Rename a town — from enslaver to his child slave

My name is David Martosko. I launched the Fenton Project in the hope of renaming my town (Burke, Virginia) after a 6-year-old African American boy named Fenton. The town is named for Silas Burke, a 19th century Fairfax County plantation owner and judge who bought Fenton and enslaved him in 1826. Worse yet, he oversaw slave auctions.

Read that again. The goal is to rename my town by swapping (1) the name of a slave-owning judge who directly participated in auctions of children, with (2) the name of one of his own child slaves. A few historians have told me this kind of swap is unprecedented. It'll take a bit of money to get it done, so I'm raising funds for expenses.

In the interest of transparency, I have published a spreadsheet that discloses all income and expenses related to this project, and I will update it periodically.

Here's some of what I've found while digging for documents in courthouses and the National Archives. Silas Burke wasn’t an ordinary Virginia slaveholder. He was a serial enslaver of children who supervised slave auctions at the Fairfax County courthouse while he was a judge and a school commissioner. He owned as many as 14 people at a time, a number that put him at the 95th percentile for the area. And he ran the county’s largest plantation, where more than 80 slaves worked the land with no hope of changing their lives.

Please visit the Fenton Project online to learn more about Fenton and his enslaver.

The process for changing the name of an unincorporated town moves at the speed of government. Because Burke is not incorporated under the laws of Virginia, only the 31-member federal government Board on Geographic Names is empowered to approve renaming it. I will get a formal proposal on their agenda.

I’ll be reaching out to the 45,000 people who live in Burke, and I'll hold public community meetings about this. I'll also send mailers, make yard signs, , and plan to aggressively communicate about it all year. There will be yard signs that look like someone named Fenton is running for office. I’ll also advertise in local newspapers and online forums ... all the things you'd expect. Please consider helping.

Let’s rename Silas Burke’s town after one of his pieces of property — a child described in court records only as “Negro Boy Fenton.”