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.
History
As a plantation (18th century)
Lexington was originally part of the Gunston Hall plantation land tract, held by various members of the Mason family 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 George Washington subdivided his property when his firstborn son George Mason V reached legal age in 1774. 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, George Mason V would only acquire title to the plantation upon his father's death in 1792 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 and other crops by 1775.
Disrepair and the Mason family (19th century)
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. 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, 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 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 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.