An early wealthy colonial family, Washington made connections with them as a kid.
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The Fairfax family of Fairfax County, Virginia, lived in a splendid brick mansion called Belvoir on the Potomac River four miles downstream from Mount Vernon. In his youth, George Washington developed lifelong friendships with several members of the Fairfax family and established social connections that would propel him to prominence as a young surveyor, soldier, and politician. George Washington fondly remembered his time with the Fairfaxes as "the happiest moments of my life."1
The Fairfaxes were descended from a prominent family based in Yorkshire, England, that had obtained a Scottish peerage from King Charles I in 1627. By 1719, Thomas Fairfax the sixth Baron of Cameron, inherited control of the vast Northern Neck Proprietary, a five million acre land grant between Virginia's Rappahannock and Potomac rivers. In 1734 he asked his cousin William Fairfax to act as his land agent in Virginia. By 1743, William and his family were comfortably settled into their new home on the Potomac. That same year Lawrence Washington married Colonel William Fairfax's eldest daughter Ann and the couple settled down at the newly re-named Mount Vernon, just across Dogue Creek from Belvoir.
Lawrence's younger brother George Washington became a part of the extended Fairfax family. He became a frequent foxhunting companion of Colonel Fairfax, who took an active interest in Washington's career. In 1748, Washington accompanied the Colonel's eldest son George William Fairfax on a surveying expedition across the Blue Ridge Mountains to Lord Fairfax's lands in the Shenandoah Valley.
