Ebenezer Erskine Mason (August 28, 1829 June 18, 1910) (a/k/a/ "Ebon" or "Eben") was a farmer who also served as a local magistrate and one of Fairfax County, Virginia's two delegates to the Wheeling Convention in 1861 which created the Restored Government of Virginia and led to the creation of the state of West Virginia. Early and family life Mason was born in Eastport, Washington County, Maine on August 25, 1829 to Rachel Lincoln Mason (1810–1889) of Perry, Maine, although his merchant sailor father John Mason (1799–1888) was from New Hampshire. Their second son Otis Tufton Mason (1838–1838) was also born in Maine before John Mason moved his family to Haddonfield, New Jersey where William Mason was born in 1841. In 1849, John Mason moved his family to Fairfax County, Virginia. Three years earlier, Quakers had bought Woodlawn Plantation from relatives of Nellie Custis, whom George Washington had adopted a child, and were subdividing it. Mason took in boarders for income and to provide needed labor, and bought Woodlawn in 1853. Rachel gave birth to her last child, Anna, in 1854. In that year Ebon Mason married Elizabeth Thompson (1825–1913). They had at least one daughter, Nellie born in Maryland in 1862 and living with them in 1870 but not 1880. Career By the 1860 census, Ebon Mason lived with his wife on a farm near his father's farm. His parents had attended Cavalry Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia, but in 1859 started a Sunday school in their home, that would become Woodlawn Baptist Church (received by the Potomac Association of Southern Baptists in 1869). Rachel Lincoln Mason was a cousin of Abraham Lincoln, the Republican Party Presidential candidate. As the American Civil War started, Fairfax County voters seceded, but some Unionists established a Restored Government of Virginia. Ebon Mason, already a local magistrate and member of the Unionist Accotink Home Guard, was one of two delegates elected to represent Fairfax County at the Wheeling Convention, alongside Quaker (and neighbor) John Hawxhurst. Otis Mason had left for college at Columbia University in 1856 and remained in the north. William Mason was of draftable age and disappeared from local census records in 1870. During the war years, both armies stole from local farms, but the Union Army occupation proved permanent. The Accotink Home Guard defended their property from Confederate raiders led by Col. John Singleton Mosby in the 1864 Action at