Greenway Court is a historic country estate near
White Post in rural
Clarke County, Virginia
Clarke County is a County (United States), county in the Virginia, Commonwealth of Virginia. As of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, the population was 14,783. Its county seat is Berryville, Virginia, Berryville. Clarke County is inc ...
. The property is the site of the seat of the vast 18th-century land empire of
Thomas Fairfax, 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron
Thomas Fairfax, 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron (22 October 16939 December 1781) was a British-born planter. The only member of the British peerage to permanently reside in British America, Fairfax owned the Northern Neck Proprietary in the Colony ...
(1693–1781), the only ennobled British colonial proprietor to live in one of the North American colonies. The surviving remnants of his
complex
Complex commonly refers to:
* Complexity, the behaviour of a system whose components interact in multiple ways so possible interactions are difficult to describe
** Complex system, a system composed of many components which may interact with each ...
— a later replacement brick house and Fairfax's stone land office — were designated a
National Historic Landmark
A National Historic Landmark (NHL) is a National Register of Historic Places property types, building, district, object, site, or structure that is officially recognized by the Federal government of the United States, United States government f ...
in 1960.
Description
Greenway Court is located down a long private drive on the west side of White Post Road, south of the village of White Post. The property now consists of about , although it was in the 18th century at the center of landholdings over . Its principal feature is a brick farmhouse built in 1828, the original
plantation house
A plantation house is the main house of a plantation, often a substantial farmhouse, which often serves as a symbol for the plantation as a whole. Plantation houses in the Southern United States and in other areas are known as quite grand and ...
having been demolished c. 1834. The main historic structure surviving from the period of the Fairfax residency is the Land Office, a c. 1762 single-story gable-roofed limestone structure, and a timber
smokehouse
A smokehouse (North American) or smokery (British) is a building where meat or fish is curing (food preservation), cured with Smoking (cooking), smoke. The finished product might be stored in the building, sometimes for a year or more.
History
Greenway Court was the center of the "Northern Neck
The Northern Neck is the northernmost of three peninsulas (traditionally called "necks" in Virginia) on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay in the Commonwealth of Virginia (along with the Middle Peninsula and the Virginia Peninsula). The P ...