Aldie,VA
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Charles Fenton Mercer

 
Mercer's interest in Aldie Mill afforded him means to pursue a long and proactive career of public service in the state and national legislatures. As Loudoun's delegate to the General Assembly from 1810 to 1817 and the leader of the Federalist opposition in Virginia during the administration of James Madison, he rose to become chairman of the House finance and military committees and the Assembly's most innovative financier. He was the principal architect of the Virginia Fund for Internal Improvement and the Board of Public Works, as well as the leading reformer of the state banking system. As a notable leader in the American Colonization Society, a group of reformers dedicated to establishing an American colony in Africa of free blacks, Mercer in 1816 urged the General Assembly to call for the founding of such a colony—the first such public resolution in the nation. For his pioneering effort in 1816 and 1817 to create a comprehensive system of public education for the Commonwealth, he is justly regarded as his generation's foremost advocate of free public schools in the South. Mercer also played a leading role in the popular movement in the 1820s to reform the Virginia Constitution of 1776.
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Charles Fenton Mercer
 
 
No less remarkable was Mercer's career as U.S. Congressman for northern Virginia. A key figure in the rise of Virginia's Whig Party, he is best remembered as the chief promoter of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, first president of the C&O Canal Company, and chairman of the Roads and Canals Committee during the administrations of Jackson and Van Buren. At the age of sixty, Mercer resigned his seat in Congress and moved to Florida, where he became a cashier for the Union Bank of Florida in Tallahassee.  He said his long public service had drained his personal finances and had necessitated his finding steady employment. Later he gained an interest in the colonization of the Texas Republic, and in 1841, during one of his seven journeys to Texas, he laid plans for promoting the settlement of Anglo-Americans in northern Texas.  After becoming an official empresario for the republic, he organized the Texas Association and arranged for more than 100 families to relocate to Texas.  His colony, however, caused controversy around the time of annexation because of Mercer’s firm antislavery sentiments.  Although financially strapped, he spent the last six years of his life traveling in Europe.  In 1858, he returned to Virginia, where he died at Howard, near Alexandria.  He was buried in Union Cemetery, Leesburg, Virginia.  He remained a bachelor his entire life.