George Rainsford Fairbanks was born in Watertown, New York on July 5, 1820.

[2] Senator David Yulee brought Fairbanks, a Confederate Major during the U.S. Civil War, to Fernandina in 1879 to run the town's Florida Mirror newspaper.

Fairbanks was also a historian, an educator, a former state senator, and one of the founders of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee.

He and his granddaughter witnessed the fire that destroyed downtown Jacksonville 40 miles away from the house he built in 1885.

[4] The Fairbanks House was converted into a bed & breakfast and is on Amelia Island's Fernandina Beach at 227 South Seventh Street.