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History’s Crossroads
article and photos by Bill Bruzy RECENTLY, I HAD A chance to go to Fairfax, Virginia on what’s called a press trip. I jumped at it. Fairfax — a short train ride to/from Washington, DC — is fascinatingly historical and beautiful, and, being close to the heart of the nation’s power, is alive with the energy that drives our world. So it interested me. And I liked the press trip idea. That’s a travel trip, by the way, where a public relations company takes writers to some locale hoping the writers will think favorably and write positively about the place. Of course, being treated very well could eat away at objectivity. When a writer from the New York Times publishes a travel article, it’s not about a trip sponsored by a public relations firm. But I often work in the lower rungs of writing — down from the Times and Conde Nast. It’s a Dantesque hell of a place with many rungs descending to the core of writers’ hell. (At the lowest level of writers’ hell, you have to crank your laptop by hand, and you only get to write obituaries of people no one knows). I’m about six rungs up from there. We have batteries in our laptops and we get to write about sponsored trips. Frankly, it’s hard not to. Take this from a guy who has done his own laundry for years. Being treated like an honored guest, getting access to people and attractions without all the hassle is a very, very nice thing. Like I said, especially for a guy who cleans out the cat box and does all the vacuuming. So, off I went to Fairfax. Close to DC, urban sprawl has marched over the area like the Union Army in the Civil War. But once you get through the ubiquitous big-box outer ring, Fairfax is a charming, little (population 20,000), historic community, and a nice place to stay. The restaurants, catering to the well-traveled tastes of the urbane population, are excellent. And it’s much more reasonably priced than DC and, frankly, a lot calmer. An easy commute, a half-hour Metro train ride drops you right in the middle of the DC Mall. Fairfax, the heart of town, is small and well-preserved, historically speaking. Thirty-five acres of the town, including the downtown business district, is a nationally registered historic district. Long-known as a crossroads for commerce, travel, and war, the sedate and settled look of modern Fairfax clouds its reality of being fairly central to national and global changes over the last 200 years. Now something of a bedroom community for DC, it was once the place that sat in the middle of the pitched battles of America’s bloodiest conflict, the Civil War — in which more Americans died than in all other wars combined. At the time of gathering hostilities, Fairfax was in a delicate situation. It was located very close to the dividing line between North and South, being just southwest of Washington. The Confederate capital had been established in Richmond, Virginia, 100 miles to the south. Something decisive was bound to happen in the region as tensions built between Washington and Richmond, North and South, one way of life and another. In an early clash in Fairfax, on the courthouse lawn, a headline event read around the world was the death of Confederate Captain John Quincy Marr in a small skirmish with |
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