Potomac Almanac

    George Washington and Linneall Naylor, a descendant of West Ford who was enslaved at Mount Vernon and founded the African-American community, Gum Springs. Naylor teaches at Riverside Elementary School.
  

Where we live, where we grew up, where we are now, it’s “the power of place,” the theme of the Fairfax County History Commission’s 20th annual conference held on Nov. 2. Around 130 attendees heard experts probe Fairfax County’s past, some stories unreported and under-reported. 

Opening the event, Commission chair Lynn Garvey-Hodge, quoted a Dakota proverb: “We will be known forever by the track we leave.” 

U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly said, “To love history is not to suppress it, to uncover the truth.” The history that survives can be biased by those who write it, he noted, citing former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s history of World War II in which Winston Churchill was the central figure. 

Much of the history of America’s post-Civil War Reconstruction period was “imposed by Yankees, propaganda that led to 100 years of segregation and Jim Crow after the Civil War,” Connolly offered. In reality, he said, “Reconstruction was a vibrant program, a transition from slavery into citizenship,” a time when formerly enslaved people could vote, become literate and be elected to Congress. “There are forces today that want to censor history, censor books and doctor it to indoctrinate kids in the ‘right’ history,” he asserted. “We’re not going to do it again. Our mission is to tell our true history.”

In a video message, Jeff McKay, Chairman of the Board of Supervisors, commended the Commission for telling “Fairfax County’s complete history.” The commission, established in 1969, is a board of 16 members appointed by the supervisors. Commission Chair Lynn Garvey-Hodge announced that she is retiring from her 24-years of service. 

Keynoter

Filmmaker Ron Maxwell, who directed “Gettysburg,” “Gods and Generals” and “Copperhead” encouraged people to “abandon preconceptions.” He explained, “My credo: To take the past and use it to score points in the present is propaganda. To surrender to the past and discover what it has been saying to us all along is art. It takes an open mind and open heart to do this work.” He urged people to turn off the technology, “to be an explorer and clear away the noise, the diversions of our lives and to shrink-wrap our present.”

18th Century Notables

Conference-goers traveled back to the 18th century when “George Washington” and “Nancy Mason” in period dress and wigs recounted their lives.

Brian Hilton, who portrayed Washington while holding a “voice amplification device,” said he was one of the first residents of the county, having moved to what became Mount Vernon at age three in 1735. Citing his goal to unify the country and “not sow division among people of the colonies,” he said, “There is always work to be done. Human nature has not changed much since my day.” He quoted James Madison who wrote, “If men were angels, government would not be necessary.” 

“Washington” applauded the 1774 Fairfax Resolves, resolutions largely drafted by county resident George Mason of Gunston Hall, protesting the British Parliament’s claim of authority over the American colonies. “The King counted on the colonies not uniting in a common cause,” he asserted. “They were sorely mistaken. The resolves were a powerful statement we made in Fairfax.” Reprints were stacked on every table.

Hilton referred to the first President’s moral struggle with slaveholding, reminding the audience that Washington freed his enslaved people in his will. Dubbing himself as a “lukewarm abolitionist,” Washington said, “My hope is that their children and children’s children will experience this country in a more different way.”

Referring to Washington’s leadership in the Revolutionary War, “The Cause,” he said he was “not an army of one, but I was a man of action. I am most proud of providing future generations a new vocabulary — equality, justice and liberty, the common currency that describes who we are.”

Moving to those present, he challenged, “You have come incredibly close to the vision of myself and compatriots of the early republic. The work is never really done. My hope is that enlightenment has continued. Learn all that you can from the past, but keep your eyes on the future and endeavor to make it a better one.”

Janis Harless re-enacted “Nancy Mason,” daughter of George Mason and said that her father ensured that his girls got an education. “Father respected the minds of women,” she remarked. She said that her father viewed “slavery as an abomination, but father did not free his. The answer is ‘money.’ The truth just needs to be told.” 

In an interview, Harless said that she made her outfit, including her bum roll, a bustle-like pillow over her butt and tied around her waist under her floor-length dress. Women of that era wanted to give the appearance of having wide hips, she said, because men thought wide-hipped women could successfully bear children.

Jamestown’s Bones

Dr. Douglas Owsley, Curator of Physical Anthropology at Washington’s Smithsonian Natural History Museum, described his forensic work to determine the identities of early Jamestown colony settlers by analyzing human bones interred at the site of three churches. Using multiple techniques, including CT scans and DNA and chemical analyses, he said, “I can read bones, the human skeleton.”

By identifying chipping or divots in recovered human teeth, Owsley confirmed the remains of George Yeardley, the 1618 British- appointed governor who died in 1627. Owsley concluded that the teeth belonged to someone who had repeatedly pulled a sewing needle through his teeth. Yeardley’s father had trained his young son as a tailor.

Fairfax City Mayor Catherine Read reminded the group, “History is dynamic. Every day we discover something new.”

More information

https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/history-commission/ 

Next week: The Power of Place, part 2, a sampling of Fairfax County’s historic African American communities.