The Fairfax Independent Company was organized in Fairfax County in September 1774, seven months before the fighting at Lexington and Concord. Its members, men of Alexandria and the surrounding county, called themselves the Fairfax Independent Company of Volunteers, and they trained in blue coats faced with buff. George Washington was their patron. He reviewed them in Alexandria, paid toward their expenses, and spent much of the winter before the Revolution exercising with them. Many of the men who rest in Alexandria’s historic burial grounds knew this company well. Several of them marched in its ranks, and their names appear in our registry of Revolutionary War patriots.
How the Company Began
On September 21, 1774, a meeting of Fairfax County gentlemen and freeholders, with George Mason in the chair, signed an association forming a volunteer company of no more than one hundred men. The members agreed to elect their own officers and to master “the military exercise and discipline.” Each man was to keep at least six pounds of gunpowder, twenty pounds of lead, and fifty flints on hand.
Their stated reasons are worth reading closely. The association pointed to danger from the “Indian Enemy” on the frontier and to threats against “our civil rights and liberty.” It also pledged to defend the lawful prerogatives of King George III alongside the rights of the colonists. In the fall of 1774, these men still saw themselves as loyal British subjects standing up for British rights.
By October 19, forty-nine men had signed. That day three of them wrote to Washington, who was then at the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. They were Dr. William Rumney, Robert Hanson Harrison, and John Fitzgerald, and they asked him to find the company a pair of colours, two drums, two fifes, and two halberds.
Blue and Buff
The association set out a uniform of blue “turned up with buff,” with buff waistcoat and breeches, white stockings, and plain yellow buttons. In November 1774, Andrew Judge, an indentured tailor at Mount Vernon, made Washington a suit of regimentals. In December he made regimentals for Lund Washington and John Parke Custis as well. The editors of Washington’s papers judge that this blue and buff suit was almost certainly the uniform Washington wore at the Second Continental Congress, where he was chosen commander in chief in June 1775.
Washington and the Company: A Timeline
- January 16–17, 1775: Washington rides to Alexandria to review the company and remains “under arms” the next day. He records a subscription of one pound toward the company’s expenses. On the evening of the 17th, the Fairfax County Committee meets with Washington as chairman and Robert Hanson Harrison as clerk. The committee calls for a tax of three shillings per tithable to buy ammunition and urges men from sixteen to fifty to form militia companies of sixty-eight.
- January 23, 1775: Washington asks his Philadelphia agent, William Milnor, to send eight shoulder knots for the company’s sergeants and corporals, and he charges the cost to himself.
- February 18, 1775: Washington goes to Alexandria “to meet & exercise the Independant Company.”
- April 15, 1775: He attends the company’s muster.
- April 18, 1775: Milnor reports that he stopped the sash-maker’s work after seeing the first sash, which he had sent to Mr. Gilpin.
- April 26 and May 1, 1775: Washington meets the company in Alexandria again.
- May 4, 1775: Washington leaves for the Second Continental Congress.
- June 20, 1775: Now commander in chief, Washington writes a farewell to the officers of five Virginia independent companies, Fairfax’s among them. He urges them never to relax the discipline of their men.
- July 8, 1775: The Fairfax company replies with its congratulations. The members tell him they will cheerfully march to Cambridge, or anywhere else, if he thinks it expedient.
The Officers
A modern guide to Virginia’s Revolutionary units names William Ramsay, one of Alexandria’s founders, as the company’s first captain, with Robert Hanson Harrison as first lieutenant. By the summer of 1775, the company’s letter to Washington was signed by Captain James Hendricks and Lieutenants George Gilpin and Robert Hanson Harrison. Harrison went on to serve as Washington’s secretary for most of the war. John Fitzgerald, one of the three signers of the October 1774 letter, became one of Washington’s aides-de-camp.
The Size Roll
Sometime in April or May 1775, someone listed the company’s men by height. Companies used a “size roll” like this to arrange their ranks. The original survives among Washington’s papers at the Library of Congress. The published transcription names fifty-six men, running roughly from shortest to tallest: John Kearns at 5 feet 3¾ inches to Peter Waggener at 6 feet 3.
The names include Lund Washington, the general’s cousin and the manager of Mount Vernon, and Martin Cockburn, George Mason’s neighbor. Among the Alexandrians are Richard Conway, John Fitzgerald, Alexander Henderson, Charles Little, William Bushby, and James Kirk, a future mayor of Alexandria. The company’s two physicians, Dr. William Rumney and Dr. William Brown, are on it as well. Captain Hendricks and Lieutenant Gilpin do not appear on the roll.
In Alexandria’s Burial Grounds
Six men connected to the company are documented in our Revolutionary War patriots registry.
- Captain William Ramsay rests in the Christ Church burial ground in Old Town, with no surviving marker.
- Colonel George Gilpin‘s presumptive resting place is in Christ Church Cemetery in the Wilkes Street Cemetery Complex.
- Four men on the size roll are in the registry as well:
- Colonel Dennis Ramsay, William’s son, in the Presbyterian Cemetery
- The brothers David and Samuel Arell, in the Old Presbyterian Meeting House burial ground
- Benjamin Dulany, at the lost Shuter’s Hill cemetery
Other men on the roll may rest in Alexandria ground as well, and that research continues.
The End of the Company
On August 21, 1775, the Third Virginia Convention ordered the volunteer companies disbanded once the new minute-man battalions in their districts were fully formed. The next day, George Mason wrote to Martin Cockburn, himself a man on the size roll, that the volunteer companies were “all discharged & melted down” into the new regiments of minute men.
On September 29, Lund Washington reported that a great many members of “our Company,” about forty in his estimate, had been chosen as officers for the minute service and the county militia. Gilpin, Dulany, and Cockburn were among the militia captains he believed had been named. The members who remained planned to carry on as a militia company. In just over a year, a volunteer company of Alexandria gentlemen had supplied much of the leadership of Fairfax County’s Revolutionary forces.
Sources
This page draws on the transcription and documentary history prepared by William C. Schneck Jr. and C. Leon Harris, with thanks for their work.
- Size Roll of the Independant Company of Alexandria, [April–May 1775]. George Washington Papers, Library of Congress.
https://cdn.loc.gov/master/mss/mgw/mgw4/033/0500/0574.jpg - William C. Schneck Jr. and C. Leon Harris, transcribers and annotators, “Size Roll of the Independent Company of Alexandria, Virginia, April–May 1775.” Southern Campaigns American Revolution Pension Statements and Rosters.
https://revwarapps.org/b382.pdf - Fairfax Independent Company association, September 21, 1774. In Kate Mason Rowland, The Life of George Mason, 1725–1792, vol. 1 (1892), 181–182.
https://books.google.com/books?id=F0F6TuWe_LwC - Fairfax Independent Company of Volunteers to George Washington, October 19, 1774, with editorial note. Founders Online, National Archives.
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-10-02-0113 - Donald Jackson and Dorothy Twohig, eds., The Diaries of George Washington, vol. 3 (1978), entries for January 16–19, February 18, April 15 and 26, and May 1 and 4, 1775.
https://www.loc.gov/resource/mgwd.wd03/?sp=321 - George Washington, Cash Accounts, January 16, 1775. Founders Online.
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-10-02-0158 - Resolutions of the Fairfax County Committee, January 17, 1775. Virginia Gazette (Pinkney), February 2, 1775.
- George Washington to William Milnor, January 23, 1775; William Milnor to George Washington, April 18, 1775.Founders Online.
First link: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-10-02-0174
Second link: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-10-02-0263 - George Washington to the Officers of Five Virginia Independent Companies, June 20, 1775; Fairfax Independent Company to George Washington, July 8, 1775. Founders Online.
First link: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-01-02-0008
Second link: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-01-02-0042 - “An Ordinance for Raising and Embodying a Sufficient Force, for the Defence and Protection of this Colony,” August 21, 1775. William Waller Hening, The Statutes at Large, vol. 9, 9–35.
http://vagenweb.org/hening/vol09-01.htm - George Mason to Martin Cockburn, August 22, 1775. Calendar of Virginia State Papers, vol. 1, 269.
http://books.google.com/books?id=pKwFAAAAQAAJ - Lund Washington to George Washington, September 29, 1775. Founders Online.
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-02-02-0061 - E. M. Sanchez-Saavedra, A Guide to Virginia Military Organizations in the American Revolution, 1774–1787.
First published: September 2026