[41] Martin, Gazetteer, pp. 168–169.
[42] Marshall Andrews, "A History of Railroads in Fairfax County", Yearbook of the Historical Society of Fairfax County, III (1954), 30–31.
CHAPTER III
THE COUNTY COURT AND ITS OFFICERS
The functions and officers of the colonial court
In colonial Virginia local government was centered in the County Court. Its origins as a political and social institution have been attributed to various prototypes in Tudor and earlier English history. By the time Fairfax County was established in 1742, this institution and its functions in colonial Virginia had been clearly formulated and accepted.[43]
The County Court evolved from the colony's original court established at Jamestown and consisting of the Governor and Council sitting as a judicial tribunal. In 1618, the Governor ordered courts to be held monthly at convenient places throughout the colony to save litigants the expense of traveling to Jamestown. Steadily the numbers of these courts increased and their jurisdiction expanded until, by the end of the seventeenth century, these local courts could hear all cases except those for which capital punishment was provided. In effect, their jurisdiction combined the contemporary English government's King's Bench, Common Pleas, Chancery, Exchequer, Admiralty, and Ecclesiastical courts.
During this period the local courts acquired numerous non-judicial responsibilities connected with the transaction of public and private affairs. Because of both tradition and convenience, the County Court was the logical agency to set tax rates, oversee the survey of roads and construction of bridges, approve inventories and appraisals of estates, record the conveyance of land, and the like. Therefore, the court's work reflected a mixture of judicial and administrative functions, and the officers of the court became the chief magistrates of the Crown and of their communities. Once this pattern of authority and organization was developed, it continued with very few basic changes throughout the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries.
Highest in the hierarchy of the officers of the county and the court were the justices. Originally designated as "commissioners", and, by the 1850's referred to as "magistrates", their full title was "Justice of the Peace" after their English counterparts of this period.[44] Popular usage in Virginia, however, fostered the custom of speaking of the members of the court as "Gentleman Justices". They were both the products and caretakers of a system that placed control of public affairs in the hands of an aristocratic class, and at any time in the County's history up to mid-nineteenth century a list of the County's justices was certain to include the best leadership the County had.