Origins and Stories

Official accounts reveal and conceal. When they document the beginnings of a university, founders emerge as heroes. Other protagonists recede into a footnote or archive. The enslaved people who used to live on the grounds of George Mason University (GMU) and its predecessor, George Mason College of the University of Virginia, do not appear in any account of these institutions. What unfolds in the exhibit below is another narrative that illuminates the central place of slavery in the origin story of our school.

Founders and Neighbors

GMU acquired its main campus from the former Commonwealth Attorney Wilson M. Farr (1884-1959) “and his daughter in-law, Viola Orr.” They had owned the “146-acre parcel” that GMU students cross on their way to classes, cars, and residence halls. In “June 1958 the Town of Fairfax” negotiated to buy this wooded land “for about $300,000,” with Mayor John Wood subsequently notifying Commonwealth politicians that the “Farr tract” would be “offer[ed] to the University of Virginia” (UVA). By December, UVA’s Board of Visitors had opted to transform the Farr tract into “a new branch college.” The real estate transaction concluded in February 1959.[1] Shortly afterward Wilson M. Farr passed away.

The “construction of George Mason College” (GMC) began on 1 August 1963 to the “obvious pleasure” of dignitaries and onlookers gathered at a clearing of leveled "earth." Addressing spectators in the "hot sun," State Senator Charles Fenwick recited “the motto . . . over the entrance to” Thomas Jefferson’s “university in Charlottesville: ‘Enter by this gateway and seek the way of honor, the light of truth, the will to work for men.’” A newsletter memorializing the occasion praised GMC’s own “Illustrious Native Son” George Mason IV (1725-1792), the visionary of “American freedom” who drafted sections of the Constitution and retired to his Gunston Hall “plantation” to be a “student . . . surrounded by his books.”[2]

Personal papers archived in Fenwick Library disclose that Wilson M. Farr may have structured his “one-half interest in the [GMC-purchased] property” as a $75,000 “contribution” to “education.”  His daughters, Edith Farr Elliot (1923-1973) and Ann Ratcliffe Farr Rothrock, were aware of their father’s “gift” and sought “fitting recognition” for him.[3] College administrators learned more about the “donation” from Charles Fenwick.  In 1963 the subject was broached in an exchange of letters with Congressman Howard Smith (1883-1976), whose opposition to President Johnson’s proposed Civil Rights Act was the talk of Washington.[4] Smith, the US Representative of Virginia’s 8^th District and Chairman of the House Rules Committee, had also contacted Fenwick on behalf of Edith Farr Elliot to request that a “Wilson M. Farr Building” grace GMC’s campus.[5]

The coordinated effort to erect the Wilson M. Farr Building came to naught. [6] Although disappointed, Edith Farr Elliot remained cordial with college administrators. In genial letters, she reminded them that GMC’s founding “piece of land” was a “beautiful spot” granted in the 1790s by the Commonwealth to her ancestor Samuel Ratcliffe Farr II (1772-1816). Her versions of family history did not mention notable neighbors such as Samuel Farr II’s brother-in law, Richard Ratcliffe I (1751-1825), who in 1805 chartered the town of Fairfax (then known as Providence).  And nowhere in her surviving correspondence with GMC did she indicate that scores of Black people were held in bondage on Farr and Ratcliffe properties during the 19^th century.[7]

White Ownership and Enslaved People

The American Revolution (1776-1783) liberated Virginia colonists from British tyrants.  During the peace that followed, prominent Southerners who “had hardly needed” to justify plantation bondage felt the urge to defend slavery as “a ‘positive good.’”[8] In the early 19^th century, Samuel Farr II and Richard Ratcliffe shared this strong belief. They expected judicial authorities to uphold their rights to possess, buy, and sell Black people.[9] This may partly explain why they promoted the building of the (1800/1801) Fairfax Courthouse at its current Main Street location, near their residences.[10] The county courthouse was a center of pro-slavery jurisprudence, with judges that “decree[d]” auctions to settle the liabilities of deceased debtors.  Farr and Ratcliffe family members participated in these auctions and sometimes coordinated bids on “slaves in each lot.” Moreover, daily legal proceedings involved the probating of wills, which bequeathed enslaved adults and children.  The posthumous gifting of bondspeople did much to sustain the “peculiar institution” during the antebellum period.[11]

Tracts of Enslavement: Last Testaments, Forced Labors, and Campus Boundaries

Chancery cases ("causes") filed in the early and middle 1800s detail how Samuel Farr II handed down “Negro[es]” to his son Richard Ratcliffe Farr (1804-1845). These inherited “slaves” lived on the tract that Wilson M. Farr sold to the Town of Fairfax and George Mason College in 1959.[13]  Richard Ratcliffe Farr permitted Black people to leave his plantation temporarily to earn wages.[14] One can imagine his enslaved workers venturing into areas around the Fairfax courthouse, using a shovel to dig or a tool to hammer, and then returning to surrender their income to Farr, as was expected. This practice of “hir[ing] out slaves” netted him a considerable sum of money, approximately “three hundred dollars per annum.”[15] Not long after he died in 1845, his wife became the “executrix” of his estate.  A Fairfax court ruling had ordered that the widow Margaret C. Farr (1820-1904) manage her husband’s chattels until her children, Rezin Samuel Farr (1839-1915) and Richard Ratcliffe Farr II (1845-1892), reached the age of consent.[16]Wilson M. Farr was the son of Richard Ratcliffe Farr II.

While it is an open question as to whether Margaret C. Farr continued to hire out her inherited and entrusted “[s]laves,” Fairfax County birth registers, compiled in the 19th-century, show that she deployed other means to maintain her standing as a woman with considerable property.  She used the wombs of enslaved mothers to grow her assets, a practice called natural increase.  Margaret C. Farr owned at least four Black women—Linah Thornton (first and last name), Surah, Siriah, and Lego—who carried a pregnancy to full term in the 1850s. The newborns were named, respectively, Anna, Lewis, Louisa, and Cato.[17]  These parents and children lived on land that became part of the George Mason College campus.  Today, members of the GMU community walk on this tract.

Margaret C. Farr’s neighbor, Richard Ratcliffe, also boosted his wealth through natural increase and referenced this method of accumulation in his last will and testament.  The probated document priced female “[s]laves,” among them Tamar and her daughters Mary, Sarah, and Maria. Their resale was estimated at $500.  Another woman, Eliza, was appraised at $300 while “Old George” was estimated to be worth $30. When Ratcliffe “departed life” in 1825, he left behind $4,445 in credited assets, ranging from his plantation to agricultural implements and deeds to drinking taverns. His total number of “Negroes” amounted to $3,519 (equivalent to $100,000 in 2021), roughly 80% of the estate's value. Fields, ploughs, and pubs aside, enslaved women comprised Ratcliffe’s most prized investment. [18]   Richard Ratcliffe was Wilson M. Farr’s great uncle.

Reflections and Reckonings

The redisplayed “groundbreaking” photo captures a moment of “construction” in 1963 on land previously owned by Margaret C. Farr.  She was the enslaver of Linah, Surah, Siriah, Lego, Anna, Lewis, Louisa, and Cato.  George Mason College received a large tract of Margaret Farr’s property from her grandson, the “donor” Wilson M. Farr who wanted to support “education.”[19]

In the image, we see the shovel and scooped dirt, and the liberty to create. The five contributors to a new institution of higher learning are brimming with excitement.  They experience freedom on our university soil. 

Now we might visualize another scene more than one hundred years ago. It depicts bondspeople in the same spot with shovels moving earth. They are erased from the origin story of George Mason College.  And they experience no freedom on our university land.

Hidden from view are black lives next door—in the 19^th century.  Their histories await reconstruction.  Please consider joining our effort.

By Benedict Carton

Endnotes

[1] http://ahistoryofmason.gmu.edu/exhibits/show/difficulties/contents/farr Viola Orr was the widow of Richard R Farr III, Wilson Farr’s brother: Farr Land Chain, Historic Records Division, Fairfax County Courthouse, Virginia.

[2] The Gunston Ledger, 15 October 1963. http://ahistoryofmason.gmu.edu/items/show/81. This published commentary on the “groundbreaking” ceremony made no reference to George Mason IV being a lifelong slaveholder.

[3] Wilson M. Farr was said to have lowered the price per acre to give his buyer, the Town of Fairfax, a major discount, which he understood to be the equivalent of a $75,000 "gift" in support of the founding of GMC. He was aware that Mayor Wood intended to donate the purchased tract to the University of Virginia, then seeking a permanent site for its new branch college.  Farr's "contribution" amounted to 25% of the original $300,000 cost of the main Fairfax campus. The monetary figures and quoted terms can be found in this source: Letter Howard Smith, Washington, DC, to Charles Fenwick, Washington, DC, 3 October 1963, Box 4 Series 2, Early History, Office of the President, Special Collections & Archives, Special Collections Research Center, University Libraries, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia. Letter Edith Farr Elliot, Fairfax, to Dr. Reid, Fairfax, 13 November 1964; the donation story may have circulated to UVA before reaching GMC: Minutes, Board of Visitors, University of Virginia, Wilson M. Farr Resolution, 16 October 1964; Letter Edith Farr Elliot, Fairfax, to Dr. Reid, Fairfax, 13 November 1964; Box 3, Series 2, Early History, Office of the President, Special Collections & Archives, Special Collections Research Center, University Libraries, George Mason University.

[4] Chair of the US House Committee on Rules, Smith signed the 1956 Southern Manifesto protesting Brown v Board of Education (1954). His resistance to the 1964 Civil Rights Act is recounted in J. Douglas Smith, Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Bruce Dierenfield, Keeper of the Rules: Congressman Howard W. Smith of Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1987).

[5] Letter Howard Smith, Washington, DC, to Charles Fenwick, Washington, DC, 3 October 1963, Box 4 Series 2, Early History, Office of the President, Special Collections & Archives, Special Collections Research Center, University Libraries, George Mason University. In an allusive passage of this letter, Smith reminisced that he and his late “friend” Wilson Farr were once young legal minds who gladly served in a judicial system that upheld white supremacy; see also: Thirty-Third Annual Meeting of the Virginia State Bar Association, Lynchburg, VA, June 6^th, 7^th, and 8^th, 1922 (Richmond: Richmond Press Inc., Printers, 1922), 13-31, 144, 146-47, 155.  To gain support for the proposed “memorial” building, Smith contacted the Rector of UVA, Judge Albert V. Bryan Sr. (1899-1984), another one of Wilson Farr’s associates: Letter Howard Smith, Washington, DC, to Edith Farr Elliot, Fairfax, 3 October 1963; Letter Howard Smith, Washington, DC, to Edith Farr Elliot, 8 October 1963; Box 4 Series 2; Early History, Office of the President, Special Collections & Archives, Special Collections Research Center, University Libraries, George Mason University.  Bryan’s most (in)famous panel decision, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (1952), described the “separation of white and colored children” as a harmless practice embedded in constitutional precedent: Armistead Dobie, Sterling Hitcheson, and Albert Bryan, Judges, “Section C: The Prince Edward County, Virginia Case Decision,” Journal of Negro Education 21,4 (1952), 528-31. Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County:  In the Supreme Court of the United States, October Term, 1952, No. 3, Davis v. County School Board, 103 F. Supp. 337 (E.D. Va. 1952), December 10, 1952 (Ward & Paul: Washington, DC, 1952), 36-38.   Judge Bryan's 1952 ruling influence arguments incorporated in the Brown v. Board of Education decision, handed down by the US Supreme Court two years later.  The Prince Edward County school district was party to the Brown case, which had broader implications for this region of Virginia: Jill Titus, Brown's Battleground: Students, Segregationists, and the Struggle for Justice in Prince Edward County, Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2011), 139-59; Amy Tillerson, "Black Women in Prince Edward County: Grassroots Education and the Fight for Public Schools, 1959-1964," in Cynthia Kierner and Sandar Treadway, eds. Virginia Women: Their Lives and Times, Vol 1 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2015), 290-95.

[6] The Farr family’s involvement in establishing GMC did not appear on any campus marker. The first major sign greeting the public read: “On February 10, 1959, this tract of 150 acres was given by the Citizens of the Town of Fairfax to the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia as a permanent site of the College”: Letter, Edgar Shannon, President GMC, Fairfax, to Joseph Vaughan, Chancellor for Community Colleges, Charlottesville, 17 February 1962, Box 3, Series 2, Early History, Office of the President, Special Collections & Archives, Special Collections Research Center, University Libraries, George Mason University.

[7] Letter Edith Farr Elliot, Fairfax, to Dr. Reid, Fairfax, 13 November 1964, Box 3, Series 2; Letter, Edith Elliot, Fairfax, to Dr. Shannon, Fairfax, 5 August 1970, Folder 16, Box 14; Early History, Office of the President, Special Collections & Archives, Special Collections Research Center, University Libraries, George Mason University; Virginia Governor William Cabell gave the original “tract or parcel of land” to “said Samuel Farr and his heirs forever” in two Commonwealth “grant{s],” the first dated 12 July 1797, the other 4 November 1799: Sealed Land Office Treasury Warranty, Governor William Cabell, Richmond, Virginia, 23 October 1806, Fairfax Circuit Court Historic Records Center, Virginia.

[8] Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women & Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 20004), 17-18. “Proslavery advocates [also] averred that the ‘peculiar institution’ was itself like a marriage—a hierarchical and unequal, but benevolent and reciprocal, relationship that provided the best familial supervision and care to an inferior race”: Tera Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 11.

[9] Richard Farr, slave seller: George Mason (VI), An Inventory and Appraisement of the Personal Estate of Richard Ratcliffe, (initially assessed 22 June 1826), 15 February 1830, 396, Fairfax Will Book P-1, Fairfax Circuit Court Historic Records Center, Virginia.

[10] Richard Ratcliffe I and Samuel Farr II also profited from commercial businesses that they started close to the courthouse.  Their establishments attracted a stream of consumers: judicial officials, defendants, plaintiffs, their friends and families, and passersby.  For corroborating primary sources, see the next endnote.  Histories of the 1800/1801 Fairfax County Courthouse and George Mason’s IV role in having it located on Main Street (in present-day Fairfax): Nan Netherton and Ross Netherton, “Courthouses of Fairfax County,” Virginia Cavalcade, 27, 2 (1977), 86-95; Joseph Horrell. “George Mason and the Fairfax Court,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 91, 4 (1983), 435-39; Jeff Broadwater, George Mason Forgotten Founder (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 243.

[11] The Real Estate of Richard Ratcliffe to Robert Ratcliffe Executor, 20 October 1831, 14; An Inventory and Appraisement of the Personal Estates of Richard Ratcliffe (initially assessed 22 June 1826), 15 February 1830, 395-97, Fairfax Will Book P-1; Sealed Land Office Treasury Warranty, Governor William Cabell, Richmond, Virginia, 23 October 1806; Fairfax Circuit Court Historic Records Center, Virginia; Letter George Mason, Gunston Hall, to Zachariah Johnston, 29 October 1789; Letter George Mason, Gunston Hall, to Zachariah Johnston, 3 November 1790; published in Tyler's Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine, 5, 3 (January 1924), 189-92; Statement of Margaret C. Farr to John Tyler, Judge of the Circuit Court of Fairfax County, 11 June 1852, Chancery Causes (Cases): Margaret C. Farr vs. Richard R. Farr (Younger) & Rezin S. Farr, Infants of Richard R Farr, 1878-004, Fairfax Co. Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia, https://www.lva.virginia.gov/chancery/case_detail.asp?CFN=059-1878-004; Additional research is required to assess the extent to which Farr and Ratcliffe could violently enforce legal “principles of restraint” regulating “slave movement” and enhancing a “master’s dominance.” An analysis of these retributive processes, with reference to enslavement in antebellum Virginia: Camp, Closer to Freedom, 16-17; Stephanie Camp, “‘I Could Not Stay There’: Enslaved Women, Truancy and the Geography of Everyday Forms of Resistance in the Antebellum Plantation South,” Slavery and Abolition 23, 3 (2002), 1-20.  Scholarship revealing the limits of these “principles of restraint”: Ted Maris-Wolf, Family Bonds: Free Blacks and Re-enslavement Law in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015) and Melvin Ely, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War (New York: Vintage, 2004).

[12] An Account of Sales of the Slaves given up by the heir of B.R. Davis decd, 25 April 1828, Chancery Causes (Cases): Roger W. Farr + Wife vs. Margaret Fox, Robert Ratcliffe + C, CFF 32e Part 1/14, Fairfax Co. Spotsylvania Co. 1816 Deed, 1820 Deed Slaves, 2-Wills, Nehemiah Davis Jan. 20, 1800, Benjamin R. Davis Oct. 13, 1821, Fairfax, Co. Chancery Records, Library of Virginia, Richmond, https://www.lva.virginia.gov/chancery/case_detail.asp?CFN=059-1838-011. 

[13] Statement John Scott, Judge of the Circuit Superior Court of Law and Chancery for Fairfax County, 1848; Statement Josiah Wilcoxon, Fairfax, 6 June 1848; see related docket folios: Chancery Causes (Cases): Margaret C. Farr, Widow of Richard S. Farr vs Rezin S. Farr and Richard Farr, Ch of Richard S. Farr, Fairfax Co. 1849-003, Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia, https://www.lva.virginia.gov/chancery/case_detail.asp?CFN=059-1849-003.  According to legal experts at the Library of Virginia and Black’s Law Dictionary, a chancery cause, or case, “could not be readily decided by existing written laws. A judge, not a jury, determine[d] the outcome of the case,” which “often address[ed] estate and business disputes, debt, the resolution of land disputes, and divorce”: https://www.lva.virginia.gov/chancery/faq.htm.

[14] The agricultural transformations pressuring some Northern Virginia planters to hire out their enslaved labor are examined in Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco & Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake 1680-1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 383-435.  Farr’s wage-earning (unfree) Black laborers may have secretly pocketed some of their income.  Historians are paying closer attention to the symbiotic relationships between slavery and (wage-labor) capitalism. Caitlin Rosenthal contends that in 19^th-century America (up to the 1860s) these two economies merged dynamically in “new markets, . . . new production processes, and new information systems,” especially with regard to (industrial-age) bookkeeping which borrowed accounting measures from the plantation ledger: Caitlin Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 191; Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds. Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

[15] Statement John Scott, Judge of the Circuit Superior Court of Law and Chancery for Fairfax County, 1848; Statement Josiah Wilcoxon, Fairfax, 6 June 1848: Chancery Causes (Cases): Margaret C. Farr, Widow of Richard S. Farr vs Rezin S. Farr and Richard Farr, Ch of Richard S. Farr, Fairfax Co. 1849-003, Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia, https://www.lva.virginia.gov/chancery/case_detail.asp?CFN=059-1849-003.  In the late antebellum period, enslaved workers in Virginia and the “Old South” were increasingly permitted to leave their plantation temporarily and go to an arranged job site, carrying papers, or passes, indicating their identity, departure date, destination, and time of return. On their way they could be stopped by white “patrollers” and whipped or jailed for (accused) pass violations: Camp, Closer to Freedom, 14-19.  In 19^th-century colonial South Africa, a similarly violent surveillance regime—rooted in slavery, frontier wars, and convict labor—shaped another pass (law) system, which later bolstered apartheid policies of baaskap “influx control,” compulsory wage garnishments (through migrant recruitment contracts), and “native resettlement.”  Ruling Afrikaner nationalists euphemistically dubbed “native resettlement” black spot removal: Saul Dubow, Apartheid 1948-1994 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 12-14, 110-14. Biometric State: The Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Timothy Keegan, Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 159, Dirk van Zyl Smit, “Convicts on the Hard Road: Reflections on the System of Convict Labour Introduced by John Montagu in the Cape Colony (1844-1853),” De Rebus (1981), 223-24. William Worger, “Convict Labour, Industrialists and the State in the US South and South Africa, 1870-1930, Journal of Southern African Studies 30, 1 (2004), 63-70.

[16] Richard Ratcliffe, Last Will and Testament, 29 March 1815, p.58, Fairfax Will Book 0-1; An Inventory and Appraisement of the Personal Estates of Richard Ratcliffe (initially assessed 22 June 1826), 15 February 1830, 395-97, Fairfax Will Book P-1; Map of Patents and Northern Neck Grants of Fairfax County, Virginia, VREF 929 3755 FAIR 1177 (Beth Mitchell, 1977); Fairfax Circuit Court Historic Records Center, Virginia; Statement of Margaret C. Farr to John Tyler, Judge of the Circuit Court of Fairfax County, 11 June 1852, Chancery Causes (Cases): Margaret C. Farr vs. Richard R. Farr (Younger) & Rezin S. Farr, Infants of Richard R Farr, 1878-004, Fairfax Co. Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia, https://www.lva.virginia.gov/chancery/case_detail.asp?CFN=059-1878-004. Margaret C. Farr was first appointed “oratrix” of her husband’s estate

[17] Birth Register 1853, 22a, 22 b, Fairfax Circuit Court Historic Records Center, Virginia.  Managers and owners of antebellum plantations priced (higher) the “labor” of an enslaved girl or woman after taking stock, literally, in “the added value recognized” by her potential fertility: Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery, 126-27. Laying claim to the babies of enslaved mothers was yet another way that “white masters” sought to exercise absolute control over the intimate and sacred functions of “Black bodies”: Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Wilma Dunaway, The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

[18] An Inventory and Appraisement of the Personal Estates of Richard Ratcliffe (initially assessed 22 June 1826), 15 February 1830, 395-97, Fairfax Will Book P-1; Richard Ratcliffe, Last Will and Testament, 29 March 1815, p.58, Fairfax Will Book 0-1; Map of Patents and Northern Neck Grants of Fairfax County, Virginia, VREF 929 3755 FAIR 1177 (Beth Mitchell, 1977); Fairfax Circuit Court Historic Records Center, Virginia. The deceased’s estate was inventoried in June 1826 by the (judge-appointed) George Mason VI (1786-1834). He presented his assessment to officials in a courthouse that his grandfather, Richard Ratcliffe, Samuel Farr II, situated on Main Street.

[19]Letter Howard Smith, Washington, DC, to Charles Fenwick, Washington, DC, 3 October 1963, Box 4 Series 2, Office of the President Early History, Special Collections, Fenwick Library, GMU, Fairfax. Letter Edith Farr Elliot, Fairfax, to Dr. Reid, Fairfax, 13 November 1964; Letter Edith Farr Elliot, Fairfax, to Dr. Reid, Fairfax, 13 November 1964; Box 3, Series 2, Office of the President Early History, Special Collections, Fenwick Library, GMU, Fairfax.

[20] Folder 9, Box 1, George Mason University Photograph Collection, SC, http://ahistoryofmason.gmu.edu/items/show/84, Early History, Office of the President, Special Collections & Archives, Special Collections Research Center, University Libraries, George Mason University.