Thomson Francis Mason

Thomson Francis Mason (1785 – 21 December 1838) was an American lawyer, planter and politician who served as the mayor of Alexandria (then in the District of Columbia, but now Virginia) between 1827 and 1830, and as a justice of the peace for many years and briefly in the months before his death as a judge of the Washington D.C. criminal court. Early life and education Mason was born in 1785 at his grandfather George Mason's Gunston Hall plantation in Fairfax County, Virginia. He was the second eldest child and eldest son of General Thomson Mason (1759–1820) and his wife Sarah McCarty Chichester. Mason and his brother Richard Chichester Mason were primarily raised at Hollin Hall, their father's plantation house finished by Christmas 1788. On 24 October 1805, Mason entered the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) as a member of the junior class. That same year, he joined the American Whig-Cliosophic Society. Mason graduated from Princeton with honors and subsequently stayed to study law. He graduated from law school in 1807 and returned to Virginia. Career Upon returning to Virginia, Mason began practicing law in Fairfax County. In the 1810 census, he and his brother Dr. R.C. Mason were presumably two of the six males between 16 and 25 years old living with their father, whose household of 79 people included 13 whites, the remaining people presumably enslaved, who operated his plantation. In the 1820 census (also the year of his father's death), Thomson F. Mason's household included himself and his wife and daughter, a free white woman and a free black man, as well as seven enslaved people, including a boy and three girls younger than 14 years old. The 1830 census, the last of Thomson F. Mason's lifetime, indicates his household included sixteen people: three white males, eight white females and five slaves (only one, a girl, younger than 10).