Category: Civil War

tl;dr–Fox’s Mill burned during the Civil War. The only people who know the exact details are long dead. 

Fox’s Mill was my hook into the world of Old Bad Road.

I grew up nearby and attended Waples Mill Elementary—then a newly-built hallowed hall of learning named after the family that took over the Fox milling operations and rebuilt the sprawling grist and saw facility after the Civil War.

During 2020, I found myself on a prolonged (and unbeknownst to me, permanent) sabbatical from my life as a writer in Los Angeles. It was a deeply uncomfortable time in my life, in which I turned to the targeted disassociation of diving in to local history. 

I began to read accounts of yesteryear’s Oakton, Virginia. The more I read, the less I felt I knew. Questions began to congeal and ruminate in my mind. What began as a curiosity morphed into something bordering on the obsessive. 

The issue of Fox’s Mill really irked me. The fact that it burned during the war is an article of faith  in the canon of local history, but the circumstances of its burning are never fully fleshed out. Citations are poor, if they exist at all. The whole situation is murky at best.¹

We have two sources for the burning of Fox’s Mills. First, Sally Summers Clarke, granddaughter of Jane Fox, who was the matriarch of the Fox family that owned the mills at the time of the war, left an offhand remark in her 1938 biography in which she explained that Fox’s Mills “were burned during the war by the Union troops.”² Second, a map attributed to Federal cartographer Nathaniel Michler and dated April 23, 1864 records Fox’s Mill as “Burnt Mill.”

For the last four years, these two meager points have provided a skeleton framework for a deep dive into potential scenarios for the burning of Fox’s Mills. 

Before

It helps to understand the place as it was before the conflict. Fox’s Mills—indeed, all prominent milling operations in Northern Virginia and the America of 1860—were more than just buildings with some machinery inside. They were villages.

In his riverine saga The Potomac, Lee Gutheim describes the social importance and spatial centrality of grist and saw mills in 19th century Northern Virginia.

“At the mills, the farmers’ hay and straw were baled for shipping and storage. In the amorphous countryside, an unrelieved landscape for farms, the mill became an important center and the miller an outstanding figure. His business led to wide connections. People found it easier and safer to leave the money for their crops at the mill than to take it home. The mills expanded and became banks, sources of credit; they issued scrip which frequently had currency beyond their neighborhood. When mills failed, it was a calamity to the entire community.”

Gutheim goes on to describe the local network of mills as honeycomb. “Each community achieved its little urban nucleus,” he says, “usually around a mill.” 

The gravity of commerce was often ginned up by the milliners themselves. Men who were driven by economic opportunity and encouraged by local necessity to become “men of enterprise” who acted as wholesalers, shopkeepers, light manufacturers, lenders, and all around neighbors.³

Fox’s Mills were no different.

Amos Fox, vulpine pater familias and New Jersey emigrant, petitioned the state of Virginia in 1784 for a mill seat to be built upon his sizable lands along Difficult Run. Permission was granted three years later. The final decades of Amos’ life were dedicated to the development of an enterprise and neighborhood that came to be known as Fox’s Mills.⁴

Sensing, perhaps, a budding calumny between his three sons, Morris, Isaac, and Gabriel, Amos attempted to sell the mill complex in 1817. Five years later, his sons and inheritors sought to negotiate a bitter disagreement over the Amos Fox estate be liquidating the mill holdings. In both cases, descriptive sale advertisements in the Alexandria Gazette provide a snapshot of Fox’s Mills.

The 1822 listing offers that “the tract of land is of good quality and contains about 242 acres; there are considerable improvements on the land to wit: a grist mill, 2 pair of stones, and machinery for manufacturing flour, a saw mill, a wool carding Machine, a large stone distillery, and a number of other houses convenient for such an establishment; the dwelling house is large and convenient, excellent water at hand, and a good stone dairy house, well-constructed.”⁵

A distillery and machinery capable of processing multiple raw resources hint at a larger utility as both utilitarian economic way station and social center. Additional reports from subsequent owners identify a store in the area, which is consistent with an understanding of mills as versatile, community-oriented enterprises.⁶

Deeper social dynamics are evident in the 1844 obituary for Gabriel Fox, who was the son of Amos Fox, wife to Jane Fox, and ultimately the sole owner of Fox’s Mills in the wake of a bitter chancery case between he and his two brothers. 

“He will be much missed by the poorer class of people in his neighborhood,” wrote the Alexandria Gazette. “His course toward them in many points are well worthy of imitation by those having the ability. For instance, in the latter part of the summers when corn was scarce, and the waters low, and persons of property would come to him to engage him to supply them with meal, perhaps offering him an extra price, he would tell them you have means to purchase with, go elsewhere and buy; I cannot more than supply those of my customers who have not the means of procuring from other sources. Thus instead of speculating on the necessities of the people, he would forego an extra profit to supply the poor with bread.”⁷

Subtext is rich. The use of “his neighborhood” implies more than presence. The word choice here hedges on ownership. It was truly his neighborhood. His father built it and he acquired it. More importantly, much is made out of his benevolence and charity. A pattern that would repeat itself in coming decades when his widow, Jane Fox, financed the construction, maintenance, and staffing of a neighborhood school house just east of Difficult Run from the Upper Mill. In both cases, the largesse with which Gabriel and his widow blessed their lesser neighbors seems to be premised on a robust and lucrative wholesaling business.⁸ 

Simply, Gabriel did not merely mill wool, timber, and grain into a finished product that local producers could then take to market. The language of the obituary seems to confirm that Gabriel bought the resources raw, finished them, and then took them to market himself at great increase.

On the eve of the Civil War, this arrangement developed into its own social milieu—one steeped in the dominant Whig values that permeated the Commonwealth of Virginia. Jane Fox pushed heavily for infrastructure and social betterment for the neighborhood around her business interests. The structure of this society was laid upon twin foundations: charity and debt. Locals were expected to do for themselves, but were not above accepting kindness or loans from a class of wealthy land owners like Jane Fox, her husband Richard Johnson, or nearby money-lender and barrister Joshua C. Gunnell. 

Spatially, this social patterning carved itself into the land with myriad trails and paths cutting towards the centripetal gravity of Fox’s Mills. By 1860, this single-owner facility stretched roughly a mile and a half from modern-day Valley Road near Little River Turnpike where the upper millpond began to the dead man’s curve on today’s Fox Mill Road. There the road once sluiced down to Difficult Run where the Lower Mill fulled and carded wool. 

This disposition was more than class-hierarchy and microeconomics. These many desire paths connected independent farms to what might be considered an early third place. People gathered at Fox’s Mills. They shot the breeze and drank. They potentially received their mail. They spread gossip and passed news there.

Sally Summers Clarke describes hunters traveling from far and wide to use buckwheat loaded shotguns to kill bullfrogs in the half mile by quarter mile large millpond. During the summers, Camp Revival meetings occupied the twelve acre pastureland of today’s Waples Mill Meadow Park.⁹

More importantly, on May 24, 1861, when Federal forces crossed the Potomac from Washington, D.C. into Alexandria and a rabid secessionist hotel-owner named Jim Jackson murdered Union Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, Jackson’s business partner and Jane Fox’s eldest son, Amos Fox (not to be confused with his grandfather and Fox Mill founder, who was also Amos Fox), rushed Jackson’s widow and daughter on a bee line straight to Fox’s Mills where he spread the news of the Federal invasion.¹⁰ This place was a nexus.

Burning Issue

The economic and social enticements for cutting paths and roads to Fox’s Mill in the years before the war also served to channel military forces during the conflict. On a local level, all roads led to the mills that served as the economic and social engines of the micro-communities within the Upper Difficult Run Valley.

As a consequence, Fox’s Mill and its competitor, Hunter’s Mill, four miles north, appeared frequently on otherwise unreliable military maps and served as landmarks for patrols and after-action reports.¹¹ 

In February of 1862, Colonel Freeman of the Federal Cameron Dragoons used Fox’s Mills as a way marker on a raid through Fairfax County.¹² JEB Stuart himself name-checked Fox’s Mill in his after-action report for the Battle of Chantilly. He described “passing Fox’s Mill and following a narrow and winding route in the midst of a heavy-thunder storm.”¹³

Importance was a double-edged sword for the local mills. Both Fox’s Mills and Hunter’s Mill burned during the war.¹⁴ By whom or under what circumstances we cannot be sure. Those answers are lost to time. 

What we know for sure is that Fox’s Mill changed hands many times during the war. Each new regime brought with it the capacity to burn or welcome burning of the mill, as the torch was a favorite punitive instrument of both sides. 

Mapping these moments of potential arson shines light on the burning mystery and further illuminates the importance of the Fox’s Mill position as a village that became a wartime landmark which was also an enticing target.

Timeline

In 1861, men from Fox’s Mills were quick to muster with the Fairfax Rifles, a pre-war militia unit that integrated into the 17th Virginia Infantry as Company D. However, the first documentable occupation of Fox’s Mill by forces of either side occurred long after the men of the Fairfax Rifles decamped from the Difficult Run valley.

In early July of 1861—mere weeks before the First Battle of Bull Run—the 8th South Carolina was stationed at nearby Jermantown. Not compact, elements of the regiment sprawled outwards to picket and occupy today’s Jermantown Road, the area near the modern-day Route 66/Little River Turnpike cloverleaves and Jermantown proper. Also in the mix, Company B of the 8th South Carolina under Captain MJ Hough, projected outwards to hold Fox’s Mills.¹⁵

Much of the fledgling Confederate host in the area was oriented east of Jermantown near Fairfax Court House. However, the position at Jermantown was significant. A month prior, on June 1, 1861, a lightning Federal cavalry raid generated the first Confederate KIA of the war when Lt. John Quincy Marr of the Warrenton Rifles was shot dead near the courthouse. These Federal forces charged through the Confederate position on the Little River Turnpike before escaping northwards on the Jermantown Road.¹⁶

The result of this low casualty dust-up elevated the importance of the Jermantown intersection and ensured that it was both tactically secure, but also considered strategically. Consequently, a regiment of South Carolina infantry occupied the area and gave the intersection an appearance of military utility. 

This was not a fortunate event for Jermantown. Though military utility heightened the neighborhood’s importance, it also ensured that Union troops put it to flame on their way to Manassas. 

R.C. McCormick, Esq., correspondent for the New York Evening Post, accompanied Tyler’s Federal Division on its advance through Vienna, Flint Hill, and Jermantown. He described an empty country, one where “not one house in ten is occupied.” 

Surrendered by the populace, the landscape made a perfect stage for an orgy of wanton destruction. Not least of which was the burning of Jermantown at Yankee hands.

“I am sorry to say that after Colonel Keyes’ brigade, which I accompanied,” wrote McCormick, “had passed through Germantown, certain excited soldiers applied the torch to a half-dozen of the buildings and in a moment they were in a splendid blaze. The sight was grand, but of the impropriety of the procedure there cannot be two opinions.”

Men of the 1st Maine, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Connecticut under Erasmus Keyes were not alone in their urge to destroy. A day prior, McCormick wrote of the charred remains of railroad cars and a ruined depot at Vienna, all of which “the rebels lately burned.”¹⁷

If local infrastructure was up for grabs, could men of the 8th South Carolina have burned Fox’s Mill on July 17, 1861? Or did bitter stragglers from Tyler’s Division follow the road from Jermantown northwest and apply fire a little too liberally? 

Burning was not the exclusive purview of the van or rear of Civil War armies. Men in the middle could have taken a stroll and struck a match. In a letter written to his father from Fairfax after the Battle of Bull Run on July 21, Private Daniel J. Hileman of the Stonewall Brigade remembered a scavenged and torched landscape that bore signs of hard hearts in both armies. 

“Dear Father…we are camped on the ground, where the Enemy was camped the night before the batle the fencing is all torn away & we are a burning them. You may be glad if they never reach their if they act like they do here. I came nine miles from the Junction (of Manassas) and nearly all the fencing is burnt,” wrote Hileman.¹⁸

Fire was a universal. Not just as an instrument of war, but as a necessary evil common to places where concentrations of humans find themselves needing to cook over open fires.

Occupation during the winter of 1861/1862 further exacerbated the problem of bilateral destruction. The reflexive push of Confederate forces back into Fairfax County after the defeat of the Union Army in July found rebel infantry concentrated on a line east of Fairfax Court House. Wise reconsideration encouraged a retrograde movement, by which Confederate brigades concentrated around Centreville by October. 

The Confederate cavalry centered at Camp Qui Vive—Camp “Who Goes There”—a central hub of activity where JEB Stuart maintained his headquarters beginning in October of 1861.¹⁹ Located on the site of what would become today’s Fairfax County dump, Camp Qui Vive is probably best known for its social scene.

In the Fall of 1861, the war was young. JEB Stuart was a dashing hero of the conflict’s only significant battle to date. The soon-to-be christened cavalry chief of the nascent Confederate host curried a culture that was closer to the notion of romantic war than the realities of the total war that awaited both armies in the coming years.

Female guests were entertained. Minstrels played liberally. Jokes were told and stories embellished. At this point in the war, JEB Stuart even took a pet raccoon.²⁰

Beyond the merriment and gallivanting, a little war between pickets and patrols was brewing in the no man’s land between the armies. Each day, southern soldiers sallied forth from Camp Qui Vive to lurk in the woods and secure the roads north and east. 

This put places as far as Lewinsville and Accotink Creek firmly in Stuart’s sphere. So too, Fox’s Mill would have been a critical juncture for both Confederate and Federal scouts. Thanks largely to the efforts of Jane Fox, the road between Jermantown and Frying Pan that worked past Fox’s Mill had been improved to the point that Federal maps mistook it for the Old Ox Road. 

Jane Fox was bullish about infrastructure. Road petitions and the account of her granddaughter suggest that the family matriarch valued spatial connections. This hints at the fact that the connection between Camp Qui Vive and Fox’s Mill was surely well established. 

Camp Qui Vive sat on the Millan Farm, the very same property on which Jane Fox (nee Jane Millan) was born and raised. The milling complex she inherited and the home she’d known as a child were a mere four miles apart by well-documented roads. In a tactical environment that intensified with each passing day, this familial infrastructural link likely funneled Stuart and his forces into and through the Difficult Run valley around Fox’s Mill. 

The resulting outpost war is one of the most likely timeframes for the burning of Fox’s Mill. Quasi-lawless and practical in its occasional brutality, the conduct of this largely unsupervised micro-war between detachments of both armies often centered around the destruction of specific structures known to aid and abet enemy forces. 

Countering Stuart was a priority and the means with which those efforts were transacted could very well have included the torch. On February 8, 1862, men of the Fifth Pennsylvania Cavalry raided through Flint Hill towards Hunter’s Mill and “pursuant to orders, set fire to an old barn which has for a long time afforded the pickets protection…”²¹

A week later, this same body of men struck through Fox’s Mill and reported their movements from that place north and east toward Hunter’s Mill before returning to Flint Hill (Oakton). Men who were empowered to burn prominent infrastructure to deny the enemy shelter at critical points on important roads came through Fox’s Mill during this interregnum. 

These raids came less than a month before one of the best documented chapters of Civil War history in Fairfax County: the withdrawal of Confederate forces past Manassas and south of the Rappahannock concurrent to the advance of the Federal Army of the Potomac. By late February of 1862, President Lincoln grew impatient with the tempo of the war and a perceived wastage of the mighty army then under the command of George McClellan. 

Lincoln urged, coaxed, ordered, and eventually cajoled Little Mac into confronting the Confederates still encamped around Centreville. For four days in early March, 36,000 bluecoats occupied Fairfax Court House and the surrounding countryside.²²

The Yankees brought a vengeful spirit, which was surely felt at Fairfax. Union troops of the 3rd and 8th Pennsylvania Cavalry—sister regiments to the unit that had raided past Fox’s Mill three weeks prior—looted the court house.²³

If Federal soldiers were universally inclined to apply the torch to Fairfax, their ambitions of arson were stymied by a want of fuel. Much of the surrounding area had already been laid to waste. One Yankee soldier wrote home to describe the approach to Fairfax in bleak terms, “For a distance of six or seven miles not a whole house was to be seen. Where the buildings had not been burned down, the cavalry pickets had torn off the weatherboards for firewood and used the structures as horse stables.”²⁴

This account corroborates both arson prior to March 1862 and a certain willingness amongst the Federal cavalry to scavenge and destroy in a pragmatic and ruthless manner. 

Further confirmation of previous destruction was communicated in a letter from a Wisconsin private in which he described numerous burned structures in Jermantown.²⁵

Though short lived, the intensity of Federal presence was high. An entire corps of infantry encamped at Jermantown on the site of today’s Home Depot. On March 11, one division occupied Flint Hill and another fanned out near Hunter’s Mill. Each of these sprawling military formations would have included a cavalry screen that punched out into the Difficult Run basin. Any one of these outriders could have put Fox Mill to flame.²⁶

The untested Yankee army soon withdrew to the Potomac and a date with destiny at the gates of Richmond. However, the war was not gone from Fairfax. By the last days of August, Confederate cavalry was fanning through western Fairfax County on a prolonged scout in advance of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

These preliminary feelings peaked on September 1, 1862, when Jackson’s Corps duked it out with two Federal divisions just north of the former Camp Qui Vive on the southern slope of Ox Hill. The battlefield has since been subsumed into the Fairfax Town Center. Crucially, a little known sideshow to the Battle of Chantilly occurred just north of modern-day Fair Oaks Mall on Difficult Run in near proximity to Fox’s Mill. 

Confederate and Union cavalry battled one another on a line that extended along Difficult Run as far as the Fox Mill pond just north of the modern Penderbrook development. So too, Federal Cavalry commander John Buford stationed himself at Jermantown and reported his scouts were two miles down the Ox Road to his right on a line consistent with the modern-day Waples Mill Road and the historic Fox Mill.²⁷

These federals encountered mounted Confederates. A firefight between these two parties added to the din of nearby fighting. Combat on the line of the Fox Mill Road worsened as JEB Stuart himself advanced from Ox Junction by way of the Fox family’s famed establishment.

JEB Stuart wrote in his after action report, “Passing Fox’s Mill and following a narrow and winding route in the midst of a heavy thunder-storm, I reached the summit of the ridge which terminates in Flint Hill about dark, and discovered in my immediate front a body of the enemy, a portion of which was thrown out as sharpshooters to oppose our farther advance.”²⁸

Fox’s Mill changed hands on September 1, 1862 amidst the tension and sensory overload of a nearby battle. It’s worth considering that the mill burned that day, by either accident or intent. 

If not September 1, September 2 is an intriguing option as well. Confederate cavalry brigades projected eastwards to and beyond Fairfax Court House to skirmish with their Yankee counterparts while the entire Confederate army rested and recouped between the Ox Road and Pleasant Valley west of Chantilly.²⁹³⁰ Deliberate Confederate arson of Virginia property feels unlikely at this juncture of the war, but accidents happen.

Beginning September 3, 1862, both armies maneuvered apart from one another and away from Difficult Run towards Sharpsburg, Maryland. The subsequent vacuum invited more coy guerrilla warfare from John Mosby’s predecessors in the Black Horse Cavalry, Elijah White’s Comanches, and the Chinquapin Rangers. 

In the final week of 1862, Stuart returned to the Difficult Run basin on the last leg of his Fairfax Station raid, which famously culminated in an order for John Mosby to stay behind with a handful of carefully selected men to raise a little hell. 

Mosby’s sudden presence amidst a tinder box of friendly locals ensured that 1863 would be an active year for combat around Difficult Run, but few could have predicted that the area surrounding Fox’s Mills would be the lynchpin of that violence. 

There was distortion between the Federal command picture in Fairfax County and the reality on the ground. Insufficiently detailed Yankee maps struggled to cobble together a sense of space. Poorly understood roads, unknown vegetation conditions, and little social wherewithal gave regional commanders a two-dimensional understanding of the basin that led to facile decision making. On paper, Difficult Run looked like a space where Federal cavalry could dominate with a basic set of outposts and patrol routes. 

For Union field officers at the Colonel grade or below, the reality of holding sway over Difficult Run was much less approachable. Not only was the area densely thicketed and criss-crossed with a hodge podge of poor roads, but the dominant socius was actively hostel.

This much was clear long before the arrival of John Mosby. As a known associate of Elmer Ellsworth’s assassin and local firebrand Jim Jackson, Amos Fox was on the Yankee radar early in the war. The tendrils of this intelligence are not difficult to trace. Jim Jackson himself was an object of fascination for Jonathan Roberts, a particularly prickly Quaker emigrant to Virginia who volunteered his services as a scout to the Union Army in Fairfax during the war. Roberts’ account of the raucous Secession vote in 1861 and the menacing undertones of rebel sympathizers at the court house includes a description of “Jim Jackson and his gang of bullies.”³¹ Amos Fox was certainly included in this group.

The association would explain how Amos and his younger brothers George and Albert (a future Mosby Ranger) ended up in Federal custody in 1862 despite not being in Confederate ranks. Exchanged for actual Federal POWs in mid-August, Amos Fox was held in the Old Capitol Prison for his known sentiments long before John Mosby earned independent command.³²

Fast forward to March of the following year when Mosby’s burgeoning command began to stab closer to Jermantown via the Frying Pan Road, which fronted Amos Fox’s family’s mill. It’s difficult to imagine that Federal authorities did not immediately suspect the involvement of Amos and his kin. These suspicions were all fun and games until Mosby’s daring raid into Fairfax Court House on March 9, 1863, which resulted in the much publicized capture of Union Brigadier General Edwin Stoughton. 

The aftermath of this raid was not pleasant for local civilians harboring Confederate sympathies. Amos Fox was among a set of high-profile Fairfax citizens who Federal authorities immediately swept up.³³

This information itself is a flimsy pretext for the burning of Fox’s Mill. However, Amos’ incarceration was not an isolated event. Typically civilians arrested in Fairfax County on suspicion of leaning towards Southern affiliation were reported as being “rebel sympathizers” or “rabid secesh.” 

In one of the most interesting uses of creative nomenclature expressing civilian arrests in Fairfax County during the war, Amos’ twin brother, Frank—himself a future Mosby Lieutenant—and their step-father, Richard Johnson, were arrested nine days after Mosby’s Fairfax raid. They were charged with acting as “Confederate videttes.” A vidette is a mounted scout or picket that screens ahead of a main body of troops. If we follow the specificity of language used, then Federal gendarmerie had reason to believe that men who owned Fox’s Mill were performing specific duties as unofficial partisans.³⁴

These arrests occur at the inauguration of a season I refer to as “the critical interval.” Beginning in February of 1863, John Mosby was particularly active in an area that suggests the deliberate and patterned use of the space between Fox’s Mill and Hunter’s Mill to the north. 

Following a heavy rain on April 25, Mosby failed to cross Difficult Run at an unknown point. However, his previous raids on the Ox Road two miles west of Fox’s Mill suggest that this aborted crossing occurred downstream and in proximity to that facility. Two days later, with Federal cavalry dispatched to operate in conjunction with the Army of the Potomac’s advance in what would become the Chancellorsville Campaign, two regiments of Yankee infantry—the 111th and 125th New York—were advanced on the road between Jermantown and Frying Pan to guard against Mosby.³⁵

The Yankee foot soldiers who were posted in the vicinity of a nice mill complex known to be owned and operated by Confederate sympathizers are an alluring choice for culpability. In 1863, the men of both the 111th and 125th New York regiments had substantial chips on their soldiers. By no fault of their own, they were involved in the mass surrender of Federal troops to Stonewall Jackson at Harpers Ferry during the Antietam Campaign the previous September. Paroled back into service with the labeled with the stigmatizing nickname “the Harpers Ferry Cowards,” these Empire State men had something to prove. 

Three months after their service on the road to Fox’s Mill, they proved their mettle in gritty dogfights on July 2 and July 3 along the Emmitsburg Road. Men with the moral fiber to lock horns with and defeat William Barksdale’s Brigade on a Thursday and shatter elements of Pettigrew’s Division during Pickett’s Charge on the next day surely had hate enough in their heart to burn down a mill.³⁶

We may never know if men from the 111th or 125th New York were the responsible parties. The potential was surely there. If not them, other options were on the near horizon.

When the bluecoat infantry left, men of the 6th Michigan Cavalry occupied the same line from Jermantown to Frying Pan. On June 3, with Frank Fox and numerous other locals already in his fold, Mosby used Fox’s Mill as the staging area for an ambush of these same Federal forces operating on Lawyer’s Road.³⁷

The dust-up resulted in an enhanced presence at Fox’s Mill. Men of the 6th Michigan maintained a camp at the corner of modern-day Waples Mill and Fox Mill Roads, or in the parlance of 1863, they occupied Fox Mill itself.³⁸

What killer instincts the 6th Michigan naturally possessed had yet to be fully realized. By the time they arrived on Difficult Run, they were a mere month away from receiving a new brigade commander—George Armstrong Custer—who promptly ordered the men into the maw at Gettysburg. By war’s end, the 6th Michigan and their fellow regiments in the Michigan Brigade were an elite unit that played the antagonist for much of the later Mosby story. 

In June 1863, they were still on the tenderfoot side of total war. One trooper, JH Kidd, described the regiment’s sojourn near Fox’s Mill in language uncommonly flowery for Civil War soldiers stationed in Northern Virginia. “The Difficult Creek duty,” he wrote, “was a sort of romantic episode in our military experience—a delightful green oasis in the dry desert of hard work, exposure, danger, and privation. Many pleasant acquaintances were made and time passed merrily.”³⁹ 

Barring undisclosed psychopathy, this description does not match the profile of a unit that willfully burned a civilian structure during the same period.

More Yankees would pass through soon and en masse. On June 16, 17, and 18, heavy columns of Federal infantry marched through Fairfax County as the Army of the Potomac maneuvered across its namesake river to confront Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg. Marching orders from June 16 place one corps—either the 1st or 11th—on “the route by Frying Pan, Old Ox Road, and Farewell Station.” The 12th Corps passed through Hunter’s Mill with the 6th marching just behind it and bivouacking along Difficult Run. Just south of Fox’s Mill, the 5th Corps passed along the Little River Turnpike.⁴⁰

Four months later to the day—October 15, 16, and 17, 1863—the Federal 5th Corps took up a position at Jermantown with Sedgwick’s 6th Corps arrayed to the west at Chantilly.⁴¹ On both occasions, Fox’s Mill was well within walking distance for mischievous stragglers. So too, the facility was in the geographic umbrella of patrols that would have screened outwards from the main body of infantry—especially in light of the guerrilla presence active in Fairfax at the time.

Still, neither of these pass through events feels as significant to the mystery of who burned Fox’s Mill. Especially in light of the micro-war occurring around there during the summer of 1863. 

The Official Records of the War of the Rebellion hint at a harsh conflict that played out near Fox’s Mill at a time when the fate of the war hung in the balance. Rebel raiders under John Mosby were routinely slipping through Federal lines between Jermantown and Flint Hill on a path that likely took them through or past Fox’s Mill. 

After a substantial strike on sutlers and supply wagons east of Fairfax in early August of 1863, Mosby retreated with his quarry on the road past Fox’s Mill, but in an overland and covert manner so as to avoid the detection of his federal pursuers. Yankee commander Rufus King reported that a party of his Union cavalryman “heard that a band of 30 or 40, with some 20 mules in their possession, had passed Fox Mills, up toward Frying Pan. Our cavalry pursued them vigorously to Frying Pan, but could not overtake.”⁴²

A week later, Colonel Charles R. Lowell, Jr. of the 2nd Massachusetts Cavalry bird-dogged John Mosby and offered a flummoxing explanation of the Confederate partisan’s maneuvers. Mosby, wrote Lowell, “moved down yesterday forenoon through Ox Road junction toward Flint Hill. Hearing that our pickets were there, turned to the north again, and, passing through Vienna by Mills Cross-Roads, to Little River Pike, near Gooding’s Tavern.”⁴³

Translated into modern parlance, John Mosby and his men came down the West Ox Road from near the Fox Mill Shopping Center. At the modern intersection of Vale Road and West Ox, the Confederates darted onto Waples Mill Road and took that route past Fox’s Mill to the edge of Oakton where they turned back around and used an unknown byway in the Difficult Run basin to translate northwards to Vienna.

Federal forces knew that Mosby was lurking in the woods near Fox’s Mill. They were also quite invested in destroying Mosby. This moment in time is particularly alluring as a possible solution to the burning mystery of Fox’s Mill because of the stakes and the known intensity of conflict occurring within a stone’s throw of the structure.

Also, we know that the mill burned by April of 1864, because it was included on the Federal Michler map as “burnt.” Corroborating this is a twist of vernacular in Federal after action reports. After a scout in September of 1864, Union Colonel Henry S. Gansevoort of the Thirteenth New York Cavalry mentioned that his unit “crossed Fox’s Ford, on Difficult Run.”⁴⁴

Known the year before for the structure that dominated the landscape at the intersection of the Old Ox Road and Difficult Run, this same area was referred to in 1864 as nothing more than a ford. Apparently, the mill was long gone.

Doctrine

The war against John Mosby was an incubator for a school of strategic thinking and tactical action that would evolve over many decades into counter insurgency. By way of example, seeds of destruction that found the Union army targeting buffalo in a mass extinction gambit to deprive the enemy plains Indians into capitulation were planted in early efforts to starve John Mosby out of Northern Virginia.

On October 12, 1864, Henry Halleck, chief administrator of the Federal armies, ordered the targeted destruction of every house that sat within a ten mile wide swath of land bordering the railroads.⁴⁵

Six weeks after that order, Ulysses S. Grant encouraged the systematic destruction of farmlands in Loudoun County. Grant’s reasoning was Biblical. “As long as the war lasts,” he opined, “they must be prevented from raising another crop.”

Phil Sheridan, his subordinate, relayed Grant’s orders to Wesley Merritt who was tasked with executing what came to be known as the burning raid. Sheridan wrote, “You will destroy and consume all forage and substinence, burn all barns and mills with their contents, and drive off all stock in the region…”

Of the three Federal brigades involved, one alone took responsibility for destroying at least eight mills.⁴⁶

As evidenced by the reports from Federal raids in February of 1862, the application of the torch was always an element in the Union army’s anti-guerrilla toolkit. However the expansion of that practice ballooned drastically in late 1864. Fox’s Mill burned sometime between the two events. 

We do not know the details, but the body of potential burning windows begs the question: was Fox’s Mill burned intentionally and, if so, was this methodology an important segue way to a broader comfort with fire therapy as a means for achieving counter insurgency?

One Last Option

Sally Summers Clarke, granddaughter of Jane Fox and niece to three Mosby Rangers, is our sole source attributing the burning of Fox’s Mill to Union forces. I have no reason to disbelieve here, but need to present one alternative just in case.

Grist mills were notorious for fire due to the combustible nature of particulate wheat flour. So much so that millers were beholden to the use of wooden shovels to prevent sparks from kicking up accidentally if a metal shovel hit an exposed nail head.⁴⁷

There were no new taxation figures calculated during the war, nor was there an agricultural census. However, we have strong evidence from both pre and post war figures suggesting that some members of the Fox family who lived close to, but apart from, the milling complex, maintained much of their livestock despite repeated intrusions by men of both armies.

Were they able to bring in a crop in 1863 and, if so, did they attempt to mill that grain at Fox’s Mills? Is it possible that a want of man power or an attendant lack in equipment like wooden shovels created a situation where best practices were not followed? Is it worth considering that perhaps Richard Johnson, a cousin, or a neighbor burned down Fox’s Mill accidentally? Would it be above these men to then blame their tragic mistake on the nearby Yankee hordes? 

Food for thought. 

On the Unwitnessed Disappearance of a Beloved Old World

A cloud of possibility surrounds a very concrete reality. Sometime between 1861 and 1864, a village burned in Fairfax County, Virginia. The particulars are not remembered because the event itself was mundane in a region that experienced near universal destruction. 

An entire microcosm turned to ash in a “new normal” that arrived as a deferred cost for armed rebellion. What once was at Fox’s Mill ceased to be. An event horizon of unknowing cloaks the truth surrounding an act of destruction that gobbled up a piece of Fairfax County’s antebellum status quo.

Sources

1.  The origin of the Fox Mill burning story can be traced to an off-hand remark Sally Summers Clarke dictated to her stenographer Ralph LeRoy Milliken in Los Banos, California some seventy years after the war. In the text of “Vale History: From Money’s Corner Through Difficult” found in Joy S. Starr Collection on Vale History. Collection 06-18. Virginia Room. Fairfax County Library, the authors cite an excerpt of Sally Summers Clarke’s Then We Came to California, which detailed her experiences at Fox’s Mill before the war and her wartime accounts. This excerpt was printed in the HSFC Yearbook circa 1963. (Milliken, Ralph LeRoy. “Then We Came to California.” HSFC Yearbook 8 (1962-1963): 1-44. https://archive.org/details/hfsc-yearbook-volume-8) Unfortunately, that chapter includes no reference to the burning of Fox’s Mill. I had to track down the full text, which primarily detail Sally’s life after the war in California. In the concluding chapter, Clarke devotes a page to details of a 1917 visit back to Virginia, in which she mentions that the mills (plural) were burned during the war by Union troops. The full text can be found here: Milliken, Ralph LeRoy. Then We Came to California. Merced: Merced Express, 1932. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015041065445

2.  Milliken, Ralph LeRoy. Then We Came to California. Merced: Merced Express, 1932. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015041065445 p. 103

3. Gutheim, Frederick. The Potomac. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1949. p. 185

4.  Lundegard, Marjorie. “Mills and Mill Sites in Fairfax County, Virginia and Washington, DC.” Society for the Preservation of Old Mills Mid-Atlantic Chapter (August 10, 2009). https://spoommidatlantic.org/uploads/editor/files/Mid-Atlantic_Mills/Fairfax_County%2526_DC_Mills-Book-5-8-2009.pdf  23-24.

5.  “Public Sale.” Alexandria Gazette & Advertiser. Volume 22, Number 6268, 29 August 1822. 

6.  Waple III, George. Map of Waple’s Mill 1. Scale Not Given. Hand drawn in colored pencil. In the Virginia Room Collection, Fairfax Public Library, 05-53 Vale Club Records, Series 9: Maps, Undated, Oversize Manuscripts Drawer.

7.  “Died.” Alexandria Gazette. September 4, 1844, Image 3. 

8.  Milliken, Ralph LeRoy. Then We Came to California. Merced: Merced Express, 1932. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015041065445 p. 13-14.

9.  ibid 13-16.

10.  ibid 24-25.

11.  Part of what has made this project somewhat difficult to undertake is the existence of two Fox’s Mills. Not just a Lower and an Upper Mill as was the make-up of “Fox’s Mills” in Fairfax County, but an actual second Fox’s Mill of no relation to the first and sitting on the Rapphannock River in Fauquier County in such a place that it merited a number of its own references in the Official Records. Great pains have been taken to ensure contextual clues refer to the correct Fox’s Mill(s).

12.  “February 22, 1862—Expedition to Vienna and Flint Hill, VA.” Official Records. Operations in MD., N. VA., and W. VA. Chap XIV. 

13.  Official Records. War of the Rebellion: Serial 016 Page 0744 “Operations in N.VA., W.VA., AND MD.” Chapter XXIV.

14.  Hawxhurst’s Mill is not included in this description, even though it appears on the Michler Map of 1864 as a burned mill. It burned in 1856 and was a charred carcass of a building at war’s start. More information about that facility is available in David Alexander Colby and Mathew Evan Corcoran’s “An Inquiry Into The History of Mills Along Difficult Run” published in the HSFC Yearbook Volume 17, 1981. Regarding Hunter’s Mill, a real estate listing from 1868 (Alexandria Gazette, Volume 69, Number 91 16 April 1868) offers that “The mills, both grist and saw, were destroyed during the war.” 

15.  “First Brigade, Army of the Potomac, Eighth South Carolina Infantry.” firstbullrun.co.uk. Accessed December 26, 2023. Https://firstbullrun.co.uk/Potomac/First%20Brigade/8th-south-carolina-infantry.html

16.  Evans, D’anne A. The Story of Oakton, Virginia: 1758-1990. Oakton: The Optimist Club of Oakton, 1991. Pg. 34.

17.  “The Advance—the March Towards Richmond.” Long Island Farmer, and Queens County Advertiser, 23 July 1861. NYS Historic Newspapers Database.

18.  Leigh, Jr., Lewis, and Dr. Joseph L. Harsh. “Letters Postmarked Fairfax County 1861-62.” HSFC Yearbook 19 (1983): 35-64. https://archive.org/details/hsfc-yearbook-volume-19 pg. 46.

19.  Trout, Robert J. With Pen & Saber: The Letters and Diaries of J.E.B. Stuart’s Staff Officers. Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books, 1995. Pg. 41.

20.  ibid pg 50.

21.  Official Records. War of the Rebellion: Serial 005 Page 0506 “Operations in MD., N. VA., AND W. VA.” Chapter XIV.

22.  Johnson II, William Page. “McClellan at Fairfax Court House: First Advance of Army of the Potomac.” The Fare Facs Gazette 9, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 1-17. https://historicfairfax.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/HFCI91-2012.pdf  pg. 1.

23.  ibid pg. 5. 

24.  ibid

25.  ibid pg. 7.

26.  ibid pg. 12. 

27.  Official Records. War of the Rebellion: Serial 018 Page 0786 “Operations in N. VA., W. VA., and MD.” Chapter XXIV.

28.  Official Records. War of the Rebellion: Serial 016 Page 0744 “Operations in N. VA., W. VA., and MD. Chapter XXIV.

29.  Von Borcke, Heros. Memoirs of the Confederate War for Independence. Madison & Adams Press, 2019. Pg. 62.

30.  Hartwig, D. Scott. To Antietam Creek: The Maryland Campaign of September 1862. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Pg. 91.

31.  Catlin, Martha Claire. The Quaker Scout: Testimony of a Civil War Non-Combatant of the Woodlawn Antislavery Colony. Columbia: Quaker Heron Press, 2022. Pg. 155.

32.  Official Records. War of the Rebellion: Serial 117 Page 0382 “Prisoners of War and State, Etc.”

33.  Netherton, Nan, Donald Sweig, Janice Artemel, Patricia Hickin, and Patrick Reed. Fairfax County, Virginia: A History. Fairfax: Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, 1978. Pg. 355. 

34.  Alexandria Gazette: 1834-1974. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov> March 18, 1863, Image 1. 

35.  O’Neill, Robert F. Chasing Jeb Stuart and John Mosby. Jefferson: McFarland & Company Inc, 2012. Pg 157-163.

36.  Rollins, Richard, ed. Pickett’s Charge. Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books, 2005. Pg. 292-293.

37.  ibid 206-207

38.  Joy S. Starr Collection on Vale History. Collection 06-18. Virginia Room. Fairfax County Library. “Vale History: From Money’s Corner Through Difficult.” Pg. 12.

39.  Kidd. J.H. Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman with Custer’s Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War. Ionia: Sentinel Printing Company, 1908.

40.  Official Records. War of the Rebellion: Serial 045 Page 0151 Chapter XXXIX “Correspondence, Etc., Union.”

41.  Official Records. War of the Rebellion: Serial 049 Page 0324 Chapter XLI “Operations in N.C., VA., W. VA., MD., and PA.”

42.  Official Records. War of the Rebellion: Serial 044 Page 0989 Chapter XXXIX. “Mosby’s Operations, ETC.”

43.  Official Records. War of the Rebellion: Serial 048 Page 0068 Chapter XLI “Operations in N.C., VA., W. VA., MD., and PA.”

44.  Official Records. War of the Rebellion: Serial 090 Page 0616 Chapter LV. “Operations in N. VA., W. VA., MD., and PA. 

45.  Seipel, Kevin H. Rebel. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. Pg. 125.

46.  Divine, John, Wilber C. Hall, Marshall Andrews, and Penelope M. Osburn. “Loudoun County Burning Raid.” Loudoun History. Accessed June 1, 2024. Https://loudounhistory.org/history/loudoun-cw-mosby-burning-raid/

47.  Zimiles, Martha, and Murray Zimiles. Early American Mills. New York City: Clarkson N. Potter, 1973. Pg. 36-40.

TL;DR—At the time of the Civil War, the Ox Road west of Fairfax, Virginia, was actually two roads: “West” Ox Road and today’s Waples Mill Road. 

Double Vision at the Battle of Chantilly

September 1, 1862 was a confusing day for both armies. 

It was the capstone on a long season of campaigning that began in Fairfax, Virginia, in March before a marathon bloodletting on the Peninsula that mutated into an ugly, hot, and hard-fought contest for central Virginia that climaxed on the plains of Manassas from August 28 through the 30th. 

Over three violent days, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia was stretched to the limits of its operational capacity while a conglomerate Federal army under John Pope came uncomfortably close to its own destruction.

Fitful maneuvers on August 31 led to a murky situation. A large Confederate host lurked somewhere on the Little River Turnpike within striking distance of Jermantown where the retreating Federals were funneling wounded men, supply wagons, and intact line units eastwards towards the safety of Washington. 

Aware of one another, rival generals wondered where exactly their opponents were. Scouting parties groped through the woods and roads of western Fairfax County hoping to catch a fruitful glimpse of their enemies. 

On the afternoon of the 1st, massed infantry finally came to blows on the southern slope of Ox Hill where the historic Ox Road slalomed down to intersect the Little River Turnpike east of a plantation named Chantilly. 

Stonewall Jackson’s corps deployed into the fields south of the road where elements of Phil Kearney’s division of the Third Corps and Isaac Steven’s division of the Ninth Corps assaulted them during a fierce thunderstorm.¹

Awkward terrain features, harsh weather conditions, and the sudden death of both Federal division commanders made for a sharp, murderous battle set-dressed with rampant confusion. 

The immediate disorientation was only the beginning. 

On January 12, 1863, then Brigadier General Jubal Early—a prominent mid-to-late war Confederate officer in the ANV—submitted a lengthy report detailing his command’s service with Stonewall Jackson from August 16 to September 1, 1862.

Early describes his brigade’s position on the afternoon of the battle:

“On reaching Ox Hill in the afternoon, where the Ox Road crosses the turnpike, indications of the approach of the enemy on the turnpike from Centreville having been observed, Trimble’s and Hays’ brigades were moved to the right and placed in line of battle on the right of Jackson’s division and occupying positions in the edge of a field beyond a piece of woods through which the Ox Road here runs.”²

Other Confederates in proximity to Early and numerous Federal sources who fought against them corroborate the battlefield’s location along the Ox Road. 

Unfortunately, other units who were not near the battlefield nor on the same road also recorded a position on the “Ox Road” that night. 

Two miles to the east of Jubal Early, Union cavalry commander John Buford moved his brigade to a position at Jermantown where his troopers masked Fairfax Court House and the vital Warrenton Pike from marauding Confederates.

At 7:15 p.m. on September 1, 1862, Buford placed his headquarters at Jermantown, the intersection where today’s Waples Mill Road hits Route 50 by Burlington Coat Factory. Buford notified his superior that “the report from my right, up the Ox Road, is that 2 1/2 miles from this point its advance was fired upon by a footman. Immediately after, and near the head of the column, a mounted man came out of the woods, and on being challenged answered that he belonged to Stuart’s cavalry, and when ordered to surrender he clapped spurs to his horse and made his escape.”³

Was John Buford confused about his location? Not likely. 

Buford was beyond reliable. Most famous for a decisive stand on the ridges west of Gettysburg early on July 1, 1863, he and his men rendered expert service screening Federal forces and delaying James Longstreet at Thoroughfare Gap in the week prior to Chantilly.⁴

The core of Buford’s reputation was built around his ability to discern and accurately report force dispositions at specific locations. When he fixed a position two miles distant from Jubal Early but on a road with an identical name, Buford was expressing in high-fidelity a very disorienting peculiarity of Fairfax place names. 

Who Cares?

One hundred and sixty some years later, the paradox is esoteric. Amidst a sea of confusing reports in a war full of uncertain positions, the ambiguous quality of two roads with the same name in a footnote battle can feel somehow meaningless. 

Miniature as the Ox Road may seem in the grand scheme of things, a project premised on sussing out tiny trails three feet wide in a forgotten valley necessarily gravitates to exactly this sort of perplexing local puzzle. These Ox Roads (plural!) loom especially large. 

This should be cleared up before we move forward: at the time of the Civil War, there were two Ox Roads. 

Bread Crumbs in Time

There are hints scattered about. Not least of which is the fact that what remains of the Ox Hill battlefield where Jubal Early’s brigade fought is located on West Ox Road. “West,” of course, implies that there is another, more eastward Ox Road. 

This concept is corroborated on the Federal McDowell Map of 1862, which associates the road to Fox’s Mill (known today as Waples Mill Road) as the Old Ox Road. John Buford would certainly have had a copy of this map with this route name.⁵ 

It all comes together on an 1864 map created by the Chief Engineer of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. North of the battlefield along the road that Early occupied and northwest of John Buford’s 7:15 p.m. position along the road he occupied is an intersection labeled as “Ox Road Junction.”⁶

(This is the exact same “Ox Road Junction” where Federal forces reported that John Mosby entered the Difficult Run Basin and disappeared before cutting through Federal lines near Vienna on August 11, 1863.)⁷

“Junction” expresses a union of like things. In this case, Ox Roads. Plenty of other thoroughfares connect to the Ox Road, but this is the only one known as “Ox Road Junction,” chiefly because it is the only place where two Ox Roads collided. 

Paths of Least Resistance

There’s rich context here. Bedrock type socio-cultural stuff that merits taking a moment to examine. If only to illuminate a piece of infrastructure that functioned as a utilitarian boundary object uniting multiple worlds over multiple time periods. 

By September of 1862, the Ox Road was well established as an expression of energy. More than any other local road, this demi-highway channeled flows of resources, religious ideas, social impulses, and commercial forces like current traveling over a twisted conductor. A certain electricity surged through and utilized portions of the road, cohering to temporary paths of least resistance that united people, places, and things in ad hoc configurations. 

This narrative begins in time immemorial. Local history has it that the Ox Road in western Fairfax County was an expansion of an existing Indian trail.⁸ I’ve detailed the role of indigenous roads in a previous post. In summary, a trading paradigm encouraged extraction of resources both rare and common. What became the Ox Road once represented an early piece of pragmatic infrastructure used to bring these resources out of creek bottoms and deep forests towards the Potomac and its rich culture of trading. 

Much later, the co-opting of an indigenous route was a necessary component in a project founded on a similar spirit of wealth extraction and laced with spite. 

During the first decades of the 18th century, future Fairfax County hosted an elite land grab executed at massive scale. Select families with existing wealth and ties to the crown vied with one another to assemble real estate holdings consisting of tens of thousands of acres.⁹ One such land impresario was Robert “King” Carter, who patented 19,000 acres in 1729 alone.

Included in that number was a parcel his son Robin discovered the year before. Known today as Frying Pan, the land along a stretch of Broad Run was rich in an ore that Robin Carter mistook for copper. Once assayed in London, his mistake was discovered, but not before King Carter, his sons, and a son-in-law established a mining company that ended in a petty squabble with their equally ambitious neighbor, Thomas Lee.

After Carter announced his intentions to transport the ore overland to a proposed port at Little Falls on the Potomac, Thomas Lee patented the coveted waterfront land. It was a bitter affront. Like many men of wealth and prestige, humiliation was an unacceptable encroachment on King Carter’s aura of power. So he bullishly funded the creation of an Ox Road connecting a riverine port at Occoquan to Frying Pan.¹⁰

The Ox Road never served its intended purpose. Mostly, its early years found the new cut road achieving its highest and best use as a concrete reminder of the influence that King Carter wielded in the area. 

As the area began to fill out, minor land speculators, settlers, and would-be tenants utilized the rare good road as a taproot to establish themselves in the rich soils and virgin hardwood forests along the Ox Road. The road to Williams Gap (later known as Snickers Gap or the Snickersville Gap) tied the Ox Road apparatus into an influential east-west corridor that sluiced tobacco and grain growers into the warehouses and banks at Alexandria. Conversely, the lands around Ox Road were prime candidates for farmers who could not afford prime land, but still valued access to markets.¹¹

In a well-research, adroitly argued, and valuably illustrated thesis, anthropologist Heather K. Crowl charted the origin of roads in Northern Virginia. She mapped the original, early-18th century western branch of Ox Road as forking from the eastern branch near Pohick on a line that occupied part of the present Colchester Road near Clifton. This is a very possible reality. 

Deprecated branches and withered alleys of various past Ox Roads informed and enabled the creation of many future roads and development paradigms. Often sequential generations of the roadway did not attach to one another and instead opened possibilities to new routes, not unlike a game of dominos or the forked tongue of a lightning strike. That Crowl’s representation of early Ox Roads differs from my Civil War-era interpretation matters little. The road was somewhat amorphous.¹²

Multipolar Difficult Run

The Ox Road achieved new and unlikely prominence as a civic corridor in 1757 when the formation of Loudoun County brought all of Fairfax County west of Difficult Run into a new political sphere centered around Leesburg.¹³ Even after this section was returned to Fairfax County in 1798, the area was known as “the pocket” owing to its multipolar existence.¹⁴

During those four decades, Alexandria’s proximity and prominence as a port and commercial center far outweighed that of any municipality in Loudoun County. However, the allure of the western county would have incentivized locals in the pocket to travel the Ox Road deeper towards taverns at Dranesville and the courts at Leesburg. 

Loudoun was then in the midst of an agricultural revolution which brought Quaker know-how and cutting edge methodologies into praxis. At a time of growing soil exhaustion, farmers benefited immensely from the “Loudoun System” of deep plowing and gypsum soil amendments.¹⁵

By the time Virginia seceded from the Union in 1861, most of the land west of Difficult Run in Fairfax County still oriented itself north and west. Men of the Difficult Run valley largely cohered to these invisible boundaries and allegiances when they volunteered for Confederate service. Most of those who lived on west of Fox’s Mills joined Thrift’s Rifles, a company of the 8th Virginia which was raised in Dranesville. Those who lived east of Difficult Run or close to Fox’s Mills on the road to Jermantown more often than not found themselves in Company D of the 17th Virginia—the Fairfax Rifles.

Almighty Infrastructure

Orientation to the Ox Road was an immense influence on these polarities in ways that transcended the social. Very practical considerations about infrastructure development built themselves around or literally over the old Ox Road. 

When Amos Fox purchased one thousand acres along Difficult Run from Samuel Oldham for three thousand pounds in 1764, he acquired prime milling land that split between Loudoun and Fairfax Counties.¹⁶ As a miller, Amos Fox would nominally have been concerned about achieving a direct route to the port at Alexandria by either an eastward path to the Chain Bridge Road or a trail south to intersect the section of the Ox Road that ran east to west from Fairfax to Ox Hill. Yet, the long-privileged road to Fox’s Mill began at the future Ox Junction to the west. His clearly prioritized integrating with the Millan farm and other large land holdings along the Ox Road in Loudoun County over a closer path to business dealings on the Potomac.¹⁷

So it was that the Upper Difficult Run was opened westwards towards Dranesville and Frying Pan before it was integrated into the eastern part of Fairfax County. This spatial relationship is laid bare in a survey dated to 1801. A trace of the Ox Road stemming off from Old Courthouse Road in what was then Providence, the new court house town that would become Fairfax Court House, dribbled westwards before jogging north in the trace of today’s West Ox Road. There it intersected with the Fox Mill Road, which indicates that the milling facility was accessible only by the road from Ox Hill.

More critical to our interests, the map in question shows the first iteration of the Fox Mill Road that would bear the label “Old Ox Road” during the Civil War. The place where it leaves the Ox Road would eventually come to be known as Ox Junction. Not yet a full path from Ox Hill to Jermantown, the road is clearly an afterthought. One that confirms that the road to Fox’s Mill may have been called the Old Ox Road at one point, but was, in fact, never the original Ox Road.

Five years later, the section of the Ox Road pictured here achieved still greater utility when it was itself co-opted for use as part of the thirty-four mile long Little River Turnpike stretching from Alexandria to Aldie.¹⁸

Shunpike Alley

In the same way that the Ox Road was built to bring select resources directly to an export port, the Turnpikes were large scale infrastructural projects devoted to the concept that breadbasket counties like Fauquier and Loudoun could be incentivized with good roads to enter business dealings with Alexandria wheat wholesalers. 

The attempt was successful, if only for a time. The Warrenton Pike, Little River Turnpike and Middle Turnpike all had their days in the sun before the railroad eclipsed them. Unexpectedly, one of the crucial unsung impacts of these thoroughfares was the reality that tollroads incentivized travelers to wend their way across the landscape on roads other than that turnpikes. Nowhere was this process of shunpiking more popular than in the vicinity of tollbooths. Two such areas were located near the Ox Road—one at Pleasant Valley just south of Sully and Frying Pan and the other on Difficult Run just west of Jermantown and a mile upstream from Fox’s Mill.

During the logistical lead-up to the Gettysburg Campaign in 1863, Army of the Potomac Chief of Staff Dan Butterfield described the area around Frying Pan as “full of roads.”¹⁹ This noteworthy design feature was a likely consequence of a patterned history of shunpiking, which incentivized travelers and locals to slip around existing tollbooths to find a way into Fairfax Courthouse. The historic Ox Road was the perfect avenue to execute this maneuver. 

The pragmatic needs of this particular moment spawned another mutation in the Ox Road. In the decades after the opening of the Little River Turnpike, the dead-end road that connected Fox Mill to the historic thoroughfare at Ox Hill opened up eastwards to Jermantown, Flint Hill, and Fairfax Court House beyond. 

This expansion was probably not coincidence given the presence of a prominent and unavoidable tollbooth on the Turnpike just south of the road to Fox’s Mills. Fox’s Ford as it came to be known was the easiest and nearest way to cross Difficult Run without paying money. All you had to do was dart northwards from roughly the position Jubal Early occupied in 1862 and take a quick shortcut east. 

Residents and business owners in the area were keen to formalize this new energy. In 1845, Jane Fox, daughter-in-law of Amos Fox and heir to her husband’s family’s mill, successfully petitioned Fairfax County to grade and clear a road from Fox’s Mill eastwards to Jermantown. Critically, Fox indicated that the path in question “has been a public road for thirty years,” which dates the route to a time period just after the Little River Turnpike opened and began collecting tolls.²⁰

That same year, her son-in-law, John Fox, petitioned the County to commission a road from Ox Junction eastwards to Hunter Mill Road. This is the origin of “Old Bad Road” as it came to be known in the Civil War. More importantly, it indicates economic and social energy rippling off of the Ox Road into previously underserved areas.

Baptist Gravity

In John Fox’s petition, the Ox Road is referred to simply as the “Frying Pan Road.” There’s a hint here. 

Gabriel Fox, husband of Jane Fox and son of Amos Fox, began attending the Baptist Church at Frying Pan in 1840.²¹ Gabriel’s 1844 obituary indicated that he “made no profession of religion,” however, his wife became a prominent patron of summer revival meetings at Fox’s Mills.²² In 1848, she selected Samuel Trott, a prominent Baptist clergyman at Frying Pan, to officiate her third and final wedding.²³ 

Between simple spur of the moment attempts to avoid an onerous toll or richly engrained patterns of religious practice, energy and traffic was arcing off of the Ox Road on a line down the Fox Mill Road into Jermantown. 

Interestingly, Herman Boye’s 1859 Map of the State of Virginia does not even represent the modern West Ox Road that would play a prominent role in the Battle of Chantilly three years later and John Mosby’s operations later int he war. Instead, the road from Jermantown through Waples Mill is depicted as a straight avenue with a robust stroke appropriate for a major thoroughfare. This route patently crosses the highest reaches of Difficult Run above Little River Turnpike near Fox’s Mills and maintains an arrow straight line to Frying Pan, at which point it continues westward on an arc that brings it to Gum Springs.

Was this the road as it appeared in 1859 or was this a politicized narrative expressing the prominence of local Baptist populations, their miller enablers, and a culture of cartographic negligence that established a precedent for considering the road to Fox’s Mill as the road to Frying Pan? 

No Smoking Gun

The ensuing fifteen years from the formalization of Jane Fox’s road to Ox Junction and the outbreak of the Civil War left no lasting evidence pointing towards a collective decision to begin calling this recent road the Ox Road. What we’re left with is a situation akin to a maze where a profusion of paths without labels stymied attempts to clearly demarcate roads for visiting armies. 

What makes sense is a simple conflation. If the Ox Road was known to connect Fairfax with Frying Pan, the road past Fox’s Mill was the best developed and most used option at the time of the war. By this criteria alone, it became one of two roads to bear the name “Ox.” It carried this peculiar and confusing nom de guerre in report and function until the end of the conflict.

By 1879, the confusion had been addressed. The reliable Hopkins Atlas depicting the Dranesville District map refers to the route as the “Old Fox Mill Road.” 

Sources

1.  More on Ox Hill/Chantilly to come. For now, let’s assume David Welker’s book is the definitive modern account of the battle. Welker, David A. Tempest at Ox Hill. Cambridge: De Capo Press, 2002. 

2.  An informative and thorough document, this report switches scale throughout to reflect the fact that Jubal Early’s division commander, Dick Ewell, was hors de combat after Second Manassas. Ewell’s replacement, Alexander Lawton, ascended to divisional command only to have his career ended with a nasty wound early in the day at Sharpsburg. Thus, the acceleration of Jubal Early’s storied career is reflected in the scope of the report. The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Civil War. Ohio State University eHistory. Serial 016 Page 0703-0716 Chapter XXIV. “Campaign in Northern Virginia.” https://ehistory.osu.edu/books/official-records/016/0703

3.  The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Civil War. Ohio State University eHistory. Serial 017 Page 0786 “Operations in N. VA., W. VA., and MD.” Chapter XXIV. https://ehistory.osu.edu/books/official-records/018/0786

4.  Hennessy, John J. Return to Bull Run. New York City: Simon and Schuster, 1993. p. 233.

5.  McDowell, Irwin. Military Reconnaissance of Virginia. 1/24000. 1863. “Library of Congress: Civil War Maps.” < https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3880.cw0481400/?r=0.679,0.499,0.114,0.067,0>

6.  Hoffman, J. Paul and Samuel Howell Brown. A Map of Fairfax County, and Parts of Loudoun and Prince William Counties, Va and the District of Columbia (Confederate). Scale “1/2 inch per mile.” 1864. “Library of Congress Civil War Maps.” < https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3851s.cwh00030/?r=0.728,1.541,0.296,0.174,0>

7.  The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Civil War. Ohio State University eHistory. Serial 048 Page 0068. “Operations in N.C., VA., W. VA., MD., and PA.” Chapter XLI. https://ehistory.osu.edu/books/official-records/048/0068

8.  Netherton, Nan, Donald Sweig, Janice Artemel, Patricia Hickin, and Patrick Reed. Fairfax County, Virginia: A History. Fairfax: Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, 1978. p. 25.

9.  ibid 15-17

10.  ibid 25. 

11.  Crowl, Heather K. “A History of Roads in Fairfax County, Virginia: 1608-1840. Masters Thesis, (American University, 2002). p. 53-54.

12.  ibid 28.

13.  Mitchell, Beth. Beginning At A White Oak. Fairfax: Fairfax County Administrative Services, 1977. p. 1. 

14.  Joy S. Starr Collection on Vale History. Collection 06-18. Virginia Room. Fairfax County Library. “Vale History: From Money’s Corner Through Difficult” p. 8. 

15.  Craven, Avery Odelle. Soil Exhaustion as a Factor in the Agricultural History of Virginia and Maryland, 1606-1860. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006. p. 94. 

16.  Mitchell, Beth. Beginning At A White Oak. Fairfax: Fairfax County Administrative Services, 1977. p. 114.

17.  Duncan, Patricia B., and Ann Brush Miller. Historic Roads of Virginia: Loudoun County Road Orders 1783-1800. Charlottesville: Virginia Center for Transportation Innovation & Research, 2015. https://virginiadot.org/vtrc/main/online_reports/pdf/15-r18.pdf 

18.  Crowl, Heather K. “A History of Roads in Fairfax County, Virginia: 1608-1840. Masters Thesis, (American University, 2002). p. 80-81.

19.  The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Civil War. Ohio State University eHistory. Serial 045 Page 0150 “N.C., VA., W. VA., MD., PA., ETC.” Chapter XXXIX. https://ehistory.osu.edu/books/official-records/045/0150

20.  Fairfax County Road Petitions. Box 1: 1844-1908. Historic Records Center. Fairfax County Courthouse. Fox, Jane RP-006 1845

21.  Frying Pan Meeting House Minutes—November 1840. Familysearch.com. https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33SQ-GPX1-2H3?i=32&wc=MD1F-CNG:229206201,229206202&cc=1932510

22.  Milliken, Ralph LeRoy. “Then We Came to California.” HSFC Yearbook 8 (1962-1963): 1-44. Https://archive.org/details/hfsc-yearbook-volume-8

23.  Alexandria Gazette: 1834-1974. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. Nov. 28, 1848, image 3. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85025007/1848-11-28/ed-1/seq-3/#date1=1841&index=5&rows=20&words=FOX+JOHNSON+RICHARD&searchType=basic&sequence=0&state=District+of+Columbia&date2=1920&proxtext=”richard+johnson”+and+”fox”&y=0&x=0&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=1