Fairfax County Courthouse

About this property

The Historic Fairfax County Courthouse is one of the oldest buildings in the City of Fairfax, Virginia. It was constructed in 1799 to serve as the seat of government in Fairfax County. During the American Civil War, the first Confederate officer casualty of the war took place on the courthouse grounds and the building was occupied by both sides in the conflict. Today, the original courthouse building is part of the larger courthouse site that serves the local government of Fairfax County. When Virginia's county court system was established in 1619, important issues handled by it included determining local tax rates, licensing mills and inns, providing for road construction and repair, and generally administering local government. Fairfax County built its first courthouse in 1742 at a site called "Spring Field", which is near present-day Tysons Corner. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the city of Alexandria, Virginia, had established itself as one of the major ports of the region for coastal and oceangoing ships, and in the year 1752, the courthouse for the Fairfax County court system moved there. In November 1789, realizing the County of Fairfax was in need of a new courthouse building, a legislative petition was arranged in Alexandria. The petition requested the courthouse be placed in the center of Fairfax County, a more convenient location for citizens of the area, in order to promote trade and commerce. Shortly after, the court ordered that the sheriff collect thirty-five cents for each taxable person in Fairfax County to pay for the construction of the new courthouse. Businessmen in the vicinity of the proposed site for the new structure were assured its arrival would bring an increase in business to the area. The present location of the courthouse was selected and purchased from Richard Ratcliffe for one dollar. In May 1799, after the land had been laid out by a man named William Payne, the court ordered the construction of a courthouse forty by thirty feet "with sixteen feet pitch with a twelve foot Portico, one (jail) forty feet by twenty…one clerks office twenty four feet by eighteen…and one (jailers) House twenty four feet by eighteen." The jail would have three rooms on the first floor and two on the second, with an addition on the back. The clerk's office should be "arched over with Slate or Tile," which can be assumed was for fire protection. There was also to be stocks, a pillory and whipping post. Two men, John Bogue and Mungo Dykes were hired as the contractors. The architect of the building was to be James Wren. The District of Columbia was founded in 1800. In March of that year, following the adjournment of the Court in Alexandria, a notice was released announcing that the County Court would be held at the new courthouse in "the center of the County, where all suitors, and others having business, are hereby notified to attend, on the third Monday of April next." On April 21 the first court session was held at the new building. The first order of business was to record the will of Corbin Washington, nephew of George Washington and brother of Judge Bushrod Washington, a Supreme Court Justice between 1798 and 1829. Corbin had been married to Hannah Lee, a daughter of Richard Henry Lee. Thomas Mason, son of George Mason, was present at a poll of voters taken two days later. With his design of the new courthouse, James Wren departed from the traditional single-story plan of most Virginia courthouses, and produced a two-story building with the courtroom on the ground floor and jury rooms over the arched arcade.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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