Mason Family History in the Classroom
In 2012, Fenwick Library’s Special Collections Research Center bought the account book for Raspberry Plain plantation. The farm had once been owned by Stevens Thomson Mason, brother of George Mason IV, for whom George Mason University is named, and his son Armistead Thomson Mason. This ledger, which covers the period from 1792 to 1820, reflects transactions of all sorts at the plantation.
In Spring 2020, Cynthia Kierner and George Oberle, who are both professors in the GMU Department of History and Art History, decided to make this account book the centerpiece of a new course “Mason Legacies.” They would teach local history and documentary editing through the ledger, while giving students a chance to experience the past first-hand. The course, which has now been running for six years straight, ultimately aims to transcribe and edit the book in its entirety, making it available to scholars and the public as a digital history project.
Enrolled students begin by reading scholarly sources on a range of subjects, including local history, agriculture, slavery, and property law, so they can better understand the transactions recorded in the account book. They then transcribe parts of the book. As they work, students also annotate their transcriptions, explaining strange abbreviations or identifying places, laws, publications, and other important contextual information. Finally, they write biographical sketches for each person mentioned in the account book—when the project is finished, there will be around one thousand, all told. Most of these people, Professor Kierner notes, “are incredibly obscure,” meaning that this project offers a unique “cross-section of the people who lived in Loudoun County” around the turn of the nineteenth century.
Indeed, the account book provides a wealth of information about life in Loudoun County a generation after the founding of the United States. As one of the leading planter families in the area, the Masons were involved in shipping local crops to Alexandria merchants. These sales often involved bartering for consumer goods. At Raspberry Plain, the Masons then supplied local farmers with those goods from their storehouse, while also hiring locals to work in various capacities. Because the Masons were also lawyers, some of the ledger entries recorded legal fees paid to them, or fees they paid to people who acted as witnesses or provided other legal services. A few estate accounts also appear in the book when the Masons acted as administrators or executors.
The ledger not only provides insight into individual lives but also offers rich contextual information about how the economy of early modern Virginia worked. It underscores, for instance, the lack of specialization in this period, the importance of grain-based agriculture, and, of course, slavery’s centrality. In fact, because the account book provides so much information on the administration of the plantation after the death of its owner, it also affords historians an understanding of how these deaths affected enslaved people.
Because this book is a unique source offering rich insights into an important moment in American history, the course has been a popular one for Mason students. Not only has it whetted their appetites for research, though, it has also led them into internships with both the Center for Mason Legacies, which Professor Oberle directs, as well as the Fairfax County Courthouse Historic Records Center. For graduate students, the class has led to MA and doctoral research projects. The class “helped solidify” his PhD dissertation topic, says David Armstrong, a student in the doctoral History program. For PhD candidate Tom Seabrook, Mason Legacies “helped me hone my skills as a researcher, introducing me to primary sources that I had not previously considered as windows onto the lives of individuals. The experience of writing biographies of enslaved people, who had all but disappeared from the archives, was a powerful reminder of the value of historical research to amplifying silenced voices.” Earlier this year, three PhD students presented their work on the project at the Virginia Forum, a highly-regarded annual conference on Virginia History.
Professors Kierner and Oberle plan to continue teaching the class until they have finished the work of transcribing and annotating the account book. They also hope to write essays that will further contextualize the information found within it. Yet, while the source is a gold-mine for Virginia historians, Professor Kierner underscores its importance to education: “it’s hard to over-estimate the value of having students find and engage with primary sources, ranging from moldy old county records to the databases available via Fenwick Library.”
August 07, 2025