Fairfax Courthouse: Washington's Will and a War's First Officer Casualty

The brick courthouse at the center of Fairfax opened in eighteen hundred, when the surrounding village was still called Providence. It holds two details worth knowing. When Confederate forces moved through in June of eighteen sixty-one, the court clerk Alfred Moss took George Washington's will, the one in which he freed all his enslaved people, on horseback by night to keep it from falling into unknown hands.

Also on June first, eighteen sixty-one, Captain John Quincy Marr was killed nearby, making him the first Confederate officer to die in the Civil War. The courthouse changed hands more than a dozen times over the course of the war. The building has served continuously as Fairfax's civic center since that first session of court in April of eighteen hundred.