Bryan Fairfax marries in 1759, later the 8th Lord Fairfax
Geoge Washington was much closer to the other Fairfaxes than he ever was to Lord Fairfax. He had a benefactor in a very important Fairfax - William Fairfax, who was Speaker of the House of Burgesses. GW also liked both of his sons. George William Fairfax and Bryan Fairfax. George William Fairfax married Sara (Sally) Cary, who GW absolutely adored. But GW was emotionally closer to the other son of William Fairfax -- Bryan Fairfax. You will know this in their letters to each other. They both got married in the same year in 1759. Bryan Fairfax knew George Washington from the early years of their lives to the end of their lives. Bryan Fairfax was one of GW's pall bearers at the end. Bryan Fairfax married Elizabeth Cary in 1759, the sister to Sara (Sally) Cary.
(We have not found any primary source for what month in 1759 yet)
That's it.
That's out lead story.
There's always more.
Skip around.
Read bits and pieces.
Compiled 2022, updated 12/1/23
Famous sister
Elizabeth Cary has a famous sister. She is Sally Cary Fairfax who married George William Fairfax, the older step brother of Bryan of Fairfax. Those two step brothers were brothers by a different mother but same Dad - William Fairfax, President of Virginia's Executive Council who died in 1757. And when he died, what Fairfax relation was going to assist Lord Fairfax?
Who is going to run the Survey Office?
President of Council William Fairfax died in Sept 1757. He was also the head of Lord Fairfax's land office. He also was Customs agent.
When he died, Bryan's brother George William Fairfax became Belvoir's land agent.
But before the Dad, William Fairfax died and before Bryan's step brother George William Fairfax became assistant to Lord Fairfax, that's when Bryan Fairfax was still "finding himself." Meaning finding himself in jail, to be exact.
Jail Stint
in Westmoreland and Essex County,
his brother-in-law John Carlyle
caught up with him
in the Annapolis gaol
and brought him back
to Belvoir.[19]
Bryan Fairfax writes about these times of troubles.
In Answer to your Enquiry I can scarce say whether I am alive or dead: I have been so long disorder’d both in Mind and Body that I am really between both.
Disappointments in Love & repeated Colds have reduced me much;
however tho’ I am sensible of the Follies of this Life I am no ways desirous of leaving them:
I had rather bear the Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune than venture upon the unknown Regions of Eternity.
No Exact date for the Marriage
In 1759, he married Elizabeth Cary (1738–1778),
daughter of Colonel Wilson Cary and Sarah Pate.
Elizabeth was the sister
of his brother's wife,
[Sally Cary Fairfax is the woman George Washington really loved and liked].
Together, Bryan and Elizabeth had three children:[20]
Bryan Fairfax was friend to GW all lifelong
Short Bio of Bryan Fairfax
The title Eighth Lord Fairfax descended to Bryan ( 1736-1802), son of Colonel William Fairfax and Deborah Gedney Clark, his second wife.
Young Bryan first started out on a Colonial Career in Barbados, but he soon came back to Virginia and served in the Virginia Regiment under George Washington at Winchester as a Volunteer Cadet.
Colonel Fairfax died in 1757 and Bryan's brother George William became Belvoir's land agent.
Bryan married Elizabeth Cary in 1759.
George William left for England in 1760 to take care of inheritance matters.
Belvoir was put at Lord Fairfax's disposal, and he came down-river. Although Belvoir was the principle land office for many years Lord Fairfax realized that the main office should be in closer proximity to the ungranted land in the newly expanded Proprietary which lay beyond the Blue Ridge. Lord Fairfax had offered George the proposed Valley office agency but George refused. While George was in England Lord Fairfax closed the Belvoir office and in 1761 opened the Greenway Valley office and appointed his nephew Thomas Bryan Martin as Agent.
This change did not cause concern for Bryan because he was now living at Towlston Grange. The 5,568 acre tract of Towlston Grange was inherited by Bryan from his father Colonel Fairfax in 1757. About 1760 Bryan moved his family from Greenhill to the new house at Towlston Grange, where the family remained until 1790.
Bryan and Lord Fairfax got along famously despite the wide differences in their ages. In gratitude to Lord Fairfax for his "many kindnesses" Bryan named. his first son Thomas. Bryan's first wife Elizabeth died in 1778. There were four children, Sally, Thomas, Ferdinando and Elizabeth. His second wife was Jane Donaldson. They had one daughter, Ann.
Meet William Fairfax for the Last Time Oct 17, 2021 jimmoyer1
Meet William Fairfax et al Apr 4, 2021 JIM MOYER
Notes for further followup
page 176
.
1. Mrs. Fairfax’s response to GW’s letter of 12 Sept., to which GW is here referring, has not been found.
2. GW wrote on this date similar accounts of James Grant’s defeat on 14 Sept. both to Mrs. Fairfax and to her husband as well as to Governor Fauquier.
3. The great French bastion at Louisburg on Cape Breton Island fell to the forces of Gen. Jeffrey Amherst at the end of July 1758. At this time, William Henry Fairfax held a commission in Col. Philip Bragg’s 28th Regiment of Foot, which took part in the Cape Breton operation.
4. GW is here referring to Grant’s losses in the engagement near Fort Duquesne on the fourteenth.
5. Joseph Addison’s Cato, a tragedy in five acts written in blank verse and first performed at Drury Lane in 1713, was greatly admired in Britain’s American colonies before the Revolution. Marcia was the daughter of Cato, and Juba was the Prince of Numidia who had to hide his unacceptable love for Marcia. Marcia and Juba have two scenes together in the play. In the first (act 1, scene 5) Marcia sends Juba to war against Caesar, and in the second (act 4, scene 3) Marcia, believing Juba to be dead, declares her love for him in his hearing. In the first of these scenes, Juba at one point says: O Marcia, let me hope thy kind Concerns And gentle Wishes follow me to Battle! The Thought will give new Vigour to my Arms, Add Strength and Weight to my descending Sword, And drive it in a Tempest on the Foe. And he ends his final speech in the second of these scenes with this couplet: Juba will never at his Fate repine; Let Cæsar have the World, if Marcia’s mine. The quotation is taken from a 1750 edition printed in London.
6. As it happened, Hannah Fairfax (1742–1804) married, in 1764, GW’s first cousin Warner Washington (1722–1790), not Lord Fairfax’s nephew Thomas Bryan Martin. Elizabeth Cary did become a Fairfax when she married Bryan Fairfax the next year. Nancy Gist did not marry Capt. Thomas Cocke of GW’s regiment or anyone else, but in 1759 after the death of her father, Christopher Gist, she left Belvoir where she had been living with the Fairfaxes and went to live with one of her brothers.
Bryan Fairfax (1736–1802) was the son of William and Deborah Clarke Fairfax of Belvoir. As a boy he lived for a time with his mother’s relatives in Salem, Mass. At the age of 18 he went to work briefly for an uncle who was a merchant in Barbados. He returned to Virginia in 1754 as a clerk for his brother-in-law John Carlyle of Alexandria. His father secured a commission for him in GW’s regiment in 1756, and he joined Capt. George Mercer’s company as a lieutenant in the summer of 1756 and served until he resigned in December.
He later married Elizabeth Cary, sister of Sarah Cary Fairfax, and was GW’s lifelong friend and neighbor. In 1789 he was ordained an Episcopal priest, and in 1800 he became eighth Baron Fairfax of Cameron.
To George Washington from Bryan Fairfax, 15 September 1758
From Bryan Fairfax Belvoir, Septr the 15th 1758 Dear Sir, In Answer to your Enquiry I can scarce say whether I am alive or dead: I have been so long disorder’d both in Mind and Body that I am really between both. Disappointments in Love & repeated Colds have reduced me much;1 however tho’ I am sensible of the Follies of this Life I am no ways desirous of leaving them: I had rather bear the Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune than venture upon the unknown Regions of Eternity. The Prospect is gloomy even when viewed by a Mind that thinks itself prepared for the Journey; but how dismal it must appear to those who are unprepared for it! As this is Case there seems to be no Wonder why we are so unwilling to leave this World of Troubles and Anxieties. I am concerned Sir to find you want Employment for from Experience I know a State of Idleness to be very disagreeable.2 Such a close Confinement and such a constant Round of Inactivity must prove very irksome to one capable of Action; and if you had complained more of the Follies of this life and the Uncertainty of it’s Enjoyments; in your present Situation Sir I should not have been surprised at it. As we have now begun I shall be extremely proud to cultivate a Correspondence, and if you choose to give me your Sentiments on the Campaign whatever you desire to be kept secret shall remain so. My best Wishes, Sir, attend You to the Woods of Action; and that you may return in Safety is the sincere Desire of Yr most obedt Servt Bryan Fairfax We have heard Nothing of my Brother since he left N. York.3 ALS, DLC:GW. 1. For the most recent references to the love affairs of Bryan Fairfax, see John Kirkpatrick to GW, 23 Aug. 1758. Bryan Fairfax was the half brother of George William Fairfax of Belvoir. 2. Fairfax was referring to the months GW had spent in camp at Fort Cumberland awaiting orders from General Forbes. 3. William Henry Fairfax, Bryan Fairfax’s younger brother, went to New York in the fall of 1757 and bought with the approval of Lord Loudoun an ensign’s commission in the 28th Regiment of Foot. He was killed in James Wolfe’s siege of Quebec in September 1759.
PERMANENT LINK What’s this?
no letters in 1759 when he married
On December 11, 1799, Fairfax dined with the Washingtons at Mount Vernon. Three days later George Washington died, leaving Bryan a special bible in his will. Fairfax and his son Ferdinando were noted among the principal mourners at Washington’s funeral.3 Bryan Fairfax died at his home near Alexandria on August 10, 1802.
They were pallbearers too.
John Carlyle and the Lords Fairfax by Bob Madison 2004
Washington's connection to that place:
We this day call’d to see the Fam’d Warm Springs. We camped out in the field this Night.
The "Warm Springs," now known as "Bath" or "Berkeley Springs," were already famed, as Washington notes, in[30] 1747. They were deservedly popular for many years, but their remoteness and the difficulty of access to them, with the competition of other resorts more easily reached, prevented their receiving the attention which the value of their waters merited. A settlement sprang up about the springs at an early date, which finally became a prosperous village under the name of Bath, and was made the county seat when, in 1820, the county of Morgan was formed. Washington bought lots here, built a cottage and stables, and passed summers here with his family. His half-brother, Lawrence, spent nearly a year at the springs for the benefit of his health before going to England and later to Barbadoes. The property-right in the springs is in the state of Virginia, and is held for the benefit of the public.
His mother may have gone there too.
Washington also held title to lots in the Virginia cities of Winchester and Bath (now Berkeley Springs, . . .
GW had made little or no use of the house and dependencies that James Rumsey built for him in 1785 in Bath (or Berkeley Springs), Berkeley County.
Ferdinando Fairfax son
Ferdinando Fairfax (bap. 31 May 1769–24 or 25 September 1820), author of an emancipation plan, was born probably at Towlston, the Fairfax County plantation of his parents, Bryan Fairfax, a Church of England minister, and Elizabeth Cary Fairfax. At his baptism there on 31 May 1769, George Washington and Martha Dandridge Custis Washington stood as two of his four godparents, and he remained close to them until the ends of their lives. He often visited Mount Vernon and consulted Washington on business matters. In 1788 Fairfax went to Philadelphia, where he underwent smallpox inoculation and through Washington's good offices gained introductions to many prominent members of society. Fairfax numbered among the principal mourners at Washington's funeral in December 1799.
At the death of his childless uncle George William Fairfax, a former member of the governor's Council, in 1787, Fairfax inherited property in England and thousands of acres of land in Virginia, including the family seat at Belvoir, in Fairfax County. When he composed his will in 1799, he was rich enough to specify $41,500 in individual bequests to family members and friends. On 18 February 1796 Fairfax married his first cousin Elizabeth Blair Cary, daughter of Wilson-Miles Cary, a member of the Convention of 1776. They lived at Shannon Hill, an estate in the part of Berkeley County that in 1801 became Jefferson County, until about 1810, then in Alexandria, and later at Mount Eagle, in Fairfax County. In twenty-four years they had at least nine sons and six daughters, of whom at least three sons and one daughter died in infancy or childhood.
Fairfax engaged in a variety of large-scale business enterprises, not all of them financially successful. His interests included making brick, selling timber, raising sheep, and owning and operating an ironworks, a tavern, a distillery, a brewery, and a mill. Fairfax joined the Freemasons in Alexandria in 1792, became a trustee of the Charles Town Academy in 1795, and served as a justice of the peace after the creation of Jefferson County in 1801. He also helped build a market house in Charles Town in 1806. The following year he attempted to found a weekly newspaper there but relinquished the project to another man. Fairfax delivered the Fourth of July oration in Charles Town in 1805 and published it three years later in a seventy-three-page pamphlet.
As a young man Fairfax became a follower of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and remained committed until his death. In December 1790, perhaps as a consequence of that religious conversion, Fairfax published in the American Museum, or, Universal Magazine his "Plan for Liberating the Negroes within the United States," which advocated gradual emancipation of slaves and passage of a congressional act to offer inducements for owners to free slaves and also to assume the expense of colonizing freedpeople in Africa. During his life, Fairfax freed several enslaved people and sold others with the understanding that they be freed in the future. In an 1806 codicil to his will he specified that none of his children should inherit any portion of his estate if they held any slaves for life. Fairfax also stipulated that the slaves above ten years of age belonging to his estate at the time of his death, excepting those reserved as household servants for his wife during her lifetime, should all be sold for life on condition that their future children be freed at age twenty-one, that children then younger than ten be freed at age twenty-eight, and that all of them be prepared mentally and morally for their freedom. Fairfax signed the constitution of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United States (popularly known as the American Colonization Society), founded in December 1816.
Fairfax had artistic talent and painted at least one oil portrait, of Elizabeth Gibson, of Charles Town. He was known for lavish hospitality and as a man of cultivated mind and charming manners. Fairfax's large family and handsome lifestyle exceeded his success in business, however. In 1810 he let it be known that he would accept a government job if it were offered, and by the mid-1810s he had to sell the contents of the Alexandria townhouse that he rented and many tracts of land in northern and western Virginia. Fairfax simultaneously pursued a campaign to challenge the several state monopolies that Robert Fulton had obtained for his steamboats and a plan contrived after Fulton's death to renew a federal patent that might create a potential monopoly. Having purchased the patents held by John Fitch, one of Fulton's early competitors, Fairfax probably invested money in pursuit of the cause. He unsuccessfully petitioned the United States Senate in 1816 in opposition to the patent application.
Ferdinando Fairfax died at Mount Eagle, in Fairfax County, late on the night of 24 September 1820 or very early the next morning. His will directed that he be buried simply near the place of his death and that eulogies be omitted. According to tradition, he was initially interred in a family plot at Ash Grove, his brother's estate in Fairfax County, but conflicting accounts suggest that his body was later moved. One of the Washington newspapers, no doubt not knowing of his aversion to memorials, published a short but flattering obituary characterizing him as "a polite and an accomplished gentleman, possessing every kind of knowledge except that of worldly:—he was sober, frugal, and industrious, yet more money escaped from him than from any other man."
Sources Consulted: Biography in F. L. Brockett, The Lodge of Washington: A History of the Alexandria Washington Lodge, No. 22, A.F. and A.M. of Alexandria, Va., 1783–1876 (1876), 118–120 (with birth year of 1774 and death "at midnight" on 24 Sept. 1820); Donald Jackson and Dorothy Twohig, eds., The Diaries of George Washington (1976–1979), 2:154 (baptism date); Ferdinando Fairfax Travel Diary (1792), Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (UVA); letters in Thomas Jefferson Papers and George Washington Papers, both Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., and in several collections in Library of Virginia, UVA, and Virginia Historical Society, Richmond; Norfolk Herald, 22 Feb. 1796; Columbian Mirror and Alexandria Gazette, 3 Mar. 1796; publications include Fairfax, "Plan for Liberating the Negroes within the United States," American Museum, or, Universal Magazine 8 (1790): 285–287, Oration Delivered in Charlestown, in Virginia, on the Fourth of July, 1805 (1808), and Memorial of Ferdinando Fairfax, Against the Extention of the Patents Granted to Robert Fulton, for Improvements in Propelling Vessels by Steam (1816); John A. Cuthbert, Early Art and Artists in West Virginia (2000), 174; Virginius Cornick Hall Jr., Portraits in the Collection of the Virginia Historical Society: A Catalogue (1981), 82 (portrait); Fairfax Co. Will Book, M-1:143–167; Ferdinando Fairfax Estate Papers, Fairfax of Cameron MSS, Virginia Colonial Records Project microfilm (originals in private hands, 2009); death notices in Charles Town Farmers' Repository, 27 Sept. 1820 (died "the 24th. inst." at age fifty-one), and Washington Daily National Intelligencer, 28 Sept. 1820 (died "the 25th inst."); obituary in City of Washington Gazette, 28 Sept. 1820 (died "on the 26th of this month" and quotation).
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Mary V. Thompson.
How to cite this page: Mary V. Thompson,"Ferdinando Fairfax (bap. 1769–1820)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2017 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Fairfax_Ferdinando, accessed [today's date]).
Bryan Fairfax, Thomas Bryan Martin, & George William Fairfax
Lot #52
Photographed By Craig Doda, July 23, 2022 1. Bryan Fairfax, Thomas Bryan Martin, & George William Fairfax Marker
Inscription. Bryan Fairfax, Thomas Bryan Martin, both Trustees of the town, and George William Fairfax. All were nephews of Thomas Sixth Lord Fairfax who built a house here before the town was laid out which blocked what was to become Montgomery Street. The kitchen of the house was located on Lot #52.
Lot #52: Conveyed by the Trustees of the Town of Bath to Bryan Fairfax. Thomas Bryan Martin, and George William Fairfax, 1777.
Topics. This historical marker is listed in this topic list: Settlements & Settlers. A significant historical year for this entry is 1777.
Location. 39° 37.54′ N, 78° 13.638′ W. Marker is in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, in Morgan County. Marker is on South Mercer Street, on the right when traveling north. Touch for map. Marker is at or near this postal address: 48 S Mercer St, Berkeley Springs WV 25411, United States of America. Touch for directions.
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Thomas Fairfax, sixth baron Fairfax of Cameron (22 October 1693–9 December 1781), proprietor of the Northern Neck, was born at Leeds Castle, in Kent, England, and was the eldest son of Thomas Fairfax, fifth baron Fairfax of Cameron (1657–1710), and Katherine Culpeper Fairfax. His mother was the only legitimate child of Thomas Culpeper, second baron Culpeper of Thoresway, who had served as governor of Virginia from 1677 to 1683 and who had settled on her his five-sixths interest in the valuable Northern Neck Proprietary, the land in Virginia lying between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers. Fairfax spent his boyhood in part at family properties in Yorkshire. When his father died early in January 1710, he became the sixth baron Fairfax of Cameron. A few days later Fairfax entered Oriel College at the University of Oxford. When his maternal grandmother died in the spring of that year, he inherited her one-sixth interest in the Northern Neck.
Fairfax remained at Oxford for about three years and then moved to London to pursue a career in public life. The 1707 Act of Union barred Scottish peers from holding hereditary seats in Parliament, and as the barony of Cameron lay in Scotland he settled for an appointment in 1715, early in the reign of George I, as treasurer of the household under the lord chamberlain. Six years later Fairfax lost that post and became a coronet in the Royal Regiment of Horse Guards. At some time he became engaged to a woman whose name is not now known. Shortly before the scheduled wedding she chose instead to marry a man who was, or would become, a duke. According to family tradition, that painful episode explained why Fairfax never married and perhaps why he later moved to Virginia.
Northern Neck Proprietary When his mother died at the end of May 1719, Fairfax inherited her interest in the Northern Neck Proprietary and became the sole proprietor. Other than completing his father's planned sale of the family's Yorkshire properties in the 1710s, he displayed little personal interest in the management of his estate until years after his mother's death. Fairfax left administration of the Northern Neck in the hands of agents, a decision that consequently allowed Robert "King" Carter (ca. 1664–1732) to become the wealthiest man in the Virginia colony. Following Carter's death, Fairfax sent his cousin William Fairfax to Virginia to manage the proprietary, where he stayed for the rest of his life and became a member of the governor's Council.
The southern and western boundaries of the proprietary remained in dispute. The western boundary had not been surveyed, and agents of the proprietary and colonial officials disagreed on which of the rivers was the main channel of the Potomac, the headwaters of which under terms of the seventeenth-century charter marked its western border. To defend his interests in the west, Fairfax cooperated early in the 1730s with the proprietor of Maryland to prevent a proposed settlement of Swiss immigrants in the areas that they claimed. Fairfax also secured a Privy Council order for a moratorium on granting land in the disputed region and for the appointment of commissioners in Virginia to survey and mark the boundary. He traveled to Virginia in 1735 and remained for about two years to negotiate an agreement with the lieutenant governor and the General Assembly, which in 1736 passed an act confirming his title. After Fairfax returned to England, his negotiations with the Privy Council produced a 1745 decision that established the final boundaries of the proprietary and confirmed his most expansive claims. Under terms of the legislation and Privy Council order Fairfax had to recognize existing colonial grants within the proprietary boundaries, but he secured title to more than 5 million acres of land instead of the approximately 1.5 million acres that the colony had initially agreed was his.
Residence in Virginia Fairfax returned to Virginia in 1747 and lived with William Fairfax and his family at Belvoir, in Fairfax County. By the end of the decade he had moved to the lower Shenandoah Valley and begun construction of a country house in the part of Frederick County that in 1836 became Clarke County. Although Fairfax sometimes returned to Belvoir, for the remainder of his life he lived at Greenway Court, where he hosted hunting parties and managed the proprietary from the land office that he built nearby. His nephew Thomas Bryan Martin resided with him and assisted him. Among the surveyors Fairfax employed were Joshua Fry, who with Peter Jefferson produced one of the best maps of Virginia executed during the colonial period, and George Washington, who late in the 1740s began his career as a surveyor for the proprietary and also a long and close relationship with members of the Fairfax family.
Fairfax fostered the development of Frederick County's principal town, Winchester, which he named probably for Charles Powlett, eighth marquess of Winchester and third duke of Bolton, under whom he had served in the Horse Guards. Other than several royal governors, Fairfax was the only resident nobleman in Virginia and as proprietor of the Northern Neck was one of the most important men in the colony. As a consequence, the governor's Council authorized him in 1749 to sit as a justice of the peace in all of the counties within the proprietary. He often presided over the Frederick County Court and beginning in 1749 also served as the county lieutenant, or commander of the militia, including during the Seven Years' War.
Fairfax otherwise remained aloof from politics, and he maintained an air of indifference to the American Revolution. He did not return to England, but he refused to swear an oath of allegiance to Virginia and consequently paid double taxes to the new state. In 1777 the General Assembly abolished quitrents, except for those paid to Fairfax in the Northern Neck Proprietary. Despite a Virginia statute confiscating the property of British subjects, Fairfax's ownership of proprietary land remained unchallenged until his death, after which lawsuits about surveys, taxes, and ownership proliferated for decades. A number of issues went before the Supreme Court of the United States in Martin v. Hunter's Lessee (1816), in which the justices upheld the constitutionality of federal appellate jurisdiction over the highest court of each state.
Thomas Fairfax, sixth baron Fairfax of Cameron, died at Greenway Court on 9 December 1781 and was buried within the communion rail in the church of Frederick Parish. His remains have been moved several times: in 1828 to beneath the chancel of the new Christ Episcopal Church in Winchester, in 1925 to a crypt on the west side of that church's basement, in 1955 to temporary storage, and in 1957 to a tomb in the church courtyard. Fairfax County, formed in 1742, bears his name, as does Lord Fairfax Community College, which opened in 1970.
Sources Consulted: Biographies in Andrew Burnaby, Travels through the Middle Settlements in North America, in the Years 1759 and 1760, 3d ed. (1798), 159–166 (with erroneous birth date "about the year 1691," erroneous death date "in January or February 1782," and other errors), Fairfax Harrison, The Proprietors of the Northern Neck: Chapters of Culpeper Genealogy (1926), 125–135, 148–152 (quoting the register of Bromfield Parish, Kent, Eng., for birth, baptism [31 Oct. 1693], and death dates), and Stuart E. Brown Jr., Virginia Baron: The Story of Thomas 6th Lord Fairfax (1965), with frontispiece portrait; Joseph Foster, Alumni Oxonienses (1891–1892), 2:481; letters in various collections in British Library, London, Eng., in Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone, Kent, Eng., in Papers Connected with the Fairfax Family, MSS Fairfax 35, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, in Public Record Office, Kew, Eng., and in Fairfax of Cameron MSS, Virginia Colonial Records Project microfilm (originals in private hands, 2009), Library of Virginia (LVA); deeds, legal documents, and some Fairfax correspondence in Northern Neck Proprietary Papers (1675–1843), Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, Calif., and (1688–1810), Accession 24062, LVA; numerous references in Henry R. McIlwaine, Wilmer L. Hall, and Benjamin J. Hillman, eds., Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia (1925–1966), vols. 4–6; William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619 . . . (1809–1823), 4:514–523, 9:359, 361; will and estate inventory in Frederick Co. Will Book, 4:583–595; estate materials in Correspondence of the Family of Fairfax including the Fairfax Estate in Virginia, Add. 30305 and 30306, British Library; death date in Thomas Bryan Martin to Bryan Fairfax, 3 Feb. 1782 (but with recipient's variant docket of 7 Dec. 1781), and Robert Fairfax, seventh baron Fairfax of Cameron, to Bryan Fairfax, 9 May 1783, both Fairfax of Cameron MSS, and in Thomas Bryan Martin to Denny Martin and to Robert Fairfax, seventh baron Fairfax of Cameron, both 10 Mar. 1782, both in Wykeham-Martin Papers, Centre for Kentish Studies; obituaries in Richmond Virginia Gazette, or Weekly Advertiser, 5 Jan. 1782 (with variant death date of 12 Dec. 1781), and Gentleman's Magazine 52 (1782): 149.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Warren R. Hofstra.
How to cite this page: Warren R. Hofstra,"Thomas Fairfax, sixth baron Fairfax of Cameron (1693–1781)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2016 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Fairfax_Thomas_baron_Fairfax_of_Cameron, accessed [today's date]).
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William Fairfax
In the Bahamas, Fairfax married Sarah Walker (c. 1700 – January 21, 1731), the daughter of a former Justice of the Vice admiralty court and acting deputy governor of the Bahamas. They had a son, George William Fairfax, followed by a daughter Anne (discussed below) and another daughter Sarah before Mrs. Sarah Fairfax died on January21, 1731 in Marblehead, Massachusetts.
The widower Fairfax then married Deborah Clarke, of Marblehead. Together they had three sons: Thomas, William Henry ("Billy") and Bryan, and a daughter Hannah. In June 1743, the eldest Fairfax daughter, Anne (then aged 15) was hastily married to Lawrence Washington.[5] At age 25 in 1742, Washington had recently returned to Virginia from two years at war in the Caribbean. Washington was appointed Adjutant (commander) of the Virginia militia, at the colonial rank of major. In the spring of 1743, the young Anne disclosed to her parents that she had been sexually molested by Charles Green, the Anglican priest of Truro Parish.[5]
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