Chopawamsic (plantation)

Chopawamsic was an eighteenth century plantation of more than 2,000 acres on Chopawamsic Creek in Stafford County, Virginia, its name an Algonquian word meaning isolated lodge. George Mason II built its manor house from locally quarried sandstone after selling his father Accokeek property, and worked the estate tobacco fields and orchard with enslaved labor; his 1715 will named 21 enslaved people held there. The plantation passed through several generations of the Mason family, including the boyhood years of the Founding Father George Mason IV, and was the birthplace of Thomson Mason and his son Stevens Thomson Mason. The sandstone manor did not survive the Civil War, and in 1942 the United States government took most of the former plantation land to form Marine Corps Base Quantico.