Stafford County: Where Washington and Mason Grew Up

Stafford County was carved out of Westmoreland County in sixteen sixty-four and named for Staffordshire, England. English colonists had already been farming here for decades, growing tobacco on plantations that stretched from the Potomac south toward the Rappahannock fall line. The county turned out to be fertile ground in more than one sense: both George Washington and George Mason spent portions of their childhoods here.

Mason would go on to draft the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the document that served as a basis for the United States Bill of Rights. Falmouth, a town in the county, grew into a busy ferry and mill town at the head of Rappahannock navigation, and during the Civil War the county hosted one of the largest Union encampments in Virginia, with more than one hundred thousand troops encamped here around the Battle of Fredericksburg.