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.”
