Moss Family Cemetery

Here follows an excerpt from the Fairfax Genealogical Society website:

MOSS FAMILY CEMETERY
4603 Green Spring Road
Lincolnia, Virginia USA

Original Information from Volume 5 of the Gravestone Books

Green Spring Farm, home to the Moss family, is located at 4603 Green Spring Road, just north of Little River Turnpike (Route 236) and east of Braddock Road (Route 620). The grounds of Green Spring Farm are now a part of the Fairfax County Park Authority and open to the public as Green Spring Gardens Park with a botanical garden and a horticultural center. The manor house is open to the public Wednesday to Saturday, from 12:00 to 4:00 p.m.

According to descriptive markers at the site and a 1969 Historic American Buildings Survey Inventory, the house at Green Spring Farm was built in about 1760, by John Moss, who died in 1809. The farm passed to John Moss’s third son William, and when William died in 1835, his younger brother Thomas inherited the property. Thomas Moss died in 1839, and the farm was sold by his heirs. The 1839 court case of Moss & Love vs. Heirs of Thomas Moss (CFF #62W), reserved “25 poles for a family burying ground.”

A marker at the site presented by the Jamestown Chapter, Virginia State Society, National Society of Colonial Dames XVII Century, states that “by 1835 the farm supported dairy cattle, grain crops and orchards.”

After the Moss family left, according to information at the park, the house and grounds sank into a decline through the Civil War. The farm was purchased by Captain Fountain Beattie, a former member of Mosby’s Raiders, whose twelve children worked the farm and turned the property into a successful farm again. Beattie remained close friends with Colonel John Singleton Mosby, the commander of the Raiders, who was often a guest at Green Spring Farm.

After the Beattie tenure, the house and farm once again fell into ruins and was completely restored in the 1930s by Minnie Whitsell. At the time of the buildings survey in 1969, the farm was owned by writer and publisher Michael Straight and his wife Belinda who donated the house and sixteen acres to Fairfax County in 1970.

The exact location of the family cemetery is not known, although a park employee told the 1998 surveyor that it may be in the “hemlock area” or near the spring house. According to local tradition, the wife of one of the previous caretakers did not like seeing gravestones from the caretaker’s cottage, so she had them removed from the site. (The spring house was converted to a residence for the farm’s caretaker in the 1940s.)

Brian Conley, Information Specialist in the Virginia Room of the Fairfax City Regional Library states that John, William and Thomas Moss all owned slaves, so it is most likely that there is also a slave cemetery on the grounds of Green Spring Farm.

No Updates from Volume 6 of the Gravestone Books