Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from A Memorial to Washington the Mason, to Be Erected at Alexandria, Virginia
Having been organized in 1749 pursuant to an act of the General Assembly of Virginia, the city is one of the oldest municipalities in the State, and for over half a century was the county seat of Fairfax, in which county Mount Vernon is located, and we find among the Trustees constituting its first legislative body Washington's relatives, patrons and warm personal friends, viz.: Thomas Lord Fairfax, by whom at that time - 1749 - the boy was engaged as a surveyor; William Fairfax, at whose home - Belvoir - he had lived while pur suing his studies; George William Fairfax, his preceptor and com panion of his first surveys; Lawrence Washington, his half-brother, and John Carlyle, in whose dwelling he was afterwards commissioned a Major on Braddock's Staff, and in 1765 Washington himself was made a member of this famous Town Council, and served as such until the town's incorporation - 1779.
From early manhood to venerated age he mingled in social and political intercourse with its people; its representative in the House of Burgesses; vestryman in its old Christ Church; he surveyed its streets, and founded and endowed its first free school. Here, in 1755, he received his commission in the English Army under Braddock; here, to the freeholders of Fairfax County, he first announced his espousal of the cause of the Colonies; here he called, in March, 1785, the Maryland and Virginia Commissioners to confer on boundaries and the rights of import duties and navigation between the two States. This Council adjourned to Mount Vernon, and from there issued an appeal to the several States which resulted in the convention at Philadelphia, 1787, which framed the Constitution of the United States. Here, in 1799, he held his last military review, and cast his last ballot; and here, January 20, 1800, Colonel George Deneale, Master of the Masonic Lodge and Clerk of the Court, recorded his will.
It was the scene of his early social and political triumphs, the starting point of the greatest epochs in his life. Here he conferred with his neighbors on solemn questions of state and determined upon the course of action to pursue.
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