In Prince William County, there may not be a more bizarre and tragic turn of events than those that plagued the Fair Family. To quote the subheading of the newspaper account below, the Fair story is a tale of "wrecked homes, black fratricide, murders, suicides, and kindred disasters ... [that] would sound cheap in fiction, but these are the sordid facts."
The following was published on February 27, 1910 in the Richmond Times-Dispatch:
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| Richmond Times-Dispatch (Richmond, VA) February 27, 1910 |
My wife is a descendant of Emma Fair, who was murdered by Silas Putnam. Today I visited the abandoned Fair Family Cemetery in Manassas, VA. It is slowly fading into oblivion, with only two stones (of many stones) with any legible writing. If any of you are also Fair descendants, and are interested in collaborating on a preservation effort, please contact me at peterwingate64@gmail.com. Fortunately, the neighbors around the cemetery keep a watchful eye, and have posted a nice sign indicating that it is the Fair Family cemetery.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment. I would be happy to post your request to clean up/preserve the cemetery as a main blog post, if you'd like. There are field stones under the leaf and tree debris, in addition to the two engraved stones.
DeleteI live next to the cemetery and I purchased the plaque along with cleaning it up until some neighbors didn't want me to keep cleaning it up. They even called the county who came out and said I hadn't done anything wrong by removing debris. That was 10 years ago and now I just look at the limbs all over it and downed trees that lifted some of the markers up.
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