Dumfries: Virginia's Oldest Chartered Town

The small town of Dumfries holds a record most people driving past on the interstate never suspect: it is the oldest continuously chartered town in Virginia. The General Assembly granted its charter on May eleventh, seventeen forty-nine, on sixty acres at the head of Quantico Creek harbor. Scottish merchant John Graham donated the land and named the settlement after Dumfries, his hometown in Scotland.

For about fifteen years after its founding, Dumfries was a booming tobacco port that rivals called the equal of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Then three forces dismantled it one by one: the Revolutionary War cut off trade, soil erosion silted up the harbor, and the colony shifted from tobacco to wheat. By the seventeen eighties, the port was mud.