Tiny Fairfax Stone State Park marks the meeting point for Preston, Grant and Tucker counties and for West Virginia's border with Maryland at the north branch of the Potomac River. But two centuries earlier, the stone marked the western boundary of land granted to Lord Fairfax by the King of England in the 1700s.
It became part of the state park system in 1957, when the West Virginia Central and Pittsburgh Railway Company gifted it to the state. The original stone erected for Lord Fairfax in 1746 had been a small pyramid of sandstone bearing the letters "F X." Vandals destroyed it in 1910, and the original stone was replaced. After the area became a state park, officials replaced the stone again, with a natural boulder featuring a bronze tablet.
Park Focus author Audrey Stanton-Smith is a West Virginia writer and journalist.
