250 Years in Fauquier County: A Virginia Story

Kathi A. Brown, Walter Nicklin, and John T. Toler

208 pages, 7 x 10

25 color and 218 b&w illustrations

Cloth ISBN 978-0-9818779-3-8 • $50.00

Paper ISBN 978-0-9818779-4-5 • $29.95

Beginning with the early interactions between Native Americans and European explorers and settlers, this history traces three and a half centuries of change in Fauquier County, Virginia. Commissioned by the Fauquier Historical Society to commemorate the county’s 250th anniversary, this engrossing narrative tells the story of the men and women, black and white, who built the region’s farms, plantations, schools, and churches.

Individual biographies are interwoven with a social, political, and military history of the American Revolution and Civil War, allowing crucial events in the county’s history to come alive. This book also explores Fauquier’s depressed economy after the Civil War and shows how the area’s location and natural beauty drew wealthy outsiders to purchase estates in the early part of the twentieth century. After midcentury, the enormous expansion of the Washington suburbs ignited a heated and ongoing debate over the county’s position on growth and development.

Related here is the fascinating story of a historically significant county. The volume has more than two hundred illustrations, some displaying the county’s stunning beauty, which enhance the book throughout.

Distributed for George Mason University Press

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Kathi A. Brown is an independent historian based in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her clients include Marriott, Motorola, Friends of the National Zoo, the Federal City Council, and many other corporations, museums, and associations. Walter Nicklin is a Warrenton native. His stories have appeared in national newspapers and magazines and have often included Fauquier County. He is the editor and publisher of The Piedmont Virginian. John T. Toler has lived in Fauquier County for fifty years and has researched and written numerous articles about the county’s history. He is the editor of the Fauquier Historical Society newsletter, and he frequently lectures on different aspects of the county’s colorful past.