The farm office across the lawn is all that remains of the once-sprawling plantation called Fairfield. Thomas Coleman Chandler purchased Fairfield Plantation in 1845, and for the next 17 years it prospered and evolved largely through the labor of the dozens of enslaved people who worked the fields and toiled in the Big House. The plantation was profitable enough that in 1854 Chandler tore down the main house and built a more substantial two-story brick house in its place, and that house stood until 1909. As Chandler raised his family and managed his affairs, enslaved people made Fairfield one of the more prosperous plantations in Caroline County. With barns, a smokehouse, kitchen, and slave quarters, the place resembled more a village than a simple home. For a time before the war, Thomas Chandler’s son practiced medicine from the farm office later made famous by Stonewall Jackson. For the Chandlers, the Civil War abruptly ended the halcyon days; for the Chandler slaves, war brought the prospect of freedom. Fairfield originally centered on 740 acres, but after the war its buildings fell into disrepair. When the R.F.&P. Railroad acquired the property in 1909, it pulled down the main house and restored the farm office, calling it the Jackson Shrine, and in 1937 the railroad donated the site to the National Park Service.