Fairfax Station
“The angel of the battlefield.”
The first Fairfax Station depot, built by Irish immigrants in 1852, was a stop on the Orange
and Alexandria Railroad from Alexandria to Gordonsville. Early in 1862, after Confederate forces withdrew, the railroad carried military supplies
and letters and packages from home to Union soldiers
camped north of the Occoquan River and at
nearby Fairfax Court House.
In Sept. 1862, wounded Union soldiers were transported here after the Second Battle of
Manassas for evacuation to Alexandria and Washington, D.C., hospitals. Clara Barton, whom
an army surgeon called
“the true heroine of
the age, the angel of
the battlefield,” and who founded the American Red Cross in 1881, nursed the soldiers here. She later wrote,
“We were a little band
of almost empty-handed workers, literally
by ourselves, in the wild woods of Virginia, with
3000 suffering dying men crowded upon the few acres within our reach.”
Col. Herman Haupt, Chief of Construction and Transportation, ordered the depot burned after Barton and the last wounded soldiers were evacuated to Washington on Sept. 2, 1862. “Have fired it. Goodbye,” Mr. McCrickett, a railroad
employee, telegraphed Haupt. The Federals rebuilt the station just two months later. New York,
Vermont, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Delaware regiments guarded it against surprise attacks by
Confederate Gen. J.E.B. Stuart and Col. John S.
Mosby until the end of the war.
New buildings completed in 1873, 1891,
and 1903 served a growing Fairfax Station community. In the 1980s, the 1903 station was moved to this site. It houses the Fairfax Station Railroad Museum, opened in 1988 to educate visitors
about railroading, Civil War, and local history.
Marker is on Fairfax Station Road 0.4 miles west of Ox Road (Virginia Route 123), on the right when traveling west.
Courtesy hmdb.org
