Around 1745, John Minor proposed laying out a town called Cameron on 25 acres at the head of Great Hunting Creek, near today’s Telegraph Road bridge. The town never materialized beyond an ordinary, but “Cameron” stuck as a landmark — Washington’s diaries record militia musters and horse races there — and by the end of the century the name had attached to the Cameron Mills on the creek. The real commercial center was the tobacco inspection warehouse on the Potomac, where Scottish merchants John Carlyle, later buried at the Presbyterian Meeting House, and William Ramsay, whose lost grave lies in the Christ Church burial ground, pressed for a town in 1748–49 — Alexandria.
