Woodbridge, Virginia, George Mason's Ferry Landing
Near Dc Northern Virginia, Virginia
The George Mason family acquired this land along the Occoquan River in the late sixteen hundreds. Thomas Mason, a son of George Mason the Fourth of Gunston Hall, inherited the plantation and ran a ferry crossing at the river's mouth on the old Potomac Path, a former Native American trade route that became Route One.
In the late seventeen hundreds, a wooden toll bridge replaced the ferry at the Occoquan crossing. Thomas Mason named his plantation Woodbridge after it, and a nearby village took the same name. Prince William County had been carved out of surrounding territory in seventeen thirty by the Virginia Assembly, named for the third son of King George. The community stayed rural until the Shirley Highway arrived in the nineteen forties and early nineteen fifties, after which Woodbridge transformed rapidly into one of the largest unincorporated communities in Northern Virginia.
