A monument to the memory of the William Fairfax family stands near the ruins of "Belvoir Mansion" within the confines of Fort Belvoir, a U.S. Army Reservation. The site may be accessed from Forney Loop at Marshall Road on the military base. A sign near the intersection adjacent to a small parking area reads: Belvoir Mansion Historic Area - Home of Colonel William Fairfax Established 1741. Behind the sign, a narrow gravel road (closed to vehicular traffic) leads through the woods to a beautiful, large, grassy, open area surrounded by trees. Remains of the foundations of Belvoir Mansion and its outbuildings have been marked with concrete pavers. Several signs with descriptive and historic information stand around the site. The signs describe the mansion, which stood overlooking the Potomac River northeast of Gunston Cove, as "luxuriously and elegantly furnished" in a "commanding" setting, and renowned for "princely hospitality." The site is registered with the National Registry of Historic Places and was placed on the Virginia Landmarks Register in December 1969.



According to 1971 Historic American Buildings Survey of Belvoir, the mansion was built about 1741 by William Fairfax who was a cousin of and agent for Thomas, Sixth Lord Fairfax, the Proprietor of the Northern Neck of Virginia. When Lord Fairfax came to the colonies in 1746, he stayed with his cousin at Belvoir for an extended time while his home "Greenway Court" in the Shenandoah Valley was surveyed and built. George Washington was a friend and neighbor of the Fairfax family while he lived nearby at Mount Vernon as a young man. His brother Lawrence married William Fairfax's daughter Ann and the Washington brothers then became "part of the gilded circle of planters' aristocracy ... achieved by propinquity and marri­age." George Washington's friendship with William Fairfax's eldest son George William and his wife Sarah ("Sally") Cary has intrigued historians and romantics over the years. And it was Lord Fairfax who included the young George Washington in the March 1748 excursion to survey tenant farms on the Proprietor's "vast Shenandoah Valley holdings."



Belvoir was inherited by George William Fairfax in 1757,­according to information at the site. The younger Fairfax, described as "a moderate royalist," returned to England in 1773. The buildings survey reports that the following year, a notice offering the 2,OOO-acre Belvoir estate for rent appeared in the "Philadephia Gazette." Belvoir, the notice stated, was a two-story brick building "with four convenient rooms and a wide hall on the lower floor, five rooms and a wide passage on the second floor, with spacious cellars and convenient offices, kitchens, quarters for servants, coacherie, stables and all other outbuildings needed on a great estate" which included a large garden, orchard and fisheries. A fire destroyed Belvoir in 1783, and the British shelled the remains in 1814, after attacking Washington, D.C. during the War of 1812.



The buildings survey mentions Fairfax family graves in the vicinity of the mansion site. A sign on the grounds of the ruins states that the small family cemetery was north of the larger garden, about five hundred feet from the mansion. In the spring of 1894, writer W. H. Snowden visited the Belvoir ruins and family cemetery and described the site in "Some Old Historic Landmarks of Virginia and Maryland: A Handbook for the Tourist over the Washington, Alexandria and Mount Vernon Railway" (Third edition, 1902): In the wood near adjoining, rows of sunken mounds indicated the family-burial place. A score of graves may still be counted, without stone or vestige of enclosure. The marble slabs which had marked the last resting-places of William Fairfax and Deborah, his wife, the first master and mistress, and which had remained intact until a few years before the war, had been sacrilegiously broken up and carried away.



According to the buildings survey, Belvoir was part of the 1,500 acres purchased by the Corps of Engineers in 1910. The area was originally called Camp Humphreys, and the name of the base was changed to Fort Belvoir in 1935. Soldiers uncovered the brick foundations of Belvoir and the graves of Colonel William and Deborah Fairfax in 1919 while making excavations for new barracks. A 1920 photograph of the site published in "The Alexandria Gazette" in December 1986, shows the cemetery marked by a large wooden cross and enclosed by a log fence. A brick-edged path leads from the ruins northwest to a large obelisk set in a small clearing. The monument, erected by descendant Fairfax Harrison in 1924, is surrounded by a brick walkway and wrought iron fence. The site was surveyed in the early 1970s, 1987, 1988, 1997, and 2006.