Legato School
The Legato School is the last of Fairfax County’s one-room schoolhouses. It has been restored and furnished as it was in the 1870s, and is operated as a museum. It was here that first to eighth grade students of western Fairfax County were taught the three Rs from 1870 until 1930. The schoolhouse was originally located at the intersection of Pender and Legato Roads. The building now sits upon the grounds of the Fairfax County Courthouse, Route 123 near Main Street, in Fairfax City, Virginia.
One elderly gentleman once described Virginia’s educational system in those impoverished times as teaching “The Three ‘Rs’ … Readin’, Writin’ and Road to Washington.” Today, Fairfax County, Virginia is one of the most affluent and educated counties of the entire United States.
In June of this year my Red Hats group were given a tour of the Fairfax County Courthouse construction site by project manager Ellen vanHully-Bronson. Parts of the courthouse were complete with carpet and finishes. Other areas were very much still a construction site. When completed the almost $100 million 316,000-square-foot expansion will more than double the size of the existing Jennings Judicial Center. The new courthouse is a five-story reinforced concrete-framed structure surrounded by a serpentine Jeffersonian brick wall. There are fourteen fitted-out courtrooms and three shells of courtrooms for future expansion, fourteen elevators, larger holding cells, a new law library, a beautiful courtyard and a state of the art security system.
Here is the slideshow: Courthouse Construction Site June 2007.
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Tabitha Forgotten
“Show me your cemeteries, and I will tell you what kind of people you have.” ~~Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
Broken Tombstone ~ BROKEN HEART
The graves of Tabitha and her family are not only forgotten; they are abused, vandalized and desecrated by those who now live in upscale suburban homes upon the very Virginia land that Tabitha and James Grimseley once cared for and farmed. It is a heartbreaking disgrace for neighbors of a cemetery to treat it with such disrespect.
Grimesley Family Cemetery, Chancellor Way, near the corner of Mulberry Bottom Lane, Saratoga, Virginia (Google Map) is an old family cemetery in southern Fairfax County, Virginia, located between two suburban homes. There are carved markers for James Grimesley, his wife Tabitha, Augustine W. Grimsley, and his wife Mary. There are other unreadable stones and field-stone markers, that with each passing season are blanketed higher and higher with grass clippings, garden debris and other refuse from the living neighbors of these dead Virginians. Rubbish is dumped upon the earthly remains of these immortal souls because the present caretakers of God’s land regard the former caretakers as naught but rubbish also. More at Saving Graves.
James and Tabitha were once vibrant living beings when they lived upon this land and their names are recorded for posterity on the 1880 Census of Fairfax County in the Lee District. (James GRIMSLEY – Farming)
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The image, Broken Tombstone, was originally uploaded by barneykin. It is posted here from Neddy’s .
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