[3] Through his mother, George could claim descent from early Virginia colonist and Captain Christopher Newport (4th great grandson) and Illiam Dhone and Fletcher Christian were distant cousins.
[9] In June 1791 George Hairston and James Anthony donated fifty acres of land for a courthouse and public buildings, which later became the center of Martinsville, Virginia.
[11] At the first meeting of the Henry county court when it was formed in 1776 (the justices of the peace jointly administering the county in that era), Hairston was appointed captain of the local militia, and will serve under Colonel Abram Penn and Major Waller at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, when their unit came to the assistance of General Nathaneal Greene near Greensboro, North Carolina.
He commanded the 3rd, 4th, 5th & 6th Virginia and the 85th North Carolina (a colonel in NC) regiments, and participated in the engagement that repulsed Robert Ross (British Army officer) who burned Washington DC and was killed at the Battle of Bladensburg.
George Jr. deeded the parcel to Samuel Hairston in 1862 and the following year Samuel Hairston sold it to John and Elisha Barksdale and John Stovall, who in 1903 sold the "Iron Works at Union Furnace" to Frank Ayer Hill and his wife Alice and Herbert Dale Lafferty and his wife Mary, who jointly renamed the area once known as Goblintown as "Fayerdale."
By 1910 the mining and logging town grew to 2000 people and had a train depot, general store, post office, hotel and school, as well as warehouses and other company buildings, homes and a doctor.
However, by 1921 the iron vein had worn out and Prohibition closed the whisky distillation and transport businesses, so circa 1925 Roanoke newspaper publisher Junius Fishburn bought out his partners in the successor corporation.