington, especially as the First World War caused a rapid expansion of the federal bureaucracy. Jobs were available not only in government offices, but also at telephone company switchboards and department store sales counters; women from surrounding farms and suburbs flocked to fill them. The University of Virginia cited these employment opportunities in explaining the significant drop in the female percentage of population in Fairfax, from 49 percent in 1910 to only 46.2 percent in 1920.99 Other county women found outlets for excess energy in volunteer war work and other social causes. For example, in 1874 the Fairfax News had editorially condemned a group of women who had tried to close down a bar room in Ohio, but forty years later, the Fairfax Herald called the statewide passage of prohibition "a Great Victory" and admitted that the "voters of Virginia were encouraged and inspired by the women of the State." Furthermore, in the war's early months, the Herald reported that "women have gone to work to give aid to our country." At a "Colored Preparedness Meeting" at Fairfax, the wives of prominent town officials "made speeches along patriotic lines," and the extensive Red Cross activities of Fairfax women have been cited.100

    Impressed by the admirable response of women to the wartime emergency, establishment voices called on women to accept an even more active role in the crusade, and in social and political circles as well. In 1918 the Herald reprinted an article from Physical Culture entitled "Silly Corseted Girl a Slacker." While the writer acknowledged that "women are gradually encroaching upon the occupations once followed by men," he decried "the simpering, corseted product of modern methods in the training of girls.... While the boys are making men of themselves, it should be considered the duty of the girls to [make] themselves fit mates for those who come back from the terrible conflict that is now upon us."101 Undoubtedly, the author would have applauded the wartime activities of "Ivakota", the county's home for unwed mothers. According to the University of Virginia survey, "no more interesting chapter of war work was ever written.... Here many a girl was given a chance to do her 'bit' for the country, which without the guiding and restraining hand of Ivakota, would have been an unconscious enemy of the cause she longed to serve! Many an unthinking boy in khaki was led to understand the unworthiness of leaving his own flesh and blood on some doorstep while he went to war to avenge the wrongs of Belgian and French girls at the hands of an alien foe! Many today are happy and prosperous possessing that greatest of all boons, self-respect."102 While the values embodied by "lvakota" have not always persisted, the new respect given women, and the self-respect they gained as a result of their contributions to the cause, were real and undoubtedly played a vital role in the culmination of the movement for women's suffrage. In March 1917 the recently organized Shakespearean Literary Society of Fairfax High School debated the following question: "Resolved, That Women Should Vote in Virginia on the Same Basis as Men." Although it is impossible to know whether the views of the participants were sincerely held, Judges J. W. Ballard, John W. Rust, and T. R. Keith, mayor and town councilmen of Fairfax, respectively, decided unanimously in favor of the affirmative.103

    Even after women had acquired the vote with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920, serious obstacles to true equality remained. The Fairfax Herald's condemnation of Mrs. Nicholas Longworth of Fairfax for "embrac[ing] the cigarette habit" is an example of the separate standards maintained for the sexes. The paper found it "hardly believable" that a woman who was "looked upon as a leader [would] sacrifice the confidence of her sex by setting an example so demoralizing and pernicious." Meanwhile, many men, whether from personal insecurity or sheer selfishness, continued to confine women to a separate and consistently inferior role in their male-dominated political structure. When Mattie Gundry, who had operated the Gundry Home and Training School for Feeble-Minded near Falls Church for many years, was nominated to be a school trustee by the Falls Church District School Board in 1908, County Superintendent of Schools M. D. Hall declared her ineligible because of her sex, a decision sustained on appeal by Circuit Court Judge J. B. T. Thornton. Equally detrimental to the movement for equal rights were the women who preferred the pedestal and continued liberation from the responsibilities of equality. Furthermore, once they had acquired the ballot, suffragettes discovered that they were divided along political, economic, and philosophical lines just as were men. The unity forged by the prohibition and suffrage movements had been dissipated by their successes. Evidence of progress toward equal rights would occasionally appear. In the early 1920s, the Fairfax Herald expressed its support for the "efforts ... being made to have the women of the town take an interest in local affairs and to become candidates for the town council. Mattie Gundry who three times was elected to the Falls Church Town Council certainly kept the faith.104 But it would be half a century before men and women again organized to secure the basic human rights promised all Americans, regardless of their sex.104

The Paternalistic Tradition

    The war years were a critical time for black residents of Fairfax County as well as for women. In the half century since the Civil War, race relations in the county had remained stable as long as blacks remained satisfied at the bottom of the social, economic, and political ladder. Evidence of interracial cooperation was overshadowed by the more numerous and effective efforts to limit opportunities for black advancement. The successful crusade to disfranchise black voters through the Constitution of 1902 is a prime example. Whites treated blacks like children, and many blacks behaved accordingly, gratefully accepting whites' occasional benevolence and patience with their mistakes. Blacks regularly were scolded for "loafing" and "skylarking," but little more was expected or given. "Ungrateful" blacks continued to receive most of the blame for crime in the county, but occasionally a black would earn the patronizing praise of county whites. P. H. Hughes, "the teacher at the Fairfax colored school," professed to "have tried in every conceivable way to make my humble race better citizens," and for his efforts was labeled "a Benefactor to His Race" by the Fairfax Herald. When World War I began, blacks were told to display their patriotism by planting gardens, and when county conscription quotas were still unfilled in early 1918, blacks were called to the colors. According the the Herald they displayed "fine spirit" and "much willingness to take up military life."105 This is not surprising since, even though army battalions, barracks and blood banks remained strictly segregated, blacks in the service experienced a degree of equality they had never known. This was especially true for those who served in Europe where segregated public facilities were not maintained. Even more blacks found new economic and social opportunities in northern factories and neighborhoods, both opened to large numbers of blacks for the first time because of the emergency of the war. The 6.5 percent decrease in the county's black population between 1910 and 1920 is evidence that many county blacks participated in the "Great Migration" from the rural south to the urban areas, and most probably had their expectations raised considerably by the experience.106 But an indication of how little the attitudes of county whites had changed came when the Fairfax Herald glibly noted that race riots had broken out in many parts of the north following the migration, and suggested that "the negroes should learn from this that their truest and best friends are the Southem people, who understand their weaknesses and limitations."107

Education's Condition

    The education offered the county's young people was another object of evaluation during World War I. School children contributed to the war effort through the Junior Red Cross, health, hygiene, and canning clubs, and the Junior Farm Bureau and the U.S. Boys Working Reserve, both of which sought to supplement the seriously depleted farm labor supply. At the same time, despite the increased demands on students' energies, state and local school and political leadership sought to insure and improve their educational opportunities. The state's first compulsory attendance law took effect in the fall of 1918 and required that all children between the ages of eight and twelve attend school at least sixteen weeks during each academic year. School funding continued to increase, as it had since the tum of the century, so that by 1917, the county school budget of $87,000 accounted for more than all other county expenditures combined.108

    "In the last few years," the University of Virginia's 1924 survey reported, "the amount of consolidation that has occurred has materially helped the school situation in the county.... Trucks have been used to transport children to school, thus assuring a larger attendance than would otherwise be the case."109 According to Virginia Peters, William Halley, who built a school at Lorton at his own expense when the old school building there burned in 1918, "may have introduced the first public transportation of school children in Fairfax County. For a year, he drove eight children to and from school ... so that they would not have to walk through the grounds of the Lorton Correctional Institution."110 Superintendent Hall's 1924 report counted "fourteen bus, or wagon routes," and in 1925 four new buses were purchased "to help solve the problems of consolidation."111 Although parents in Lewinsville and Langley spoke nostalgically of their neighborhood schools when the more central Franklin Sherman School at McLean superseded them in 1914, genuine complaints about consolidation and the transporting of students to achieve it seem to have been nonexistent. In fact, by the early 1920s, Langley parents had acquired a Model T Ford to take their children to the McLean school. Charlotte Corner remembered that "the children just climbed on that Ford, just like bees around a hive. If they could [not] get in ... they'd just hang on the outside."112 Despite the addition of seven fully accredited four-year high schools, at least three junior high schools, and an almost three-fold increase in the county's school attendance between 1907 and 1928, the number of school buildings in Fairfax County fell from ninety-four to sixty-five.113 The quality of education available in these enlarged and better-equipped institutions had improved markedly.

    The best indication of the job Fairfax schools were doing, and of the changing character of the county since the arrival of the electric trolley, was the revelation that in 1920 the county ranked first in the state in literacy. The census of 1900 had found almost 16 percent of the population illiterate, and in 1910 almost 11 percent. But ten years later, only 4.3 percent could not read or write.114 The 1924 University of Virginia-sponsored survey gave county schools high marks in several other areas. The Fairfax system ranked eighteenth out of one hundred Virginia counties in the average annual salary paid its teachers ($684.40); it ranked nineteenth in the value of property per school room ($1,383.75); sixth in per capita cost of instruction ($23.15); twentieth in length of the school term (161 days); and seventeenth in its "relative educational efficiency," an overall evaluation of the system's financial resources and operations.115

    Despite this positive rating, several serious shortcomings remained. Most surprising was Fairfax County's ninety-eighth position in the state in the percentage of its school-age population attending its schools. Of 8,968 children between six and eighteen years of age, only 4,989 were enrolled, and only an average of 3,556 actually attended Fairfax public schools. The fact that many older students, particularly from the Mount Vernon and Lee districts, had to travel to Washington or Alexandria to attend high school was partially responsible for this unfavorable ranking, but the 1924 survey correctly found this "a startling condition to exist in a county that ranks first in the state in literacy," and warned that "if the compulsory school law is not enforced more rigidly, we will not be able to hold our rank in the ... future."116

    Not so surprising but equally serious was the lack of adequate funding for, and apparently interest in, the black students of the county's strictly segregated school system. A Virginia Education Commission study in 1920 found that the cost of instruction per pupil in Fairfax County ranged from an average of $13.29 for each white child to $6.44 for each black. The school term lasted twenty days longer in the county's white schools, and although black teachers had an average of thirty-seven pupils in their classrooms compared to thirty-one for white teachers, blacks received an average annual salary of only $239 compared to the $408 per year received by whites.117

    Along with the prejudices that these statistics suggest, leadership, or lack of it, may have been a major problem. During M. D. Hall's forty-two years as County Superintendent of Schools, from 1886 to 1928, great progress was made. In the value of school property alone, the system saw an increase of over two thousand percent, from $32,500 to $707,000.118 But several subtle and some not so subtle criticisms of Hall's administration were surfacing by the early 1920s. It was Hall's opposition which stopped the much-needed expansion of the system in several school districts, and Charlotte Corner confessed that she finally went to Richmond to ask state school authorities to "please ... get us a new superintendent."119 When Hall was finally convinced to retire at the age of eighty, school officials, teachers, parents, and students displayed their deep affection and appreciation, not only for this final decision, but for his devoted efforts to guide the system through its formative years. Under the more energetic leadership of Wilbert T. Woodson and his successors, Fairfax County public schools continued to improve and to set an example for the systems of other counties and other states to follow.

    Another activity of county residents which received added attention and assistance during the war was agriculture. In fact, it is in this area that the impact of the technological changes coming to the county can be seen most vividly. Along with the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors' efforts on behalf of area farmers, the state had begun to provide aid by the early years of the twentieth century. The Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College, for example, offered free, three-week demonstration courses during the winter of 1907 on subjects which included horticulture, animal husbandry, and dairying. The Virginia Polytechnical Institute also offered winter courses for farmers, while the Virginia Agricultural Experiment Station regularly held public meetings in Fairfax communities to present its latest findings. In 1910 the "Farmers' Institute Train," a traveling exhibit of farm implements, products, and literature, stopped at Burke and Fairfax Station for large meetings.120 Then in 1914, the outbreak of the war and its demands on the nation's goods and manpower brought a new appreciation for America's farmers, their labors, and their products.

The War's Stimulation

    With the war in Europe threatening directly to involve Americans at any time, county farmers called a meeting to discuss the new United States Farm Loan System, and in January 1917, they became "the first on record to make application for membership."121 The Fairfax Herald announced that the Fairfax Farm Loan Association was "ready to do business as soon as the national government completes its plans for the loaning of money to farmers at a moderate rate of interest." In June 1917, the Fairfax County Agricultural Defense League bought and distributed more than $1,200 worth of seeds to county farmers. The following January, the Herald disclosed that the U.S. Department of Agriculture would sell at cost a supply of nitrate of soda, purchased through the War Industries Board, to stimulate agricultural production.122 And of greater significance to the farmers of Fairfax County was the appointment in 1917 of Harry B. Derr to the recently created post of County Agricultural Agent.

    For twenty-one years, Harry B. Derr was the Fairfax farmer's friend, advisor, and liaison for federal, state, and local agricultural programs. Further, his annual reports became a fascinating chronicle of the fruits and frustrations of farming in an area undergoing the fundamental transition from rurality to suburbia. Although his initial annual report was incomplete, the Fairfax Herald provided a synopsis of Derr's work during the war's and his own first year. Undoubtedly, the period's most pressing problem was the perennial shortage of farm labor, aggravated now by the draft and the better-paying jobs available in Washington and in war industries elsewhere. Derr sought to alleviate this shortage by organizing and promoting the Junior Farm Bureau and the U.S. Boys Working Reserve, and awarding "junior buttons" to the young volunteers. The agent also urged county farmers to file affidavits on behalf of their employees to prevent their being drafted for military service. Despite these efforts, Derr warned in late 1918 that "farm labor conditions are getting worse" and that there had been an outbreak of hemorrhagic septicemia, or "blackleg," among unvaccinated calves. He also complained that he had found "considerable sappy corn being put in the cribs," that wheat and potatoes had done poorly due to unfavorable weather and blight, and that much of the county's winter oat crop was badly infested with cheat, "a pernicious weed."123

    If farmers were limited by bad luck and a lack of farm labor, Derr tried to make the most of the situation by encouraging cooperative enterprises, from boys' and girls' corn and canning clubs, to a large-scale milk producers' association. He may have instigated the mass meeting of farmers from Fairfax and Loudoun Counties that met in June 1917 to discuss "Rural Organization and Co-operation," and he surely called the meeting in February 1918 "to form a County Farmers' Bureau [to] assist the County Demonstrator in his efforts towards the betterment of the agricultural conditions in the county." Three months later, a "Threshing Association" was organized for "the standardization of prices for threshing and bailing, the putting in repair of machines to make them 100 percent efficient, and the formation of plans whereby all farmers in a neighborhood will have grain ready at the same time so that the machines will have to pay but one visit to a section." The benefits of group action would not become apparent until after the war in most cases, but the agent's efforts to teach individual farmers better bookkeeping and business practices enabled them better to cope with the abnormal wartime conditions.124

A Fair Indication

Politicians' Protestations

The Agent's Fulminations

    One "glaring inequality" recognized by the University of Virginia's 1924 study was the favoritism shown the county's "gentlemen farmers." Since tax assessors were "left to set their own standards," the survey found that "the average county estate of $10,000 and upward is assessed at a little more than a fourth of its true value," while the owner of a small farm "pays in taxes ... nearly twice as much in proportion to its worth."149 Representative Carlin, who owned more than forty-one thousand acres of land in Fairfax and four other Virginia counties, may have profited from these underassessments, even though, as the Loudoun Mirror pointed out, both Carlin and his opponent in 1918, E. B. White, "farm by having someone else do the work for them."150 And at least one county resident doubted R. Walton Moore's claims that he cared about the common farmer. Pearl Dunn, a teacher in Fairfax schools for many years, remembered seeing Moore driven to the Capitol in his chauffeured limousine: "He never spoke, never looked at anybody or anything."151

    County agent Derr also bitterly criticized county officials' unwillingness to offend the wealthy. In 1923 and 1924, he reported "considerable losses of poultry … from fox raids," and added that "as fox hunting is a popular sport among ... a few of our citizens regualaratory [sic] measures are ... left to other parties.... It is to be regretted that one of our most profitable industries should suffer in order to furnish sport for our ... idle rich." Even more exasperating to Derr was his conviction that except for the splendid opportunities for [an] education in our county agricultural high school at Floris ... our schools give absolutely no assistance in agricultural education.... A very small percentage of our farm boys go to college and agriculture should be the elective course where the student does not expect to go farther.... Of what use will be the Latin or French learned by a farm boy except to cuss something in a language unknown to his companion.... The present curriculum is absolutely unfair to the 90% of our farm children who do not get beyond the grades.

The Trolley's Transgressions

The Auto's Limitations

    Derr's disappointment with the county school system and its leadership has been cited, but not his fear that if farm children "get their training in Washington they are lost to the farm." In 1921 he told of "one of my most successful corn club boys [who] used the money he made on his land, and took a business course, and is now assistant to the cashier in one of our county banks. His younger brother ... also a successful corn grower is dissatisfied with the hard work and no doubt as soon as old enough will hunt an easier job." Derr found some comfort in his belief that "farm boys who are competent get the preference over city grown boys in obtaining positions" in the city, but he again admitted his inability "to make much headway with [club] work, or offer better inducements on the farm.... I can hardly blame the young people, as [never] in all my experience have I seen as little return to the farmer from his labor as at the present time."180

Countryside Confusion

    The earliest openly to question the "progress" predicted to follow the trolley and the automobile to Fairfax County was James W. Head, a Vienna farmer, whose 1904 letter to the editor of the Herald was entitled, "Poor Old Fairfax ... a Lament on Introduction into Fairfax Court House of Electric Transportation Facilities." In part, his protest read,

Dear, quaint old Fairfax! … hast harkened to the insistent voice of Progress … yielded to the inroads of an implacable civilization! Where now is thy boasted individuality? Thy perfect peace of Arcadian summers? 'Alas! they are all in their graves'; progress hast sounded their deathknell; worldliness hast thrown wide thy portals, and lust will soon stalk boldly across thy threshold…. Gain will rob men of their reason, will madden their brains…. Poor old Fairfax!181

Although their own desperate desire for better transportation facilities would allow few to challenge so directly the trolley or the movement for good roads, many farmers over the following two decades did entertain serious doubts about the direction in which the county's transportation revolution was taking them. While few could so eloquently express their feelings, they had an able spokesman in Harry B. Derr.

Agrarian Desperation

some night when you are peacefully dreaming ... of the charming BABOONS you have been instructing, and sniffing in the delightful odor exuding from their bodies, you will be rudely awakened by GHOSTS ... and after you have been gagged, you will be born to a tree nearby, tied, stripped and given thirty lashes on your ETHIOPIAN back, and left to be found by some passer-by. We are for law and order just so long as you aforesaid ETHIOPIANS behave, but when you thrust yourselves on your superiors, the white people, your doom is sealed.... A word to the wise is sufficient.

    Even though the 1924 University of Virginia survey found Fairfax County's foreign-born population "so negligible as scarcely to be worth mentioning," the "107 qualified electors" of the Vienna Council, Junior Order United American Mechanics felt sufficiently threatened in 1905 to condemn America's open-door immigration policy as "a menace to our free institutions." The Vienna chapter of the nationwide nativist organization, composed primarily of local merchants, tradesmen, and postal and railroad employees, had been founded in 1896, but it was not until the arrival of the trolley that the local group spoke out against "the tide of immigration" - significantly "not the sturdy people who came before ... to build up their homes ... and if necessary, to die in defense of the stars and stripes, Old Glory, our flag - but [those] from the pauper districts of southern Europe and the Oriental Countries, the incubators of nihilism, anarchy, disease and crime."190 Over the following twenty years, town leaders would continue their efforts to attract "desirable residents who would contribute towards [Vienna's] wealth and progress," but the booster pamphlet circulated in Washington by the Vienna Citizens Association in 1925 was careful to add that "the majority of the people ... with but few exceptions are of American stock," a condition the town clearly intended to maintain.191

    A more immediate threat to the county’s white establishment was the area's black population, both upwardly mobile local blacks and outwardly mobile Washington ones. As early as 1904, the Fairfax Herald argued that the trolley had "brought a large number of lawless characters to the county" as well as the expected and welcomed suburbanites. The paper especially singled out "some of the negroes employed on the new electric railroad" to Fairfax for causing trouble, and in this case, none too subtly suggested that "when again attempted ... we would advise our people to pump lead into the rowdies until they become fit subjects for a junk shop." The trolley brought another unwelcome arrival to the county in 1907. According to the Herald, "Barbara Pope, a colored woman of Washington, ... declined ... to take one of the cars assigned to colored passengers." When the train reached Falls Church, she was arrested, fined for breaking the "Jim Crow" law, and "detained for nearly twenty-four hours." Pope brought a $10,000 suit for being "violently ejected from the train," but insult was added to injury when she was awarded one cent for damages.192

    Evidently, local authorities feared that the trolley would bring still more blacks as permanent settlers, and so in 1915, following passage of a state law permitting residential segregation, the Falls Church Town Council "proposed an ordinance which would have confined Negro residents to a small section of the town, and would have prevented them from living in the area designated for whites even though their homes were already in the restricted districts."194 In the midst of this controversy, some county blacks began to realize that only through unity could such efforts to deny their rights be defeated, and the movement for racial justice in Fairfax County was born.

    The Colored Citizens Protective League (CCPL), organized in early 1915 by Edwin B. Henderson, Joseph B. Tinner, and other black leaders in Falls Church, wrote letters of protest to the mayor and town councilmen, then hired a Washington lawyer and brought suit to prevent enforcement of the residential segregation plan. When the town council announced that a referendum would be held on the issue, the CCPL applied for chapter status in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a nationwide, biracial organization founded in 1909 under the leadership of W. E. B. DuBois. In contrast to Booker T. Washington, who called on blacks temporarily to accept white prejudice and patiently work for economic equality through vocational education, DuBois urged blacks to defend their dignity and demand their civil and political rights. With these goals, the Falls Church and Vicinity Branch of the NAACP, called the first rural chapter of the organization, hired two more Washington lawyers who argued the unconstitutionality of the Falls Church segregation plan and finally convinced the town council to abandon the proposal.195

    As E. B. Henderson explained, however, the organization's role in Fairfax County was just beginning:

The most consistent work of the NAACP was our effort to improve education and educational facilities for our youth. We learned how bad the school conditions were when my wife, who had been a model teacher in the District schools, was drafted to teach in the colored school in Falls Church during the first World War, when teachers were scarce. Negro teachers received far lower salaries than white teachers of the same qualifications. Teachers of colored children were responsible for janitorial work, whereas such service was ... provided in schools for white children. The schools for Negro children were in the most dilapidated condition. All were frame buildings and old, with outbuildings to serve toilet needs. At the Falls Church school there was no source of drinking water on the grounds.... All the schools for white children, in contrast, were brick construction and equipped with plumbing. There was no high school for colored children in Fairfax County. Those who wanted more than a seventh grade education had to travel to Washington at their own expense or be transported to the Industrial School at Manassas.... When bond issues were voted to meet the educational needs, only trifling amounts were allotted to the Negro schools. Once when I approached a superintendent with a request for a larger appropriation for Negro schools, he replied, "We have to look after our own children first."

Despite this dismal picture, Henderson credited the efforts of the NAACP, and its black and white members and supporters, for the eventual success of the movement for a high school for Fairfax blacks, and for the gradual improvement of educational opportunities for the county's black youth."196

Obstacles to Integration

    In spite of some hard-earned successes, E. B. Henderson and other leaders of the movement for racial justice fully realized that not just laws, but minds must be changed if true progress toward an equal society were to come. Henderson recalled that during the war, "when Negroes were obliged to enter and leave by the rear door of the street railway cars and sit from the rear, my father on his way to work one morning was rudely pulled from the steps of the car to let a white person enter…. I entered suit against the offender. Col. Jacob DePutron formerly of the Union army, who had witnessed the incident, consented to represent my father as counsel. When the case was tried in the Falls Church court house, Captain Bethune of the Home Guards, the defendent's attorney, brought into court with him enough of the uniformed Home Guards to fill half the room. Colored citizens occupied the balance of the space. After the conductor and others had refused to testify, Colonel DePutron had himself sworn in as a witness. His account substantiated our case, and the defendant was fined $20 and costs. On the following morning DePutron, in effigy, was seen hanging from an electric light pole at East Falls Church car stop." A few years later, when cars and buses had supplemented the trolley service to the county, Henderson himself was forcibly put off a bus when he refused to move to the rear before crossing from the District into Virginia. Despite the best efforts of the NAACP, Jim Crow seating on buses involved in interstate travel would not end until after 1946.197

    In 1900, the majority of Fairfax County's 18,580 residents lived on farms; in 1925, most of the twenty-two thousand inhabitants lived in town. The technological innovation of the electric trolley made possible, though the proximity of Washington made inevitable, this significant change in the county's character. Yet in 1925 Fairfax County was still the leading producer of dairy products in the state of Virginia.199 Symbolic of this fact was the recognition in 1925 of Ben Middleton's prize dairy cow Sadie as "the best known Holstein in the world." Middleton, a Herndon dairyman, regularly had to give Sadie three milkings per day, and over the previous three years, she had produced more than thirty tons of milk and a ton of butterfat. But Sadie and what she represented were of the past. As if to emphasize that the changes of the previous twenty-five years would seem small in relation to those of the following fifty, on 15 September 1925, a bolt of lightning struck and killed "the best known Holstein in the world."200 It seems fitting that the force which, harnessed, had connected formerly rural Fairfax with Washington should now so dramatically declare the death of an old and the dawn of a new day.

Notes

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

2. Herald, 16 November 1900; 18 November 1904; 13-November 1908; 15 November 1912; 17 November 1905; 12 November 1909.

82. Herald, 20 July 1923; 27 February 1925. A 1922 survey found the county's death rate relatively low, but the birth rate was extremely low. Fairfax whites ranked ninety-fifth and blacks ranked ninety-third out of one hundred Virginia counties. Perhaps in increasingly suburbanized Fairfax, parents were finding children an economic burden rather than a convenient source of labor, as children had often

83. Nickell and Randolph, Economic and Social Survey, p. 108.

86. Stewart, Virginia Village, pp. 85-86.

87. Herald, 17 August 1906; 4 October 1907; 26 November 1909; 28 August 1908; 28 December 1906; 12 November 1909; 28 January 1910; 27 March 1908; 10 July 1914; 17 July 1914; 14 August 1914; 25 September 1914.

89. Herald, 28 December 1917; 25 January 1918: 15 August 1924; 9 January 1925; 20 March 1925.

90. Herald, 14 October 1910; 13 January 1911; 20 January 1911; 27 January 1911; 10 February 1911; 28 April 1911; 17 May 1912; 26 February 1915; 28 September 1917,

91. Herald, 5 August 1904; 23 June 1916; 11 February 1921.

95. Herald, 12 January 1923; 21 August 1925.

96. Herald, 29 September 1905; 22 November 1912.

101. Herald, 8 March 1918.

102. Nickell and Randolph, Economic and Social Survey, p. 106.

103. Herald, 23 February 1917; 30 March 1917.

104. Herald, 12 August 1910; 11 December 1908; 24 June 1921; 24 March 1922; 22 June 1923: Steadman, Fence and Fireside, p. 144.

105. Herald, 18 August 1916; 25 August 1916; 2 April 1915; 5 April 1912; 27 April 1917; 28 June 1918.

106. U.S. Bureau of Census, Thirteenth Census, RI, Population 1910, p. 942; U.S. Bureau of Census, Fourteenth Census, III, Population 1920, p. 1064.

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

111. Hinkle, "Public Secondary Education," pp. 19-20.

115. Nickell and Randolph, Economic and Social Survey, pp. 73-74.

116. Ibid., p. 123.

119. Corner-Matthews interview, p. 39.

120. Herald, 22 November 1907; 23 December 1910; 15 December 1905; 6 May 1910.

165. Herald, 15 January 1915; 29 September 1916; 24 September 1920; 5 November 1920; 1 June 1923; 26 October 1923; 14 May 1915; 29 June 1923; 3 October 1924; 23 January 1925; 12 June 1925; 21 March 1924. In 1922 Fairfax County ranked tenth in Virginia with the value of its autos, trucks, motorcycles, and bicycles at $376,970. Nickell and Randolph, Economic and Social Survey, p. 98. In the Democratic gubernatorial primary of 1925, Fairfax County voters gave a slim majority to State Senator G. Walter Mapp, even though a young State Assemblyman named Harry Flood Byrd, who opposed road bonds with the slogan "Pay As You Go," won the nomination by more than forty thousand votes. But after his election as governor and during his long career in public service to Virginians, Fairfax County automobile enthusiasts would benefit from Byrd's active advocacy of better roads and highways. Herald, 14 August 1925.

166. Funk, "Economic History of Small Farms near Washington, D.C.," U.S. Department of Agriculture Bulletin 848 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920), p. 17 (hereinafter cited as Funk, "Economic History of Small Farms").

172. Herald, I October 1909; 4 February 1910.

176. Funk, "Economic History of Small Farms," p. 9.

179. Derr, Reports, 1921, p. 1.

181. Herald, 30 December 1904.

183. U.S. Bureau of Census, Agriculture, 1925, part II, The Southern States, p. 181.

186. Schug, "Herndon," pp, 8, 33; Herndon Observer, 10 September 1925; 23 August 1926; 5 July 1928.

187. Schug, "Herndon," p. 33; E.B. Henderson, as told to Edith Hussey, History of the Fairfax County Branch of the NAACP (Fairfax, Va., 1961), p. 5 (hereinafter referred to as Henderson, NAACP).

188. Henderson, NAACP, pp. 5-6.

189. Herald, 9 May 1924.

192. Herald, 25 November 1904; 18 January 1907; 7 June 1907.

193. Ball, "Electric Railways," pp. 38-39.

194. Henderson, NAACP, p. 1.

195. Ibid., p. 2.

196. Ibid., p. 7.

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Fairfax County, Virginia, 1870-1900

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