The Lee and Fairfax Family Cemetery
The Lee and Fairfax Family Cemetery is located on this ridge top overlooking the Occoquan Bay. The Lees established the cemetery with the death of Henry Lee II on August 15, 1787. His wife Lucy Lee, the only other member of the Lee family to be buried here, died shortly after in 1792. The Virginia Journal and Alexandria Advertiser noted Lee’s passing with an obituary: “Died on the 15th Instant, at the seat of Mr. Richard Bland Lee in Loudon County (sully Plantation), Hon. Henry Lee, Senator for the District of Fairfax and Prince William, in the fifty-eighth year of his age, thirty of which have been assiduously devoted to the service of his Country.”
Captain Henry Fairfax, who purchased the plantation from the Lees in 1825, and his third wife Elizabeth are buried in the enclosed portion of the cemetery. Captain Fairfax passed away on the sixth of October in 1847. Elizabeth died a month later in the same year.
The Lee family stones have long since disappeared. They were replaced with a bronze plaque donated by the Society of the Lees. The Fairfax headstones were relocated in 1969 to Union Cemetery in Leesburg, alongside the tomb of their son John Walter Fairfax. Their remains still rest within the enclosed cemetery.
Courtesy hmdb.org
