Henry Fairfax (4 May 1850–11 July 1916), member of the Convention of 1901–1902 and judge of the State Corporation Commission, was born in Alexandria and was the son of Mary Jane Rogers Fairfax and John Walter Fairfax, a wealthy Loudoun County planter who owned seventeen enslaved workers in 1860. He graduated from the Virginia Military Institute in 1871. Fairfax practiced civil engineering in Pennsylvania and other states until 1879, when he began accepting railroad construction contracts for several lines, including the Norfolk and Western Railroad and the Shenandoah Valley Railroad. Late in 1884 he chartered the Pocahontas Coal Company, with himself as president, to buy coal and coke mined in and around Tazewell County. Fairfax maintained an office in Roanoke and served on the city council for about three months in 1885. That year he purchased and returned to Oak Hill, his childhood home in Loudoun County that had also once been the residence of James Monroe. In Richmond on 4 June 1896, at the age of forty-six, Fairfax married twenty-three-year-old Eugenia Baskerville Tennant, daughter of David Brydon Tennant, a prominent Petersburg tobacconist. Of their four children, one daughter survived childhood and later married Edwin Parker Conquest, a civic leader and chair of the Richmond Regional Planning and Economic Development Commission.
Campaigning as a Democrat who favored reducing railroad rates for farmers, Fairfax won election in 1890 to complete an unexpired term representing Fauquier and Loudoun Counties in the Senate of Virginia. He was reelected in 1893 and 1897 but declined renomination in 1901. In each session Fairfax sat on the Committees of Privileges and Elections (as ranking member in 1897 and 1899) and on Finance and Banks (as chair in 1897 and 1899). For all but the final assembly session he served on the Committee to Examine the Treasurer's Office, which he chaired in 1893 and 1895. During his first term he also sat on the Committee on Fish and Game, but in subsequent years he served on the Committee of Agriculture, Mining, and Manufacturing (as ranking member in 1899).
Running unopposed, Fairfax won election on 23 May 1901 to represent Loudoun County in the state constitutional convention that met from 12 June 1901 until 26 June 1902. As the delegates gathered, he told a reporter for the Richmond Times that he had nothing to suggest for the consideration of the convention. Fairfax served on the Committee on the Executive Department, Ministerial Officers of the State Government, and Bureaus and on the Committee on Agricultural, Manufacturing and Industrial Interests, and Immigration. Also appointed ranking member of the Committee on Taxation and Finance, he became its chair in November 1901 after the incumbent resigned for health reasons.
Fairfax did not believe himself an effective public speaker. He addressed the convention on several occasions, once on 23 October 1901 regarding the appointment of tax assessors and again on 9 January 1902 when he strongly and successfully opposed a provision to mandate a state appropriation for the University of Virginia in the absence of a similar provision favoring his alma mater VMI. He also introduced a resolution calling for the creation of a state tax commission. On 4 April 1902 Fairfax voted with the majority in favor of restrictive voter registration requirements designed to reduce the number of Black and poor white voters, and on 29 May he again sided with the majority to proclaim the new constitution in effect rather than submit it to the electorate for ratification. On 6 June he voted for adoption of the constitution.
On 18 November 1902 the governor nominated Fairfax, who had a reputation as an expert on taxation and finance, to the new State Corporation Commission (SCC), which the Convention of 1901–1902 had created and endowed with executive, judicial, and legislative powers to charter corporations, regulate rates for freight and passengers on common carriers, and enforce laws governing rates charged by public utilities. The House of Delegates confirmed the appointment the following day for a term ending on 1 February 1906. Despite having helped to construct railroads as a civil engineer years before, Fairfax was seen as a friend of the people and did no favors for the railroads or big business. Although none of the three judges had prior regulatory experience, during Fairfax's term the SCC more than doubled state taxes derived from railroad properties, compelled the Standard Oil Company, a New Jersey corporation, to obtain a license to do business in Virginia (for which it paid $5,000), and began the process of requiring railroads to use shipper-friendly uniform freight rate classifications. The SCC also authorized a railroad to allow rate concessions on construction materials destined for a church and free transportation for packages consigned to an annual Confederate bazaar. The Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals generally upheld the hundreds of SCC decisions issued during Fairfax's term. He resigned from the SCC effective 1 October 1905, four months short of his term's end.
Fairfax retired to Oak Hill, where he devoted his time to farming. From 1909 until his death he served as president of the Virginia State Fair Association. A premier breeder of imported English hackney horses with American thoroughbreds, Fairfax helped found the American Hackney Horse Society in 1891 and served consecutively as its vice president and president for about twenty years. In 1908 the VMI board of visitors considered him for the post of superintendent, or president, of the school. Henry Fairfax died at a Leesburg hospital on 11 July 1916 of complications from appendicitis. He was buried in that city's Union Cemetery.
Sources Consulted:
Biography in Edward N. Wentworth, A Biographical Catalog of the Portrait Gallery of the Saddle and Sirloin Club (1920), 39–40; self-reported birth date in John Garland Pollard, comp., data for biographical sketches of members of the Virginia Convention of 1901–1902, compiled 1901, Virginia Museum of History and Culture (VMHC), Richmond; Marriage Register, Richmond City, Bureau of Vital Statistics (BVS), Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia (LVA); State Corporate Commission Charter Book, Record Group 112, 5:195–198, LVA; Leesburg Mirror, 23 Oct. 1890, 11 June 1896; Richmond Times, 12 June 1901; Richmond Evening Leader, 18 Nov. 1902; Secretary of the Commonwealth, Election Records, 1776–1941, No. 47, State Government Records Collection, Record Group 13, LVA; Virginia Convention of 1901–1902, [Photographs of Members], unpublished bound photograph album of convention members [1902], copies at LVA and VMHC (portrait); Journal of the Constitutional Convention of Virginia [1902], 486–487, 504–505, 535; Report of the Proceedings and Debates of the Constitutional Convention, State of Virginia (1906), 1:929–930, 2:1760–1761, 2624–2625; Resolutions of the Constitutional Convention of 1901–1902 [1901–1902], no. 176; Virginia General Assembly, House of Delegates, Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia (1776– ), 1902 sess., 85, 89, 1906 sess., 32; George Harrison Gilliam, "Making Virginia Progressive: Courts and Parties, Railroads and Regulators, 1890–1910," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 107 (1999): 189–222; BVS Death Certificate, Loudoun Co.; obituaries in Richmond News Leader, 12 July 1916, Richmond Times-Dispatch, 12 July 1916, Baltimore Sun, 13 July 1916, and Fairfax Herald, 14 July 1916; funeral account in Leesburg Loudoun Mirror, 21 July 1916; tributes and memorials in Richmond News Leader, 13 July 1916, Richmond Times-Dispatch, 13 July 1916, and William and Mary Quarterly, 1st ser., 25 (1916): 140–43.
Photograph in Members and officers of the Constitutional Convention of Virginia, Richmond, 1901–'2, Virginia Legislature Photograph Collection, Library of Virginia.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by George Harrison Gilliam.
How to cite this page:
George Harrison Gilliam, "Henry Fairfax (1850–1916)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2025 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Fairfax_Henry, accessed [today's date]).
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