The town that John Minor had proposed at Cameron never materialized, but by the 1790s the name was busier than ever. The West family, who had held the land since Major John West bought into it in 1698, were selling. Thomas West began parting with pieces of the farm to cover debts in 1790; business partners John Stump and David Ricketts bought the mill seats in 1793 and built a pair of merchant mills near the head of Great Hunting Creek that took the old name, Cameron Mills. A new farmhouse rose beside them around 1800.
In 1803, a year before his death, Thomas West put what remained up for public auction with one condition: a twenty-by-twenty-foot square around the family vault was held back, and his heirs kept the right to return to repair it and bury their dead. Inside that vault lay Colonel George West, Sybil Harrison West, and Sybil West Carlyle, John Carlyle’s second wife, with the infant daughter who died with her in 1769.
The vault lasted longer than the memory of it. Archaeologists found the collapsed brick chamber in 1999 as the Hoffman Town Center was being planned, and in 2003 they removed all fourteen people buried there, seven inside the vault and seven in plain graves outside it. Among the latter was a man buried with a quartz crystal and a smoothed stone, a practice that suggests he was of African descent and not a member of the family. All fourteen were reburied at Pohick Church in Lorton, where a memorial stone now marks them.
Read the full archaeological report: Site Report – Hoffman Town Center, 2410 Mill Road (PDF)
