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Gainesville, Virginia is located 42 miles southwest of Washington, DC. Conventially located to Rt 66, Rt 29 and Rt 15, Gainesville has become a desireable location to live. Communities such as Virginia Oaks and Lake Manassas boast the areas best golf courses. Over the past 10 years, Gainesville has grown by leaps and bounds ... with new homes being built and more people moving to the western side of Prince William County ... Gainesville is one of the more popular areas to live. Convenient to DC, Gainesville has quickly become a commuter's dream location.
Gainesville has been diligently working on making the roads more accessible to its citizens. With the widening of Route 66 to Gainesville, Route 29 in the process of being widened and Linton Hall Road in the final stages of widening, we should see traffic in the area flow better.
For you history buffs ... Gainesville began as New Stable, a changing point for stagecoach horses on the Fauquier & Alexandria Turnpike, but before that the area was called the Middle Grounds, a high spine between the drains of Broad Run and Bull Run. New Stable Post Office opened in November 1846 in Richard Graham's hotel and store. Mr. Graham was the first postmaster, and remained on the job when the village became Beckhamsville, for Cicero Beckham, fifteen days later. That post office was discontinued on the last day of the year. But, in July 1852, when the Manassas Gap Railroad reached the pike, Thomas Brawner Gaines owned the land and the railroad stop became Gainesville. In 1858, Pembroke Gaines became postmaster.
During the Civil War, nearby Thoroughfare Gap in the Bull Run Mountains served as a path for soldiers to reach the First and Second Battles of Manassas. By this time, Gainesville had become the leading market town of the Middle Grounds, a shipping point for grain, timber and cattle (except on Sundays). Edward C. Marshall, president of the Manassas Gap Railroad, did not let his trains run on the Lord's Day. The community would survive as a major cattle shipping point through the early 1960s, when the trucks to the Baltimore market finally took over. Through the Depression, the village generally had two stores, a blacksmith and cattle scales. The mid-1870s schoolhouse still stands, as does the 1886 Methodist Church, built on land donated by Miss Somerville Gaines - perhaps because it was the site of the Gaines family graveyard.
In the late-19th century, V. Bronson Cave was postmaster and had the big store, taken over by son Macon Cave in the late 1880s, although the elder Mr. Cave remained postmaster through the century. James A. Pattie had the other main store, and also operated a hotel during the nineties. Thomas L. Thorp ran a steam powered grist mill in the '70s and '80s, taken over by George Washington Bartholomew & Son, who added a sawmill operation in the nineties. J. B. Ellis was an iron founder and machinist of that decade and Thomas F. Tebb was the physician through the eighties. Gainesville's population was listed as 100 during the early 1900s.
Caves remained at the post office; Virginia, Mary, then Macon Cave, through 1921. Following some interim operators, Vernon H. Wood took over Cave's store in '38 and Wood's Store became a fixture until it closed in the early-1970s. Mr. Wood also ran the cattle scales for his father-in-law, Robert Henry Florance. John Sweeney, Jr. had the second store, and was a later postmaster; he survived until the early-sixties. Robert Ashton 'Bud' Pearson was the longtime blacksmith, through the thirties, and operated a third store through the early 1950s.
Described in 1940 as "made up of a filling station, a handful of houses and a few stores," Gainesville today might be described as a town in transition made up of many filling stations and fast food chains, a new abundance of housing developments and businesses.
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