fax_, p. 37.

[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