DEATH OF LOUD FAIRFAX

New Zealand Mail, 29 November 1900, Page 17

DEATH OF LOUD FAIRFAX

A ROMANCE OF THE PEERAGE,

John Contee Fairfax, peer of Scotland, eleventh Baron Fairfax uf Cameron, one % .™ e ancestors was qc’mmander-in-hatff of t] \ e Pai'hamentary forces at the battle of Marsten Moor, while anotlie? married the Hon. Miss Colenenner, and founded an American familv in Virginia died on Friday. Sept. 28, at his olantanon Northampton, Prince George county, Maryland. Probably no man ever bore his title with less ostentation tor neither he nor his elder brother, from whom, he inherited the peerage, would ever take measures to have it confirmed. Albert xtirhy Fairfax, to whom the barony now descends, is a clerk in a New loiw banking house,Messrs Brownßrotiiers and Co. The late peer lived the hie Oi a gentleman farmer in the South, the only title by which lie was known uas that of doctor, which he obtained as a graduate of the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania. When he was a lad his family left Virginia and moved to the heights or Georgetown, where he received liis first education! He graduated from Princeton, and later became a doctor ot medicine and rejoined his mother at Washington. When the War of the Rebellion broke'out his family, as Southern sympathisers, found matters so disagreeable for them that they moved to a point near Bcisvilie, in Maryland. Thenceforth Dr Fairfax, who had. married the daughter of Colonel Kirby, o': the United States army, resided, on the lands and modest fortune which descended to him. He inherited the title in 1863 upon the death cf liis brother Charles, a sturdy Democrat, who lived fox* many years at San Francisco. The Northampton plantation consists of about 700 acres and a house over 150 years old. The title, although the late peer never formally assumed it, was officially recognised by the Court of Great Britain, and frequently letters arrived at Northampton bearin'*official seals, inviting Baron Fairfax of Cameron to Court functions.' Lord Fairfax, who was 70 years old. leaves six children. _ His sons, Albert Kirby and Charles Edmund, and one of his daughters, Mary Cecilia, live in New York; another daughter, Josephine, now Mrs T ini stall Smith, lives at Baltimore; two others, Caroline Snowden Fairfax and I ranees Marvin Fairfax, reside at the old mansion. Mrs Burton Harrison, tiie novelist, and her brothe, Mr Clarence Cary, a lawyer, of New York, are cousins of the Fairfaxes. Lord Fairfax’s death is believed to be indirectly due to a bad fall he received s,enie years ago while driving a fractions horse, which came down and injured his spine, (lie after-effects of which sometimes caused him much pain. It was from the Fairfax family’s settlement in America, that Thackeray drew the inspiration for his famous novel, “The Virginians.”