Following the Fairfax Line no matter where it goes
Our readers share tales of their ramblings around the world.
Who: Michael Meenehan (author) and his wife, Beth Meenehan, of Fairfax County, Va.
Where, when, why: On a long spring weekend, we decided to follow the Fairfax Line. The differences between Northern Virginia and the rest of the state can be traced back to 1649, when England's King Charles II, then in exile, granted all the land between the Rappahannock and Potomac rivers to a group of his followers. Thomas Fairfax, the fifth Lord Fairfax of Cameron, eventually consolidated all of the grants into one contiguous parcel, known as the Fairfax Grant. Near the rivers, it was easy to tell where the grant boundary was, but at the western edge there was no discernible boundary. Eventually, both the government of Virginia and Lord Fairfax needed to know where the western boundary ran. So, in 1746, surveyors spent almost two months trekking 76 miles out and back through the wilderness. The result was the Fairfax Line.
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A diary kept by the survey party details the hardships they endured. In 1999, modern surveyors recreated the original survey and found many of the survey points, for which they recorded GPS coordinates.
We had traveled through the area of the Fairfax Line many times on our ski trips to Canaan Valley, W.Va. This time, we entered the coordinates from the 1999 survey into our car's GPS system and followed the line as much as we could on the back roads of West Virginia and Virginia. We started at Fairfax Stone State Park, near Thomas, W. Va., and ended in Shenandoah National Park, near New Market, Va.
Highlights and high points: The high point of the trip, literally, was Bear Rocks Preserve at the north end of the Dolly Sods Wilderness area. The view from the overlook on the crest of the Allegheny Front is stunning. We searched the cliff tops for the supposed inscription left by the 18th-century surveyors but could not find it.
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Cultural connection or disconnect: One section of the Fairfax Line in Virginia lies along someone's driveway. As we were parked on the road, looking down his property line, the owner came out of his house to ask what we were doing. He had never heard that his fence line was part of the Fairfax Line. From the way he was shaking his head as he went back to his house, I'm not sure he believed our story about our interest in his property line.
Biggest laugh or cry: Reaching the southern end of the Fairfax Line required that we hike about a mile down the steep side of a mountain from Skyline Drive. Although the northern end of the line is well marked by the Fairfax Stone and easy to get to, the southern end is a nebulous point "at the start of the Rappahannock River." The climb back up to the car was painful.
How unexpected: As we were driving up the side of a mountain in West Virginia on little more than a dirt track (which was in the GPS road database), we passed a family of four coming down the mountain on four all-terrain vehicles. We laughed and I told Beth: "The family that ATVs together, stays together."
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Fondest memento or memory: Our biggest insight came from taking our time to travel along the same route taken by those surveyors almost 300 years ago. Speeding along modern roads, we covered in two days what took travelers about a month and a half to reach by foot and horseback. We certainly appreciated our modern
four-wheel-drive steed.
To tell us about your own trip, go to washingtonpost.com/travel and fill out the What a Trip form with your fondest memories, finest moments and favorite photos.
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