Prior to European settlement, present-day Fairfax County was initially inhabited by the Algonquian-speaking Doeg tribe.

In 1608, Captain John Smith documented the Doeg tribe's villages, which included Namassingakent and Nemaroughquand on the south bank of the Potomac River in present-day Fairfax County.

[5] By 1670, Virginian colonists from the Northern Neck region drove the Doeg Tribe out of present-day Fairfax County and into Maryland.

George Washington settled in Fairfax County and built his home, Mount Vernon, facing the Potomac.

Thomas Fairfax, the only member of the British nobility ever to reside in the colonies, lived at Belvoir before moving to the Shenandoah Valley.

The Belvoir mansion and several of its outbuildings were destroyed by fire immediately after the Revolutionary War in 1783, and George Washington noted the plantation complex deteriorated into ruins.

The technology boom and a steady government-driven economy created rapid growth and an increasingly large and diverse population.

[10] A general aviation airport along U.S. Route 50 west of Seven Corners, Falls Church Airpark, operated in the county from 1948 to 1960.

Most of the county lies in the Piedmont region, with rolling hills and deep stream valleys, such as Difficult Run and its tributaries.

[16] The Piedmont hills in the central county are made up of ancient metamorphic rocks such as schist, the roots of several ancestral ranges of the Appalachian Mountains.

This geology is similar to adjacent bands of rocks in Maryland and further south in Virginia along the eastern front of the Appalachian.

[citation needed] Marine clays can be found in widespread areas of the county east of Interstate 95, mostly in the Franconia and Mount Vernon districts.

[23] In addition to the Board of Supervisors, three constitutional officers, the Commonwealth's Attorney, clerk of the Circuit Court, and sheriff.

Former Governor Tim Kaine, running for the U.S. Senate in 2012, carried Fairfax County with 61% of the vote as part of his statewide victory.

McAuliffe's running mates, Ralph Northam and Mark Herring, also carried Fairfax County in their respective bids for lieutenant governor and attorney general.

Fairfax County supported Hillary Clinton for president with 64.4% of the vote to Donald Trump's 28.6%, exemplifying a heavy swing toward Democrats across Northern Virginia.

TJHSST consistently ranks at or near the top of all U.S. high schools due to the extraordinary number of National Merit semifinalists and finalists, its students' high average SAT scores, and the number of students who annually perform nationally recognized research in the sciences and engineering.

George Mason University economics professors James M. Buchanan and Vernon L. Smith won it in 1986 and 2002, respectively.

[40] The University of Fairfax, a for-profit proprietary college and alleged diploma mill was once headquartered in Vienna, Virginia.

It contains a quarter of the county's total office space inventory, which was 105,200,000 square feet (9,770,000 m2) as of 2006, representing roughly the same size as the Lower Manhattan region of New York City.

[53] In October 2011, Forbes described the area as "the place where the Internet was invented, but today it looks increasingly like the center of the global military-industrial complex",[54] because it is home to the nation's first ISPs, many of which are now defunct, and attracts numerous defense contractors that have relocated from other states to or near Tysons Corner.

The plan calls for a private-public partnership and a grid-like street system to make Tysons a more urban environment, tripling available housing to allow more workers to live near their workplaces.

From 1945 to 1961, the eastern part of Fairfax County hosted Falls Church Airpark, an airfield primarily used for general aviation and civil defense purposes until encroaching residential development forced its closure.

[11][12] Fairfax County has multiple public transportation services, including the Washington Metro's Blue, Orange, Silver and Yellow lines.

The county maintains many miles of bike trails running through parks, adjacent to roads and through towns such as Vienna and Herndon.

The Washington & Old Dominion Railroad Trail runs through Fairfax County, offering one of the region's best, and safest, routes for recreational walking and biking.

In addition, nine miles (14 km) of the Mount Vernon Trail runs through Fairfax County along the Potomac River.

On May 16, 2008, Bike-to-Work Day, the Fairfax County Department of Transportation released the first countywide bicycle route map.

Consisting of mostly dirt paths and short asphalt sections, the trail is used mostly by recreational mountain bikers, hikers, and horse riders.

It has been proposed[72] to convert the entire county into a single independent city, primarily to gain more control over taxes and roads.