FAIRMONT, a city and the county-seat of Marion county, West Virginia, U.S.A., on both sides of the Monongahela river, about 75 m. S.E. of Wheeling. Pop. (1890) 1023; (1900) 5655, of whom 283 were negroes and 182 foreign-born; (1910) 9711. It is served by the Baltimore & Ohio railway. Among its manufactures are glass, machinery, flour and furniture, and it is an important shipping point for coal mined in the vicinity. The city is the seat of one of the West Virginia state normal schools. Fairmont was laid out as Middletown in 1819, became the county-seat of the newly established Marion county in 1842, received its present name about 1844, and was chartered as a city in 1899.
FAIR OAKS, a station on a branch of the Southern railway, 6 m. E. of Richmond, Virginia, U.S.A. It is noted as the site of one of the battles of the Civil War, fought on the 31st of May and the 1st of June 1862, between the Union (Army of the Potomac) under General G.B. McClellan and the Confederate forces (Army of Northern Virginia) commanded by General J.E. Johnston. The attack of the Confederates was made at a moment when the river Chickahominy divided the Federal army into two unequal parts, and was, moreover, swollen to such a degree as to endanger the bridges. General Johnston stationed part of his troops along the river to prevent the Federals sending aid to the smaller force south of it, upon which the Confederate attack, commanded by General Longstreet, was directed. Many accidents, due to the inexperience of the staff officers and to the difficulty of the ground, hindered the development of Longstreet’s attack, but the Federals were gradually driven back with a loss of ten guns, though at the last moment reinforcements managed to cross the river and re-establish the line of defence. At the close of the day Johnston was severely wounded, and General G.W. Smith succeeded to the command. The battle was renewed on the 1st of June but not fought out. At the close of the action General R.E. Lee took over the command of the Confederates, which he held till the final surrender in April 1865. So far as the victory lay with either side, it was with the Union army, for the Confederates failed to achieve their purpose of destroying the almost isolated left wing of McClellan’s army, and after the battle they withdrew into the lines of Richmond. The Union losses were 5031 in killed, wounded and missing; those of the Confederates were 6134. The battle is sometimes known as the battle of Seven Pines.
FAIRŪZĀBĀDĪ Ābū-ṭ-Ṭāhir ibn Ibrahīm Majd ud-Dīn ul-Fairūzābādī] (1329-1414), Arabian lexicographer, was born at Kārazīn near Shiraz. His student days were spent in Shiraz, Wāsiṭ, Bagdad and Damascus. He taught for ten years in Jerusalem, and afterwards travelled in western Asia and Egypt. In 1368 he settled in Mecca, where he remained for fifteen years. He next visited India and spent some time in Delhi, then remained in Mecca another ten years. The following three years were spent in Bagdad, in Shiraz (where he was received by Timur), and in Ta’iz. In 1395 he was appointed chief cadi (qadi) of Yemen, married a daughter of the sultan, and died at Zabīd in 1414. During this last period of his life he converted his house at Mecca into a school of Mālikite law and established three teachers in it. He wrote a huge lexicographical work of 60 or 100 volumes uniting the dictionaries of Ibn Sīda, a Spanish philologist (d. 1066), and of Sajānī (d. 1252). A digest of or an extract from this last work is his famous dictionary al-Qāmūs (“the Ocean”), which has been published in Egypt, Constantinople and India, has been translated into Turkish and Persian, and has itself been the basis of several later dictionaries.
(G. W. T.)
FAIRY (Fr. fée, faerie; Prov. fada; Sp. hada; Ital. fata; med. Lat. fatare, to enchant, from Lat. fatum, fate, destiny), the common term for a supposed race of supernatural beings who magically intermeddle in human affairs. Of all the minor creatures of mythology the fairies are the most beautiful, the most numerous, the most memorable in literature. Like all organic growths, whether of nature or of the fancy, they are not the immediate product of one country or of one time; they have a pedigree, and the question of their ancestry and affiliation is one of wide bearing. But mixture and connexion of races have in this as in many other cases so changed the original folk-product that it is difficult to disengage and separate the different strains that have gone to the making or moulding of the result as we have it.
It is not in literature, however ancient, that we must look for the early forms of the fairy belief. Many of Homer’s heroes have fairy lemans, called nymphs, fairies taken up into a higher region of poetry and religion; and the fairy leman is notable in the story of Athamas and his cloud bride Nephelē, but this character is as familiar to the unpoetical Eskimo, and to the Red Indians, with their bird-bride and beaver-bride (see A. Lang’s Custom and Myth, “The Story of Cupid and Psyche”). The Gandharvas of Sanskrit poetry are also fairies.
One of the most interesting facts about fairies is the wide distribution and long persistence of the belief in them. They are the chief factor in surviving Irish superstition. Here they dwell in the “raths,” old earth-forts, or earthen bases of later palisaded dwellings of the Norman period, and in the subterranean houses, common also in Scotland. They are an organized people, often called “the army,” and their life corresponds to human life in all particulars. They carry off children, leaving changeling substitutes, transport men and women into fairyland, and are generally the causes of all mysterious phenomena. Whirls of dust are caused by the fairy marching army, as by the being called Kutchi in the Dieri tribe of Australia. In 1907, in northern Ireland, a farmer’s house was troubled with flying stones (see [Poltergeist]). The neighbours said that the fairies caused the phenomenon, as the man had swept his chimney with a bough of holly, and the holly is “a gentle tree,” dear to the fairies. The fairy changeling belief also exists in some districts of Argyll, and a fairy boy dwelt long in a small farm-house in Glencoe, now unoccupied.