Minor's Hill

Its summit rises to 459 feet (139 meters) above sea level which makes it the highest point in the county.

Minor's Hill was well known to local Native Americans in Northern Virginia prior to European colonization.

[3] English colonists founded Falls Church in 1732, choosing as its location a place that was approximately one day's horseback ride from the Potomac River.

However, due to bureaucratic bungling among War Department officials they were not sent to help defend the approaches to Washington at Bladensburg, Maryland nor did many of them come armed.

At that time the Washington Navy Yard was an important fleet center, and its gunpowder was hurriedly moved across the bridges into Virginia, and brought to Falls Church for safekeeping, protected by a six-man guard dispatched by Colonel Minor.

The conflagration lit the nighttime skies at Falls Church, where a young refugee from Alexandria later recalled being awakened and taken outside to see Washington burn.

When it was occupied by Union troops they found his War of 1812 orders, signed by Secretary of State James Monroe, directing him to the defenses of Washington at Bladensburg.

[6] Confederate raids from Falls Church went as far east as Balls' Cross Roads in present-day Ballston, and many events took place in the territory surrounding the base of the hill.

The original lithograph now resides in the Virginia Room of the Mary Riley Styles Public Library in Falls Church.)

Soldiers from the Minor's Hill camps built their lodgings using wood they took from area farmers—they dismantled miles of wooden fencing; barns; even homes.

George and Katherine lived in the home until the early 1950s, when the county acquired the property to build a reservoir and Williamsburg Boulevard (according to an interview with Ed Brooks, former resident).

A log cabin structure owned by the Minor family and seen photographed next to a Union observation tower in 1862 was found to still exist as of 2016.

The hand-hewn log cabin with saltbox addition was found partially preserved encased within a brick two-story home, originally on a farm.

Fairfax County conducted a historical review of the property and reported the structure to have verifiably existed after 1773, possibly originally as a plantation warehouse that may have been converted into a slave cabin under lessee William Darne prior to its expansion with the addition into a dwelling of members of the Minor family in the nineteenth century.