Colchester, founded in 1753 at a ferry crossing on Mason's Neck, was the second town established in Fairfax County and prospered as a colonial tobacco port and trading center on the main post road from Boston to Charleston and at the end of the Ox Road leading west to the Blue Ridge. In 1781 and 1782, it witnessed the passage of the allied French and American armies traveling to and from Yorktown, Virginia. The town provided a ferry for soldiers crossing the Occoquan River and a route to an upstream ford where livestock, wagons, and horses could cross. A ferry receipt signed by William Lindsay on September 27, 1781 records the transport of 58 wagons and carts, 100 horses, and 100 men across the Occoquan River. Rochambeau's cartographer, Louis Alexander Berthier, recorded Colchester as a campsite for the allied overland baggage train and armies, with the recommended camp a mile north of town next to Giles Run, and noted that the ferry could carry only one four-wheeled wagon at a time, requiring the wagon train to go 7 miles upstream to a narrow, good ford before continuing toward Marumsco Creek and Dumfries. The route of the Washington-Rochambeau army followed the Post Road or Kingshighway, now Old Colchester Road. Colchester later declined after an alternate postal route crossed a new upstream bridge in 1805, grain shipping from the Shenandoah Valley was diverted to Georgetown, Alexandria, and Baltimore, and, according to tradition, a great fire occurred in 1815.
