Grayson Mill (Site)

These coordinates mark the exact location where the mill once stood. No visible remains exist. There are no known photos of the mill. This photo is an example of how another Virginia grist mill was constructed in 1750.


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Benjamin Grayson's Mill was located here by 1750, as shown on the 1760 map.

Here follows an excerpt from "MILLS AND MILL SITES IN FAIRFAX COUNTY, VIRGINIA AND WASHINGTON, DC" written by Marjorie Lundegard with the Friends of Colvin Run Mill on August 10, 2009:

In the 18th century there were few roads. Most people traveled little, either by foot or horse. The roads
were maintained by the owner or renter of the adjacent land. To create a new road, a request was made to
the county court who would appoint two to three men to lay out the new road. The work on the roads was
performed by renters on the land through which the new road was cleared. The roads meandered in order
to avoid hills, streams, and swamps. Some of the roads followed old Indian trails. Sometimes the road
followed a ridge. Construction and maintenance of bridges was the responsibility of the county courts.
There was a bridge at Grayson Mill that crossed Pohick Creek built in 1750.


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Here follows an excerpt from the Find-A-Grave website:

Benjamin Grayson Jr.
1733-1768

Son of Capt. Benjamin Grayson and Susannah (Monroe) Tyler Linton (1695-1752). After Susanna's death in 1752, Benjamin married the Widow Ewell. There were four children, all by Susanna Monroe; Benjamin, Spence, William and Susanna. Benjamin Grayson died in 1757 and was buried at "Belle Air."

Benjamin Grayson Jr. married Elizabeth Osborn Neale, daughter of Christopher Neale and Anne Osborne.

Benjamin Grayson, Jr., continued his father's business at Colchester. An able merchant, he prospered and expanded into new ventures. He added additional lots in Colchester to those inherited from his father. He acquired , BELMONT, the thousand acre Mason Neck plantation. Young Benjamin involved himself in development of a flour mill, bakery and store on the Occoquan, the construction of a new tobacco warehouse in Colchester and even a commercial winery. He became a justice of the Fairfax Court in 1763. Debt accumulated as a result of these ventures, and in 1765 and 1766 his creditors were foreclosing or forcing the sale of his holdings. Benjamin and his wife Elizabeth left for Loudoun County to begin anew. He died in 1768, leaving Elizabeth in a comfortable condition. She, in turn, left a son and a daughter with what has been described as a "handsome estate."

Eastern Loudoun County was also the seat of large plantations owned by rich Tidewater planters. The McCarty land, along the Potomac floodplain near the mouth of Sugarland Run was cleared and planted for tobacco under the direction of Daniel McCarty (grandson of the original Daniel), certainly by 1760. Planting may have begun here earlier, under his father, Dennis. Several large landholdings owned by the Carter's were being worked by numerous tenant farmers and a small number of slaves by 1760 and probably earlier. Benjamin Grayson, who owned the large tract that later became the Belmont plantation (on Route 7), was tithed in 1758 for nine slaves working his property under overseer Moses Botts (Loudoun County, Cameron Parish Tithe Books, Leesburg Courthouse). Daniel McCarty was tithed in 1765 for eight slaves working under overseer William Veal on his Sugarland plantation, and various Carter-family landholders were tithed for thirty-three slaves working several distinct tracts in the same year. Tobacco, corn, wheat, pork, and beef were the products mentioned in the plantation records of Robert Carter of Nomini Hall, for his tracts In the uplands of eastern Loudoun County (Morton 1946). Tobacco was apparently the dominant crop, and we could expect it to have been even more dominant in the floodplain plantation of Daniel McCarty. Tobacco and slaves were part of an agricultural complex not represented among the Quakers and Germans of northern and central Loudoun.

George was not the only Washington in Fairfax County. Seven miles south of Mount Vernon, the home of the nation's first president, lived his cousin Lawrence Washington. He owned about 1,000 acres on the north shore of the Occoquan River in Mason Neck, the first area in the county to be claimed by 17th-century explorers who came up into the branches of the Potomac River. Mason Neck was one of the first areas in present-day Fairfax County to be settled; Gervais Dodson first claimed what was to be Lawrence Washington's land in the 1650s. The land changed hands a few times until Belmont Plantation, one of the county's oldest dwellings, was built before 1727 by Thomas Simpson. The brick house, 25 feet by 19 feet in size, sat on Belmont Plantation, which became Washington's sometime in the 1780s or 1790s. A modest plantation at about 1,000 acres, Belmont was rich in natural resources, overlooking Belmont Bay. A 1765 advertisement in the Maryland Gazette described it in glowing terms: "There is on the Land about 60 Acres of good Meadow, it abounds in Timber … but above all the Fishery is exceeding valuable." Lawrence Washington, who also owned property in Colchester, was a quiet man. He was not given to heavy political involvement as neighbors like George Mason: although Mason was his next-door neighbor (they shared a property line), Mason never mentions Lawrence Washington. Washington married his first cousin Catherine Foote. He waited a long time to propose to her, as his cousin Lund Washington remarked: "I have since been informed that [Washington] did not ask Mr. Foote's [father of Catherine] consent because he knew it would be refused on account of their near relationship, being children of sisters." The Washington's had no children, and when Lawrence died Belmont went to Anne Washington Thompson who lived at Belmont until she died in 1824. Her son took possession of the house after her death and mortgaged the property in pieces when an economic depression caused several local estates (Lexington and Gunston Hall included) to be sold.


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From local researcher Bobby Fontaine:

I believe the reason I can't find anything on it is that a sewage treatment plant was built right there where the mill was; it was just downstream of where they dump treated wastewater,, with Lorton being the lowest valley in the county and empties directly into the Potomac, gravity demanded the plant be built where it is regardless of the historical value of the land. when I first moved here over 30 years ago and heard about the mill from old timers who’d been here their whole lives, I asked why it wasn’t rebuilt or at least memorialized; the answer was that there was nowhere else to put the sewage treatment plant and it didn’t look right showing off where they had to put it; so they erased the mills history along with a lotta other Pohick Creek sites that played critical roles in the founding of the country.