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George Mason

1725 births1792 deaths18th-century American Episcopalians18th-century American politiciansAmerican people of English descent
American plantersAmerican slave ownersAnti-FederalistsBritish North American AnglicansBurials at Gunston HallBusinesspeople from VirginiaDelegates to the Virginia Ratifying ConventionFounding Fathers of the United StatesGeorge MasonMason familyMembers of the Virginia House of DelegatesPages containing links to subscription-only contentPeople from Fairfax County, VirginiaPeople from Stafford County, VirginiaUse mdy dates from December 2019
George Mason
George Mason

George Mason (December 11, 1725 [O.S. November 30, 1725] – October 7, 1792) was an American planter, politician, Founding Father, and delegate to the U.S. Constitutional Convention of 1787, one of three delegates present who refused to sign the Constitution. His writings, including substantial portions of the Fairfax Resolves of 1774, the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776, and his Objections to this Constitution of Government (1787) opposing ratification, have exercised a significant influence on American political thought and events. The Virginia Declaration of Rights, which Mason principally authored, served as a basis for the United States Bill of Rights, of which he has been deemed a father. Mason was born in 1725, most likely in what is now Fairfax County, Virginia. His father died when he was young, and his mother managed the family estates until he came of age. He married in 1750, built Gunston Hall, and lived the life of a country squire, supervising his lands, family and slaves. He briefly served in the House of Burgesses and involved himself in community affairs, sometimes serving with his neighbor George Washington. As tensions grew between Great Britain and the North American colonies, Mason came to support the colonial side, using his knowledge and experience to help the revolutionary cause, finding ways to work around the Stamp Act of 1765 and serving in the pro-independence Fourth Virginia Convention in 1775 and the Fifth Virginia Convention in 1776. Mason prepared the first draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776, and his words formed much of the text adopted by the final Revolutionary Virginia Convention. He also wrote a constitution for the state; Thomas Jefferson and others sought to have the convention adopt their ideas, but they found that Mason's version could not be stopped. During the American Revolutionary War, Mason was a member of the powerful House of Delegates of the Virginia General Assembly, but to the irritation of Washington and others, he refused to serve in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, citing health and family commitments. In 1787, Mason was named one of his state's delegates to the Constitutional Convention and traveled to Philadelphia, his only lengthy trip outside Virginia. Many clauses in the Constitution bear his stamp, as he was active in the convention for months before deciding that he could not sign it. He cited the lack of a bill of rights most prominently in his Objections. He also wanted an immediate end to the slave trade and a supermajority requirement for navigation acts, fearing that restrictions on shipping might harm Virginia. He failed to attain these objectives, and again at the Virginia Ratifying Convention of 1788, but his prominent fight for a bill of rights led fellow Virginian James Madison to introduce the same during the First Congress in 1789; these amendments were ratified in 1791, a year before Mason died. Obscure after his death, Mason has come to be recognized in the 20th and 21st centuries for his contributions to the early United States and to Virginia.

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George Mason
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Gunston Hall
Gunston Hall

Gunston Hall is an 18th-century Georgian mansion near the Potomac River in Mason Neck, Virginia, United States. Built between 1755 and 1759 as the main residence and headquarters of a 5,500-acre (22 km2) plantation, the house was the home of the United States Founding Father George Mason. The home is located not far from George Washington's home.The interior of the house and its design was mostly the work of William Buckland, a carpenter/joiner and indentured servant from England. Buckland later went on to design several notable buildings in Virginia and Maryland. Both he and William Bernard Sears, another indentured servant, are believed to have created the ornate woodwork and interior carving. Gunston's interior design combines elements of rococo, chinoiserie, and Gothic styles, an unusual contrast to the tendency for simple decoration in Virginia at this time. Although chinoiserie was popular in Britain, Gunston Hall is the only house known to have had this decoration in colonial America.In 1792, Thomas Jefferson visited Gunston Hall for the last time, attending George Mason's death bed. After Mason's death, the house remained in use as a private residence for many years. In 1868, it was purchased by noted abolitionist and civil war Colonel Edward Daniels. It is now a museum owned by the Commonwealth of Virginia and open to the public. The National Society of The Colonial Dames of America (NSCDA) operates the museum as a joint effort with the Commonwealth of Virginia led by a Board of Regents selected by the NSCDA. The home and grounds were designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960 for their association with Mason.

Pohick Creek
Pohick Creek

Pohick Creek is a 14.0-mile-long (22.5 km) tributary stream of the Potomac River in Fairfax County in the U.S. state of Virginia. It takes its name from the Pohick Native American tribe once prevalent in the area. Pohick Creek forms in the vicinity of Burke and flows southeast past the western edge of Fort Belvoir to empty into the tidal Pohick Bay, which itself empties, along with Accotink Bay, into Gunston Cove, an embayment of the tidal Potomac River. Pohick Creek is a popular stream for whitewater kayaking, rafting, and paddling, providing Class II and III rapids along a 5.5-mile (8.9 km) stretch between Hooes Road (Virginia Secondary Route 636) and the Richmond Highway (U.S. Route 1) at Lorton. Several tributaries of the Pohick Creek are impounded by dams constructed under the Watershed Protection and Flood Prevention Act to prevent soil erosion and flooding. Originally eight dams were planned, but from 1970 to 1985, only six were actually built. Lake Braddock (Pohick #7) was the first dam built in 1970, and impounds the Pohick Creek in Burke. Huntsman Lake (Pohick #8) was built in 1973, and impounds the Middle Run in Springfield. Lake Royal (Pohick #4) was completed in 1977, and impounds the Rabbit Branch in Burke above its confluence with the Sideburn Branch, where it forms Pohick Creek. Lake Barton (Pohick #2) completed in 1978, impounds a tributary of the Sideburn Branch in Burke. Woodglen Lake (Pohick #3), which impounds the Sideburn Branch in Fairfax, was completed in 1981. Lake Mercer (Pohick #1) became in 1985 the final dam completed, impounding the South Run in Springfield.

Lexington (plantation)
Lexington (plantation)

Lexington was an 18th-century plantation on Mason's Neck in Fairfax County, Virginia, United States. The estate belonged to several generations of the Mason family, and is now part of Mason Neck State Park. Lexington was originally part of the Gunston Hall plantation land tract, held by various members of the Mason family (one of the First Families of Virginia) for generations, and previously by members of the Doeg band of Native Americans. George Mason IV, an active patriot and mentor of his neighbor General (then President) George Washington subdivided his property when his firstborn son George Mason V (1753-1796) reached legal age in 1774 (a year after his mother's death). The house was actually built beginning circa 1784, a year after that somewhat sickly son returned from a European trip taken for health and business reasons, and shortly before the son's marriage to Elizabeth Barnes Hooe, whose father operated the Barnesfield plantation in nearby King George County. Lexington's construction of wood rather than brick or stone like Gunston Hall, may indicate the economic constraints imposed by the American Revolutionary War upon the patriot family. Although they had six children (and documents confirm at least three were born at this plantation house), George Mason V would only acquire title to the plantation upon his father's death in 1792 (when the Fairfax County Circuit Court accepted and transcribed his father's lengthy and codicil-free will written in 1773 and named him the estate's executor) and only survived his father by four years. The name commemorates the Battle of Lexington in Massachusetts.The surrounding plantation was used to grow tobacco (a resource intensive crop which led to soil depletion) and other crops by 1775. It fell into disrepair after the War of 1812, both because of soil depletion, and because George Mason V's son sold the property to his uncle William Mason of Mattawoman plantation in Maryland in 1818 (a year before his wife died and two years before his own death). William Mason had run the plantation during his elder brother George Mason V's European trip before the manor house's construction. Non-family managers had operated the Lexington plantation on behalf of the Mason descendants until they came of age, later on behalf of Mason family members who chose to live elsewhere. George Mason V's will declared that Lexington would become the property of his second son, William Eilbeck Mason (1788-1820), when he came of age, an event which would not occur until 1809, although it also allowed his widow to occupy the property for the rest of her life. In fact, a month after her husband's death, Elizabeth Barnes Mason gave birth to his posthumous third son, Richard Barnes Mason, who would become a career U.S. Army officer and temporary governor of the California territory before his death in 1850. George Mason V's eldest daughter Elizabeth Mary Ann Barnes Mason (9 March 1785–25 March 1827) married her distant relative Alexander Seymour Hooe, son of Seymour Hooe and Sarah Alexander, at Lexington on 22 April 1802. The following year, the widowed mother remarried, to George Graham, who had been educated alongside George Mason's two youngest sons before attending Columbia University in New York and returning to become a Virginia lawyer as well as operate his family's properties after his father died in 1796. Elizabeth Barnes Mason Graham died in May 1814, shortly before her husband's possibly most important military services assisting in the evacuation of Washington D.C. Their son George Mason Graham, born at Lexington, would like his half-brother fight in the Mexican–American War, as well as become rich operating his family's cotton plantation in Louisiana, before helping to found the educational institution which later became Louisiana State University. Meanwhile, after his wife's death and the war's end, George Graham accepted a job with the War Department in Washington D.C., and would later remarry as well as serve as Commissioner of the General Land Office. William Stuart Mason, eldest son of George Mason IV's son William Mason acquired Lexington plantation circa 1824 and actually lived at Lexington until his death in 1857, but he also experienced financial troubles, so not only did much fall into disrepair, in 1851 a court required land to be sold to his younger brother (yet another) George Mason of Hollin Hall. George Mason of Hollin Hall tried to sell the plantation, but did not do so before his death, so in 1870 it became the property of his son, also named George Mason, on whose watch the wooden structure burned down.When that George Mason (who never had children) died of typhoid fever in Portland, Oregon in 1888, the property, which was becoming overgrown, was inherited by his sister Kora Chase, who sold it in 1903 to James D. Yeomans, a local real estate speculator as well as member of the Interstate Commerce Commission. It then changed hands among various real estate investors and companies until 1967, when Wills & Van Metre, Inc. sold it to the Nature Conservancy, which was interested in the property because of two bald eagle nests discovered in 1965. It consolidated various parcels and in 1968 sold them to the Commonwealth of Virginia to become Mason Neck State Park, which opened in 1985.Archeologists investigated the Lexington site beginning around 2006. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2013, in part because of its landscape design unearthed during those excavations, which resembles that of Gunston Hall, as well as Marlborough, a now defunct Stafford County plantation once the home of John Mercer, George Mason's relative, guardian during his minority and mentor, and who died in 1768.